A substantial research literature supports what many of us know intuitively: Teachers matter, perhaps more than anything else a school has to offer. But some of the lowest performing schools have the most difficulty recruiting and retaining effective teachers, and improving those schools without a strong staff may be impossible. How then can school leaders and policymakers make low-performing schools more appealing workplaces?
Work published in the American Educational Research Journal sheds light on this important question by asking what teachers in low-performing schools want. The authors surveyed 811 current and former teachers in Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD). The ASD was established in 2012 to provide additional support and new management to some of the state’s lowest performing schools; they are run by district staff or charter management organizations.
The survey asked teachers questions about a variety of school attributes, which were grouped into three categories: “fixed,” “structural,” and “malleable.” Fixed attributes cannot be easily changed, such as the racial and socioeconomic makeup of the student body, prior academic achievement, and school location. Structural attributes include salary, tenure, and performance-based bonuses. Often these policies are set at the district or state level and remain in place for many years at a time. Malleable attributes are those that can be addressed by school administrators, including school safety, classroom size, teacher autonomy, administrator support, disciplinary policies, professional development, teacher relationships, and prep time.
Each of these categories have distinct policy implications. If teachers have strong preferences for fixed attributes (e.g., preferring schools with higher-income students), education policy may not have much of a role to play in where teachers choose to work. If teachers have strong preferences around structural attributes—if a higher salary successfully draws teachers to lower-performing schools—state lawmakers have a clear role to play. Finally, if teachers show a strong preference for malleable attributes (e.g., wanting a school that allows for a high degree of teacher autonomy), principals know what direction they need to move their school in.
The authors asked the teachers about these attributes using four types of questions. The first asked teachers to label them as “desirable” or “undesirable.” The second was about rating them as “important” or “unimportant” when choosing between jobs. The third offered two options and asked which they preferred. And the fourth was how likely they were to choose a job with a select group of attributes.
So what do teachers care about?
Two specific attributes stand out as the most important to teachers working in low-performing schools: school discipline, labelled as “malleable” by the analysts; and salary, a structural attribute. Salary is a simple issue to address, at least from a policy implementation standpoint. The authors found that teachers prefer uniform salary increases over performance-based bonuses, but they’d rather have leaders prioritize performance-based bonuses over most malleable and all fixed school attributes. Like with any job, increasing pay is a straightforward way to attract talent.
School discipline is more challenging, as it relies heavily on the unique human capacity and context of each individual school. Nevertheless, teachers have a very strong preference for schools that consistently enforce discipline—indeed, it beats out higher pay, if only just barely. The survey does not specify what “discipline” means, but teachers also have a clear preference for strong administrative support, which suggests that teachers at the very least want to be on the same page as their leaders. A recent survey by Fordham connects these dots, with almost half of teachers surveyed reporting that they “put up” with offending behavior due to “a lack of administrative support.”
The results are, of course, only useful if teachers actually make employment decisions consistent with their survey responses. To check for this, the authors use administrative data to test whether teachers generally work in schools with characteristics that match their expressed preferences. In general, they find that they do match, with the exception of higher salary—though this is likely because the average salary difference between schools in the sample is only about $1,600. Teacher pay just doesn’t vary all that much.
Attracting teachers to low-performing schools is a foundational component of school improvement. Administrators can help facilitate this with consistent disciplinary policies and support for staff in implementing them, and state policymakers should consider offering salary bonuses to teachers who opt to work in low-performing schools. The students in them, among the most disadvantaged in the country, stand to benefit a great deal.
SOURCE: Samantha Viano, Lam D. Pham, Gary T. Henry, Adam Kho, and Ron Zimmer, “What teachers want: School factors predicting teachers’ decisions to work in low-performing schools,” American Educational Research Journal 58(1), 2021, 201–233.
