Investigating the Role of Human Resources in School Turnaround: A Decomposition of Improving Schools in Two States

Using longitudinal data on spanning the 2002-03 through 2007-08 school years in Florida and North Carolina, this paper decomposes the workforce dynamics among teachers and principals in low-performing schools that significantly improved their performance. In general, I find strong, consistent evidence of human capital development (i.e., improvements in the productivity of the teachers and principals already in the school) accounting for the increased performance in turnaround schools. These findings are robust to the inclusion of school random effects, alternative categorizations of both teachers and turnaround schools, and are observed across elementary and middle school samples in both states. There is also general evidence of productive incoming teachers helping to improve these turnaround schools, but little evidence to support negative attrition specific to these schools played a role. These findings are important as they document large improvements in the joint productivity of teachers in low-performing schools, a finding which is out of step with current federal efforts to improve schools that implicitly assume teacher productivity is essentially fixed over time.