Keeping Sight of the Forest Through the Trees

Abstract

In this invited response to Moe and Anzia (2014), we describe both the points of convergence and divergence between our prior research (2007a, 2007b) and that of Moe (2005) and Moe and Anzia (2014). We also respond to Moe and Anzia’s critique of our published work. Moe and Anzia’s study helps to refine the policy discussion around seniority preferences in teacher collective bargaining agreements by providing further evidence that such preferences may exacerbate the teacher quality gap in particular settings - specifically, large, likely highly bureaucratic, elementary school districts - a finding that is consistent with a finding from our earlier research. However, we believe that those significant findings are limited to certain school districts, and we were unable in our prior research to conclude that the strength of seniority preferences consistently and systematically exacerbates the teacher quality gap within and among all school districts. This is the point of divergence between our work and that of Moe and Anzia. Consequently, we caution that merely banning seniority preferences may not have widespread, long-term effects on closing the teacher quality gap.