Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Recent research shows that improving the conditions of teaching can positively impact the productivity of teachers.  Teachers develop more rapidly on-the-job when working in schools with more supportive professional environments (Kraft & Papay, 2014); the quality of collaboration in teachers’ instructional teams predicts higher value-added in mathematics and reading (Ronfeldt, Farmer, McQueen, & Grissom, 2015).  A natural extension of this literature on working environments and teacher performance is to consider how teaching assignments impact teacher effectiveness.  For elementary school teachers, work by Ost (2014) and Blazar (2015) shows that consistent grade-level assignments benefit teacher value-added and on-the-job development.  Essentially, teachers afforded the opportunity to develop and use grade-specific human capital were more effective than their peers who switched grades.

We extend the research on teaching assignments and teacher performance by considering secondary grades teachers, where assignment to multiple courses may adversely impact teacher effectiveness.  Teachers’ number of course preparations—the unique number of courses they prepare (e.g. algebra I, geometry) rather than the number of courses they teach—may adversely influence teacher effectiveness by (1) limiting the time a teacher can devote to teaching activities for each course and (2) increasing the cognitive load and stress in the teaching position.  Negative impacts may be particularly strong when a teacher has never taught the course before.

Given the current context in which schools make human capital decisions based on teacher performance data and teachers are evaluated, in part, based on their value-added estimates, it is essential to know which teachers have more course preparations and whether more course preparations adversely impact teacher effectiveness.  To address these questions, we use classroom roster data to code the unique number of course preparations and the number of new course preparations (never before taught) for algebra I teachers in North Carolina public schools.

Overall, we find that better credentialed algebra I teachers—those who are traditionally prepared, have higher licensure exam scores, or hold National Board Certification—are assigned to more course preparations.  This may suggest that school principals assign teachers who are best-equipped to handle more course preparations.  Across teachers, we find that additional course preparations have a negative and statistically significant effect on teachers’ value-added in algebra I.  Using fixed effects to compare within school or teacher, results are reduced but remain negative and significant.  Additional analyses show that teaching a course for the first time is particularly detrimental to teacher effectiveness.

Taken together, this study contributes to a growing body of research connecting teachers’ work environments and teaching assignments to their performance and persistence in teaching. These results suggest potential benefits to teacher specialization (Fox, 2015; Goldhaber, Cowan, & Walch, 2013) and call for continued research to better understand how teachers’ value-added estimates may be impacted by aspects of their work environments and/or teaching assignments. Moving forward, efforts to improve teacher quality should focus on policies to alter the composition of the teacher workforce and policies to directly impact the practice of teaching.