Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Since 2009, DC Public Schools (DCPS) have been engaged in a series of human capital reforms focused on improving student outcomes by improving teacher quality, with particular attention given to improving outcomes in the district’s low-income and low-performing schools. Chief among these reforms were the introduction of IMPACT and IMPACTplus, the employee evaluation and compensation systems implemented throughout the district in the fall of 2009. Under IMPACT, all teachers are evaluated based on multiple measures of teaching effectiveness and assigned an IMPACT rating. Teachers who are rated Ineffective or Minimally Effective face consequential sanctions, whereas teachers who are rated Highly Effective (HE) are eligible for meaningful financial incentives. Moreover, HE teachers in high-poverty schools (i.e., schools in which at least 60% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals) are eligible for larger financial incentives than HE teachers in low-poverty schools.

IMPACT was designed to improve teacher quality by attracting, retaining, and developing high-performing teachers while simultaneously decreasing the retention of low-performing teachers. Moreover, the differential incentives offered to HE teachers in low versus high-poverty schools were intended to encourage these teachers to teach in low-income schools. Prior research focusing on the effects of IMPACT during the first three years of its implementation (i.e., the 2009-10 to 2011-12 school years) indicates that IMPACT did indeed influence teacher retention, teacher performance, and student achievement (Adnot et al., 2016; Dee & Wyckoff, 2015).

However, DCPS introduced several new reforms as well as revisions to IMPACT and IMPACTplus that took effect during the 2012-13 academic year (hereafter AY1213). Specifically, the district identified its 40 lowest-performing schools and made a public commitment to improve student proficiency levels in these “Targeted 40” schools by 40 percentage points by 2017. In addition to providing Targeted 40 schools with supplementary resources, DCPS also made substantial revisions to IMPACTplus with the explicit intention of encouraging high-performing teachers to serve in the district’s low-income and low-performing schools. In essence, the revisions made to IMPACTplus all but eliminated financial incentives for HE teachers in low-poverty schools and reserved the largest financial incentives for HE teachers in high-poverty and Targeted 40 schools.

My study leverages the revised contrast in financial incentives to examine whether targeted financial incentives encouraged high-performing teachers to teach, and stay, in the district’s low-income and low-performing schools. Using a five-year panel of rich administrative data in a difference-in-differences framework, I find that high-performing teachers were more likely to continue teaching in high-poverty schools after AY1213. On the other hand, the revised financial incentives are not associated with increased retention of high-performing teachers in Targeted 40 schools. These findings suggest that the reforms DCPS implemented in AY1213 may have encouraged the district’s highest-performing teachers to teach in low-income schools, but not in the district’s lowest-performing schools. In this manner, my work contributes to a growing body of literature that examines the potential of improving teacher quality in low-income and low-performing schools through the offer of targeted financial incentives.