Estimating the Impact of Receiving a Higher Evaluation Rating on Early-Career Teacher Turnover and Its Relationship to School Context

Abstract

Teacher evaluation systems have gone through widespread changes in recent years. These new systems have the potential to influence early-career teachers’ career trajectories because of their increase in rigor and ties to formal and informal consequences. In this paper, I investigate the impact of receiving a higher evaluation rating on early-career attrition and movement among districts and schools in a medium-sized state in the United States. Using a regression discontinuity design that takes advantage of the cut scores between each pair of evaluation ratings, I find that receiving a higher rating slightly increases the probability that early-career teachers will move to different districts. I do not find any effect of receiving a higher rating on the probability of a teacher leaving teaching in the state or moving among schools within a district. I find similar effects of ratings on teacher attrition and movement among schools for early-career and experienced teachers. When I apply the regression discontinuity to three cut scores simultaneously, I find that early-career teachers who received a higher evaluation rating were more likely to move among districts than experienced teachers who received a higher rating. Additionally, I do not detect any differences in the impact of teacher evaluation ratings on early-career teacher turnover based on school context. Finally, while on average early-career teachers moved to schools that were similar to those they left, I find that teachers who received higher ratings were more likely to move to schools with slightly higher percentages of low-income and non-white students.