Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The distribution of teaching quality across schools is a major concern for policymakers. Even within districts, higher-performing and higher-experience teachers tend to be concentrated among schools serving students from relatively advantaged backgrounds. Intra-district teacher mobility is a potential contributor to this pattern. In this paper, we analyze intra-district movements in a large urban public-school district in the Midwest from 2009 to 2015 and estimate the relationship between school characteristics and teacher transfers. We separately estimate teacher and school preferences using detailed choice data from a web-based internal teacher labor market where schools post vacancies, incumbent teachers choose whether and where to apply, schools choose whom to interview and rank-order top interviewees, and teachers choose which offers to accept. We find that the average teacher prefers schools with low proportions of students of color, high achievement, high average teacher experience, and low pupil-teacher ratio and explore heterogeneity in teacher preferences by own effectiveness and race. We describe the changes in school characteristics that would be required to attract more highly-effective teachers to hard-to-staff schools. We employ two alternative methods of monetizing teacher preferences over school characteristics—one using variation in school pay-for-performance regimes and the other using differences in commute time from teachers' homes to schools—to estimate how much the district would have to increase pay or reduce pupil-teacher ratios at schools in the bottom quintile of student-reading proficiency to attract highly-effective teachers from schools in the top quintile.