The great research team of Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin has released an important new study of the attrition and mobility patterns of 400,000 teachers in Texas. The researchers discovered that teacher transfers and attrition are more likely to be a response to the characteristics of their students than a quest for better salaries. The study indicates that teachers moving schools typically go to schools with student populations characterized by higher average achievement and smaller percentage of minority and low-income students. However, African American teachers buck this trend by moving to schools with higher percentages of African American students than in the schools from which they departed.

Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin challenge the common assertion that across the board salary increases for teachers in the toughest schools would keep them there longer, arguing the increases in salary would need to be so enormous as to make them unfeasible. The results, they argue, suggest that policymakers should instead concentrate on ways to improve working conditions and direct money towards "selective pay increase, preferably keyed to quality," so as to improve retention rates among the most valuable assets of all-teachers who produce student achievement.