Everyone aims to put their best foot forward in job interviews, to spotlight successes, to admit that their greatest weakness is that they’re a perfectionist. Parsing through the applicants is no easy task, but this is what anyone—including school leaders—must do when deciding who to hire. Two recent studies look at tools that school hiring managers can use when hiring teachers and conclude that, when used well, they can help hire better teachers—but they’re not always used.
One study by Paul Bruno of the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign revisits data from Los Angeles Unified School District. In an earlier study, he and colleagues found that the robust, eight-part “Multiple Measures Teacher Selection Process” can successfully identify teacher candidates who are more likely to be effective, on average. In this new study, Bruno examines whether the same screening tool works for all teachers, regardless of what they teach or who their future students are.
Bruno confirms that the tool is generally predictive of teachers’ outcomes and finds that they are similarly predictive for both elementary and secondary teachers, regardless of the share of English learner students or students living in poverty that they teach. This finding suggests there’s no need for school districts to come up with unique screeners for different subjects, grades, or students (although the tool does verify that teachers know their subject, based on licensure test scores or GPA).
The results are less clear for special education teachers. For example, professional references seem to matter more, and subject matter scores matter less, when predicting special education teachers’ evaluation ratings. (The sample did not include enough test data from special education students to calculate value-added scores.) However, the main takeaway is that these screening tools are effective and generalizable, and that, as the author states, “the attributes that are important for teachers are largely similar across roles and contexts.”
In a recent CALDER working paper, Dan Goldhaber and Cyrus Grout dig into a specific piece of the hiring process: references. Previous research with Spokane Public Schools (WA), where school hiring managers use a standardized screening process for teachers, found that screening scores predicted both teachers’ value-added scores in math and their retention. One important driver of that relationship was applicants’ reference letters—but those letters were sometimes hard to interpret because people use such glowing terms to describe the teachers.
In an experiment to make reference letters more useful, the researchers asked letter writers to also rate teacher applicants on a set of skills using terms that trended favorably (with four categories for “above average” and only one for “below average”). The researchers then conducted a controlled trial that gave hiring managers access to the ratings for a randomly selected subset of applicants, ultimately finding that these ratings were predictive of teachers’ effectiveness and provided useful info beyond what was already captured in the screening tool.
Still, while having the ratings was helpful (teachers whose ratings were randomly shared with hiring managers were slightly more likely to be hired), it seemed that how positive the ratings were did not actually influence hiring managers’ decisions. In other words, reference ratings provide meaningful and predictive information, but hiring managers leave it on the table.
These studies offer a few pieces of good news to school hiring managers everywhere:
- With a thoughtful screening approach, you can get a pretty good idea of which teachers will be effective.
- You can keep it (relatively) simple and don’t need to have a separate process for every grade or subject.
- You can get useful information even from glowing references—as long as you can put it into context against all the other rave reviews.
These studies may seem relevant for a more halcyon era when districts had to select the best candidates among large applicant pools, unlike today as some districts struggle to find any applicants for teaching positions. Yet now may actually be a perfect time to implement these systems, when districts can train school leaders to use screening processes for a relatively small number of applicants.
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