Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Teachers represent a key leverage point for improving student outcomes, as teachers vary substantially in their effectiveness and can become more effective. Principals, in turn, can catalyze teacher improvement in their schools, yet we know little about the ways that principals have created supports for teacher improvement and effective learning environments. This project is interested in understanding whether principals have strategies intended to improve teaching in their buildings and, if so, how they create the conditions and execute strategies that realize this outcome. We hypothesize that effective principals employ the resources and policies that their disposal to realize their goals. This project is grounded in understanding how principals view and employ these policies to realize the goal of improving the quality of teaching in their schools. This paper examines principals’ use of a unique teacher tenure policy whereby principals have unusual leverage to improve teaching in their buildings.

In 2009-10 New York City reformed the teacher tenure process to require more rigorous assessment by principals of teachers being considered for tenure. As a result of this reform, New York City went from granting tenure to 97 percent teachers during the third year of teaching to about 65 percent. Most of this difference represents teachers whose probationary period was extended for a year so that they could demonstrate they met the tenure criteria. Principals can employ this policy to leverage improvement during the probationary period, use the extension to induce some teachers to exit and others to improve and ultimately continue to extend teachers who do not meet principals’ expectations for effective teaching. There is substantial variation in the use of this policy. In this paper we explore three research questions.

• To what extent do principals believe they have agency over improving teaching in their buildings?
• Does this agency align with differential use of the tenure policy?
• Is the differential use of the tenure reform associated with improved teacher quality?

To answer these questions, we employ extensive administrative data on teachers, principals and school climate in New York City combined with a survey of all New York City middle school principals executed in summer 2016 (N=494, response rate=52 percent) and in-depth interviews of 45 of the respondents to the survey. Our administrative data include the usual teacher and principal-level data combined with an unusual teacher application to transfer database that signals teachers’ interests in transferring to multiple schools, even if those schools are not currently showing vacancies. We also have access to teacher-by-year value added data for all teachers in tested grades and subjects as an outcome measure. We are in the process of acquiring results from the teacher standardized observation evaluation system.

Our goals are largely descriptive—we want to document an important avenue by which teacher improvement may occur and how principals and other school leaders can systematically employ policies to realize school-wide improvement.