The ever-useful National Bureau of Economic Research is out with an interesting first look at the impact of differential pay on teacher retention rates. While NCTQ is on record for insisting that these $1,000-$2,000 pay experiments don't constitute enough money to persuade anyone to do much of anything differently, much less stay in a job, researchers Charles Clotfelter, Elizabeth Glennie, Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor suggest otherwise.
They examined the brief history of a North Carolina* program that offered an $1,800 annual bonus to approximately 2,000 math, science and special ed teachers who agreed to stay in certain schools. The schools where these teachers worked--not the teachers themselves--had to meet an eligibility requirement. They had to be 80 percent or above in poverty or report more than 50 percent of their students performing below grade level in math and science.
The findings suggest that the bonuses proved to be a sufficient pull, reducing expected attrition by 12 percent. This is nothing to sneeze at, given that the worst kind of teacher is generally the first-year teacher.
Still, it's the issues on the margins that provide some of the best insights into the trouble with many pay reforms. According to surveys of the teachers involved in this program, many of them just never understood how the program was supposed to work. Even though the program had been smartly constructed to continue the teacher bonuses even when the schools in which they worked no longer met the eligibility requirements, many teachers were convinced otherwise--that they would actually end up being penalized for any success they had in the classroom. The researchers hazard an "educated guess" that if the state had communicated better with teachers, the impact of the program might have been twice as large.
One perception of the program by the teachers was right on the money: it would not be long lived. As is typical of state legislatures, he who giveth can taketh away and only three years into the program (before any evaluation had been done) poof! It was gone.
[* What is the deal with North Carolina? See link, link, and link.]