Grade Assignments and the Teacher Pipeline: A Low-Cost Lever to Improve Student Achievement?

Each year, school principals, leadership, and teaching teams make decisions about how best to allocate their scarce resources in the service of improving student outcomes. They may decide, for example, on how small or large to make classes, whom to hire, and what type of professional development to provide their staff. Despite fierce debates about which—if any—of these resources matter most (e.g., Greenwald, Hedges, & Lain, 1996; Hanushek, 1997), a broad consensus has emerged on the relative importance of investing in high-quality teachers (Kyriakides & Creemers, 2008; Nye, Konstantopoulos, & Hedges, 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005). A key question, then, is how schools can allocate resources to get these high-quality teachers into classrooms. Research indicates that paying for education master’s degrees may not be a wise investment (Wayne & Youngs, 2003), but focusing instead on developing teacher productivity through experience, coaching, and relationships with high-quality colleagues can improve teacher quality and student achievement (Allen, Pianta, Gregory, Mikami, & Lun, 2011; Jackson & Bruegmann, 2009; Rockoff, 2004). Another potential avenue not yet fully explored is teacher grade assignments. To the extent that researchers have studied teacher assignments, they have focused primarily on whether or not teachers hold qualifications in the subject they teach (e.g., Ingersoll, 2002). However, recent analyses indicate that teachers switch grades at high rates; in multiple districts across the United States, over 20% of teachers switch grades from one year to the next (Jacob & Rockoff, 2011). In addition, these trends may have negative consequences for teachers and students. Studies indicate that accountability policies likely incentivize school leaders to keep their most effective teachers in tested grades (Boyd, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2008; Chingos & West, 2011; Fuller & Ladd, 2012) and that switching grades is associated with declines in teachers’ effectiveness at raising student achievement (Jacob & Rockoff, 2011; Ost, 2014) and increases in teacher turnover (Ost & Schiman, 2015). Attention to and modification of grade assignment policies and practices has the potential to be quite valuable to schools, particularly when compared to other programs seeking to harness teacher productivity to improve educational outcomes for students. Although individualized coaching can cost around $4,000 per teacher (Allen et al., 2011) and increasing the quality of teachers’ peers requires large-scale recruitment efforts, the decision of whether or not to have a teacher switch grades may have no direct and few indirect costs. To explore the extent to which grade assignments can be a lever for change in the teacher pipeline and for student achievement, I draw on a 10-year panel of administrative data 580944 EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X15580944Educational ResearcherMonth XXXX research-article2015