Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Improving public sector workforce quality is challenging in sectors such as education where worker productivity is difficult to assess and manager incentives are muted by political and bureaucratic constraints. Struggling schools are at a particular disadvantage in terms of attracting and retaining effective teachers and administrators. We study how providing information to principals about teacher effectiveness and encouraging them to use the information in personnel decisions affects teacher turnover patterns. Our setting is a large urban school district that initiated a new and more rigorous teacher evaluation system district-wide in recent years. Prior to the new system, we show that ineffective teachers were slightly more likely to exit the district overall. The policy exacerbated the relationship between teacher quality and district exit, primarily by increasing the likelihood of exit for low-performing teachers. Low-performing teachers working in low-performing schools were particularly likely to leave the district in the post-policy period. However, the equity benefits of these exits are offset to some degree by a higher rate of switching from low-performing schools among effective teachers who remained in the district.