Feb 13
Attracting and Retaining Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools by Dr. Steven Rivkin
Dr. Steven Rivkin, Professor and Head of the Economics Department, University of Illinois Chicago, will give a research talk entitled, "Attracting and Retaining Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools" to faculty, staff and students.
Dr Rivkin's research interests include teacher and principal quality and labor markets, charter schools, affirmative action, and school reforms in Central Europe.
Research paper abstract:
Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. We evaluate the Dallas ISD Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) initiative, which provides large effectiveness-adjusted compensating differentials to effective educators in its lowest achievement schools. We find that the ACE initiative dramatically improved achievement, bringing average achievement in the previously lowest performing schools close to the district average. When ACE stipends are largely eliminated, a substantial fraction of highly effective teachers leaves, and test scores fall. This highlights the central importance of compensating differentials to attract and retain effective educators in previously low-achievement schools.