Abstract
This paper contributes to the understanding of the causal relationship between teacher turnover and student performance. We extend this research by examining the mechanisms through which turnover affects student learning, and by providing evidence on how schools respond to mitigate the disruptive effects of turnover. Using administrative data covering all state-school, age-16 students and their teachers in England, we find that a higher teacher entry rate has a small but significant negative effect on students’ final qualifications from compulsory-age schooling. This is the first study to document that the lack of school-specific human capital in incoming teachers is the main mechanism through which turnover disrupts student performance. We also find evidence that schools mitigate the effects of turnover by assigning new teachers away from high-risk student grades.
Highlights
Recent research has established that teachers matter for student achievements (Rivkin et al 2005, Rothstein 2010, Chetty et al 2014a, Chetty et al 2014b, etc.)
We find that schools do respond to mitigate the negative effects of turnover: new teachers, if they are new to the profession, are less likely to teach in high stakes grades
Where Scoreijst is an index of individual i achievement in age-16 qualifications in school j, subject s, and year t; mobjst is the entry rate in each school-subject-year group, and β, our coefficient of interest, is the expected change in student test scores associated with an increase in turnover in the year in which a student takes his/her age-16 exams; xi is a vector of student characteristics which includes gender, an indicator of economic background, prior achievement, and ethnicity; and zjst are school/department characteristics
Summary
Recent research has established that teachers matter for student achievements (Rivkin et al 2005, Rothstein 2010, Chetty et al 2014a, Chetty et al 2014b, etc.). The paper contributes to the literature in a number of ways: we improve on the rather limited existing international evidence on the causal impact of teacher turnover, investigate potential mechanisms through which turnover can affect student performance, and provide evidence on how schools respond to mitigate the disruption effects of turnover. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the section explains how our paper contributes to the literature on teacher mobility; Section 3 outlines our empirical strategy; Section 4 describes the education institutional setting in the UK and the dataset; Section 5 presents our main regression results, with Section 5.2 investigating the robustness of the analysis; Section 5.3 presents results on the potential channels that drive the negative impact of turnover and examines the actions schools take to mitigate these disruptive effects; Section 6 concludes
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