Impacts of Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers on Equity and Teacher Productivity

February 04, 2014
Policy Analysis for California Education

District policymakers often argue that rules in teacher contracts and collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), that limit their ability to transfer teachers to different schools unless the teacher initiates the move, handcuff them in achieving the right mix of teachers across the district. In many districts in California, for example, CBAs prevent districts from involuntarily transferring teachers except when schools lose teaching positions, and even then, seniority often governs which teachers can be moved. Could loosening those restrictions benefit students? On the one hand, maybe so. Districts could, for example, use transfers to move ineffective teachers out of disadvantaged schools or match teachers to positions where their skills could have a more positive impact. On the other hand, maybe not. If the district used transfers to shuffle ineffective teachers to other disadvantaged schools or moved them to positions where their skills are underutilized, greater involuntary transfer authority could be detrimental.

Up to this point, research has had little to say about the impacts of strategic involuntary transfers because there have been few opportunities to study them. In a study I recently conducted with Susanna Loeb and Nathaniel Nakashima, however, we were able to shed some light on the potential outcomes of a strategic teacher transfer policy using data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), the nation’s fourth largest school district. Prior to the start of the 2009-10, 2010-11, and 2011-12 school years, M-DCPS exercised a clause in its CBA allowing for the transfer of teachers—identified by their principals—involuntarily within the district, provided those moves could be deemed “in the best interest of the school system.” Approximately 375 teachers were moved involuntarily over these three years. The district provided us with the involuntary transfer list in each year, which we merged with other district administrative data on schools, personnel, and students. We use this dataset to investigate how the transfer policy impacted the performance and distribution of teachers in the district.

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Mentioned Publications

Jason Grissom

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Susanna Loeb

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Nathaniel Nakashima

Despite claims that school districts need flexibility in teacher assignment to allocate teachers more equitably across schools and improve district performance, the power to involuntarily transfer teachers to different schools remains hotly contested in many districts because of the potential for teachers to be treated arbitrarily or unfairly. Little research has examined involuntary transfer policies or their effects on schools, teachers, or students. This article uses administrative data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools to examine the district’s involuntary transfer policy, including which schools utilized the opportunity to transfer teachers, which teachers were chosen, where they were moved, and how their performance as measured by student value-added compared before and after the transfer. We find that the policy was effective at identifying for transfer relatively low-performing teachers in the lowest-performing schools who, on the basis of observable characteristics, would have been unlikely to leave on their own. We also find that involuntarily transferred teachers were systematically moved to higher-performing schools, suggesting that policy may be equity-enhancing. However, their performance in the new schools continued to be low, suggesting few efficiency gains from better matching.

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