The Importance of Teacher-School Fit

What happens when high performing teachers move to low performing schools

There is no more clichéd trope in movies about education than the iconoclastic teacher working in the terrible school. Edward James Olmos in Stand and Deliver, Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, Hillary Swank in Freedom Writers, the list goes on and on.

Undergirding these stories is a belief that a great teacher can make all the difference, even in a school completely oriented against them.

A new paper by Matthew Kraft, John Papay, Jessalynn James, and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum goes out of the realm of the fictionalized and looks at real world efforts to move high performing teachers into low performing schools. What did they find? The teachers became less effective in their new environments.

The paper is a study of the Talent Transfer Initiative which offered $20,000 bonuses to teachers in the top 20% of their district who would then transfer to a low performing school and stay there for two years. The incentives were randomized, allowing for strong causal claims. Initial research on the program found that it was successful in inducing high performing teachers to work in low performing schools and that student achievement increased as a result.

So far so good.

Kraft et al.’s study looks at both the teachers who transferred and the teachers who didn’t and compared the trends of their performance during the time period. This allowed them to see if the transfer teachers’ performance changed when they moved to the new school.

And change it did.

The teachers that transferred saw a weak correlation between their performance in their old school and their performance in their new school. For teachers in the control group, their pre-/post- performance was nearly identical (as we might expect).

It wasn’t because teachers got better. The researchers found that the transfer teachers dropped about 0.12 standard deviations in student performance, or the equivalent of a teacher moving from the 85^th percentile of effectiveness down to the 66^th. The teachers improved a bit in their second year but did not return to their pre-transfer levels of performance.

It is important to reiterate that this program did increase student achievement. Even in their diminished capacity, these teachers were still better than what the students would otherwise have had in their classroom. They simply weren’t as effective as they were in their old schools.

The researchers conclude that:

“Teacher effectiveness is not a fixed trait; it is heavily influenced by the school context and student population. Recruiting high-performing teachers to struggling schools can help, but transfers alone are unlikely to close achievement gaps.”

They also state:

“Hiring practices designed to ensure a good fit between a teacher’s skills and the school’s needs may be more important than a teacher’s past value-added scores from a different context, since “match quality” is a likely driver of performance.”

For those of us in school choice world, these findings matter a great deal. Fit is a huge selling point for educational choice. Not every school works for every child, so parents should find the environment that best fits their child’s needs. Some students need more structure, some less. Some benefit from technology, some don’t. Some thrive in progressive, student-centered environments, others in more traditional, teacher-driven classrooms. There is no one magic school environment that works for everyone.

The same appears true for teachers. Different teachers thrive in different environments. This makes sense if you think about it. There are some charismatic teachers who can command a classroom and wrangle recalcitrant students to become interested in topics they otherwise might not be. Do they have the high-powered content knowledge that students trying to max out AP scores need? Maybe not. But for classrooms where children need more support, they are perfect. And the reverse is true. There are some teachers that have the granular knowledge of their subject matter that is necessary to get their students to understand the course material at the highest level. Are they interesting or compelling? Maybe not. But the kids in that class don’t need entertainment from that teacher, they need expertise. We can go on and on with potential examples.

If there is one word that should guide school choice supporters, it is fit.

How can we find the environment that is the best fit for every child?

But this paper is a helpful reminder of a second question.

How can we find the environment that is the best fit for every teacher?

Great schools need great teachers. Great teachers need support. Parents need to work with teachers, not against them. Administrators need to create environments where teachers can focus on teaching. Professional development needs to be aligned to teacher needs. Teachers need quality instructional resources, a strong curriculum, and technology that works.

When all of these factors come together, both teachers and students can thrive. Policy that advances strong student-school and teacher-school fit will lead to better schools. Policy that ignores them will not.

This was originally published to our Substack.