The Pull of Public Service

If a plastic rabbit can entice a greyhound to do laps around a racetrack, can public service incentives lure promising new teachers to low-performing urban schools? And can these bonuses keep them there?

Those were among the questions to be answered when Jennifer Steele, Ed.M.’04, Ed.D.’08, joined forces with Ed School professors Richard Murnane and John Willett for the recently released report, Do Financial Incentives Help Low-Performing Schools Attract and Keep Academically Talented Teachers? Evidence from California. The report is based on Steele’s own experience as the recipient of a $20,000 Governor’s Teaching Fellowship while in a graduate teacher licensure program at Stanford University.

In light of last spring’s passage of the historic Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act — which enhances student loan forgiveness programs for those who enter public service, similar to what is already done for new doctors willing to work in urban hospitals — the recent study of California’s teaching fellowship program could cast considerable light on the value-added benefits of utilizing bonus pay to attract new talent to troubled schools.
“The key question of the study is, ‘Do these types of incentives reward people who would have already made this choice, or do they change people’s behavior?” says Steele, a policy researcher in the education unit at the RAND Corporation. What they found is that “many of the people who received these awards would have entered the same school where they gained employment,” even without the award. “But 28 percent of recipients would not have entered a low-performing school if the reward did not exist,” she says. “It did influence people, but it didn’t influence everyone.”

Not even her. As one of the program’s 1,169 recipients, Steele fell into the greater category of those who would have chosen an underperforming urban school regardless of the $20,000 awarded to those in a teacher licensure program. Having already taught in a private school and the test preparation industry, Steele felt drawn to public schools based on the students she met and her own secondary education experience.

“I loved my students, but these were students who already had a lot of advantages,” says Steele. “I [personally] came from a public school in Arkansas, so I also understood that education can make a huge difference in helping people to change their circumstances. That is when I decided to go back and get my teacher license.”

Steele says the incentive bonus was “a gift” for her, offering a way to increase her $33,000 base pay by approximately 15 percent per year. And while two in every seven bonus recipients acknowledged that their decisions were indeed based on the incentive pay alone, 75 percent of all recipients fulfilled their four-year commitments, a figure both Steele and Murnane found surprising.

“The state was still getting teachers with strong academic backgrounds who would not have chosen these schools before,” says Steele. “The bonus money came out to $254 per student, so it was not a huge amount of money. Then the question is, were [the incentivized teachers] more effective than their peers? That we don’t know. These teachers were novices, and we know that novices are somewhat less effective than teachers with three or four years of experience, but we also know that those with stronger academic backgrounds are modestly more effective than those with weaker academic backgrounds.”

Given their findings, and Obama’s forgiveness incentives, both Steele and Murnane believe that the policy implications of this latest report are promising, even as additional key questions remain.

“I think the findings are substantial,” says Murnane. “When you offer any kind of financial incentive, you know that some of the money will end up going to people who would have taken those actions anyway. … The issue is this: For how many people are you able to change their behavior and how do you know?”

Both Steele and Murnane express frustration in not knowing what happened to the teachers in California beyond their four-year commitment.

“The thought was if we could get these teachers to these schools, they could start to become agents of change, but we don’t know if that was the case or if they achieved better levels of teacher effectiveness,” says Steele. “We need longitudinal data.”

Murnane adds, “You also need to create an environment where teachers want to work and can succeed in the environments they are in. That may mean a longer school day, a longer school year, more supports in place for families.  The job will still be difficult, so the money can be a piece of what’s needed, but you also need to create conditions for success. You need skilled professionals who want to be successful in helping children.”

— Mary Tamer is a Boston-based freelance writer who contributes frequently to Ed.