Jason A Grissom
Biographic Data
| ID | 4180129 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jason A Grissom |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jason A |
| FAMILY NAME | Grissom |
| SIGNATURE | GRISSOM J A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9819-8550 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 573 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Fragmentation, Administration, and Isolation? Evidence on Principal Time Use from Large-Scale Observations in Four Urban Districts
Purpose: We describe urban school principals’ time use, including their time allocation across work tasks and locations, and how time use varies by school context. Research Method: Trained observers recorded leaders’ time use in five-minute increments over full school days in four urban school districts. The full sample included approximately 650 daylong observations. We employed descriptive methods and linear regression to describe patterns in t…
Applying to Lead
Purpose: Urban school districts often face challenges in filling principal vacancies with effective leaders, especially in high-needs schools. Prospective principals’ engagement with the job application process may contribute to these challenges. The goal of this study is to better understand the job search strategies and behaviors of prospective principals and how their approaches might contribute to leadership staffing challenges in high-needs …
Navigating a Fractured Landscape
Purpose: Coherent systems of teacher professional learning (PL) hold great promise for supporting teacher practice. Yet little research systematically examines characteristics of PL systems or how teachers are engaging with PL within and across schools and districts. Research Methods: We use statewide teacher survey and administrative data from Tennessee to examine variation in the reported quantity and instructional helpfulness of PL activities.…
Which Students are Exposed to Teachers of Color
Does Investment in High-Quality Preservice Principal Training Pay Off? Assessing Outcomes of the Governor’s Academy for School Leadership in Tennessee
(Dis)connection at Work
Teachers of color often work in schools with few colleagues from the same racial or ethnic background. This racial isolation may affect their work experiences and important job outcomes, including retention. Using longitudinal administrative and survey data, we investigate the degree to which Tennessee teachers who are more racially isolated are more likely to turn over. Accounting for other factors, we find that racially isolated Black teachers …
Country of Origin and Representative Bureaucracy
A large body of research shows that clients of government services benefit from the presence of bureaucrats with whom they share race or ethnicity. These benefits arise from active or symbolic representation, which scholars argue are grounded in the shared backgrounds, language, and values that race and ethnicity proxy. We suggest that these shared connections are likely to be even more salient for clients and bureaucrats who share not just the s…
How Principals Affect Students and Schools
Principals can make a big difference to education. Four practices are key to their effectiveness, starting with a focus on instruction when working with teachers.
Unequal pay for equal work? Unpacking the gender gap in principal compensation
Performance, Process, and Interpersonal Relationships
Purpose: Multiple-measure principal evaluation systems have become commonplace in the past decade, but we do not know how principals perceive their evaluations under these regimes. This study analyzes how principals perceive evaluation in a state that was an early adopter of such a system. It describes how attitudes are explained by individual and contextual factors, performance ratings, and elements of the evaluation process. Research Methods: U…
Potential Race and Gender Biases in High‐Stakes Teacher Observations
Classroom observations are the largest component of evaluation ratings given to teachers in the multiple‐measure evaluation systems states have implemented in the last decade. Using data from the first eight years of Tennessee's teacher evaluation system, we document race and gender gaps in observation ratings and ask whether these gaps reflect true differences in instructional effectiveness. White and female teachers receive, on average, 0.15 st…
Leading Schools and Districts in Times of Crisis
The COVID-19 school closures highlighted the importance of crisis management for school and district leaders. Crisis management, however, has not received sufficient attention from school leadership preparation programs or education leadership researchers. This article synthesizes research spanning schools and other organizations, including those in the private sector, to describe a framework for understanding crises and crisis management in scho…
Exposure to Same-Race or Same-Ethnicity Teachers and Advanced Math Course-Taking in High School
Background/Context Research links advanced mathematics course-taking to important later outcomes, including college graduation and earnings, yet many students fail to progress into higher math courses as they move through high school. Black and Hispanic high school students are less likely than their white peers to take advanced math courses. A complex set of factors inform decisions about student course-taking, but teachers play key roles, inclu…
Teacher-Child Racial/Ethnic Match and Parental Engagement With Head Start
Parental engagement is central to Head Start’s two-generation mission. Drawing on research linking teacher-child racial/ethnic match to educational outcomes, the present study explores whether teacher-child match increases parental involvement in Head Start activities designed to support children and families. Using data from the 2006 and 2009 waves of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, we estimate the relationship between teache…
Strategic Retention
Studies link principal effectiveness to lower average rates of teacher turnover. However, principals need not target retention efforts equally to all teachers. Instead, strong principals may seek to strategically influence the composition of their school’s teaching force by retaining high performers and not retaining lower performers. We investigate such strategic retention behaviors with longitudinal data from Tennessee. Using multiple measures …
Central Office Supports for Data-Driven Talent Management Decisions
School districts increasingly push school leaders to utilize multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, such as observation ratings or value-added scores, in making talent management decisions, including teacher hiring, assignment, support, and retention, but we know little about the local conditions that promote or impede these processes. We investigate the barriers to principals’ use of teacher effectiveness measures in eight urban districts a…
Strategic Staffing? How Performance Pressures Affect the Distribution of Teachers Within Schools and Resulting Student Achievement
School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data—including achievement data from untested grades—and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find that teachers with more positive performance measures in both tested and untested classrooms are more li…
Discretion and Disproportionality
Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresentation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services in both math and reading, a patt…
Disentangling the Causal Mechanisms of Representative Bureaucracy
Scholars have suggested that the benefits of representative bureaucracy arise from bureaucrats acting in the interests of clients who share their characteristics, increased diversity encouraging even nonminority bureaucrats work to further the interests of minority clients, and/or the actions of clients that are more responsive to bureaucrats that share their characteristics. Despite decades of research, the literature has been unable to empirica…
The Micropolitics of Educational Inequality
Politics of education researchers have long recognized the role of micropolitics in school decision-making processes. We argue that investigating micropolitical dynamics is key to an important set of school decisions that are fundamental to inequities in access to high-quality teachers: assignments of teachers and students to classrooms. Focusing on the intraorganizational political power of experienced teachers, our analysis of survey and admini…
Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector
Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specific area of the public sector—public education—contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. The authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic the…
The “Representative Bureaucracy” in Education
Bureaucratic representation—the idea that a governmental organization is better situated to serve its clients when its employee composition reflects that of its client population—has received considerable scholarly attention in the study of public institutions in the fields of political science and public administration. In a wide variety of settings, this research has demonstrated important connections between the racial, ethnic, and gender comp…
Make Room Value Added
Increasingly, states and districts are combining student growth measures with rigorous, rubric-aligned teacher observations in constructing teacher evaluation measures. Although the student growth or value-added components of these measures have received much research and policy attention, the results of this study suggest that the data generated by high-quality observation systems have potential to inform principals’ use of data for human capita…
Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams and Student Achievement
This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement. Tea…
Public information, public learning and public opinion
Theories of political accountability assume citizens use information about the performance of government to hold public officials accountable, but whether citizens actually use information is difficult to directly examine. We take advantage of the importance of citizen-driven, performance-based accountability for education policy in Tennessee to conduct a survey experiment that identifies the effect of new information, mistaken beliefs and differ…
Does My Boss's Gender Matter? Explaining Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover in the Public Sector
Substantial literatures exist examining public personnel turnover and the role of gender in public management. We bring these two strands of research together to test hypotheses concerning the impact of manager gender on the job satisfaction and turnover of public sector workers. In particular, we test whether manager gender influences satisfaction and turnover per se versus the competing claim that gender congruence between managers and employee…
Disentangling the Causal Mechanisms of Representative Bureaucracy
Scholars have suggested that the benefits of representative bureaucracy arise from bureaucrats acting in the interests of clients who share their characteristics, increased diversity encouraging even nonminority bureaucrats work to further the interests of minority clients, and/or the actions of clients that are more responsive to bureaucrats that share their characteristics. Despite decades of research, the literature has been unable to empirica…
The “Representative Bureaucracy” in Education
Bureaucratic representation—the idea that a governmental organization is better situated to serve its clients when its employee composition reflects that of its client population—has received considerable scholarly attention in the study of public institutions in the fields of political science and public administration. In a wide variety of settings, this research has demonstrated important connections between the racial, ethnic, and gender comp…
Bureaucratic Representation, Distributional Equity, and Democratic Values in the Administration of Public Programs
Work on bureaucratic representation suggests that minority citizens benefit when the programs that serve them are administered by bureaucrats with similar characteristics. This literature has not sufficiently dealt with the long-standing concern that minority benefits may come at the expense of citizens from other groups, which some critics argue makes representative bureaucracy irreconcilable with democratic values. This article suggests distrib…
A supervisor like me
Studies of race representation in public organizations illustrate the importance of bureaucrat race in determining client‐level outcomes. Building “upward” from this research, this study examines how supervisor race impacts outcomes for street‐level bureaucrats using data from a nationally representative sample of public schools. Employing multiple estimation methods, we find that, consistent with the predictions of representation theory, teacher…
Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams and Student Achievement
This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement. Tea…
Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector
Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specific area of the public sector—public education—contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. The authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic the…
Make Room Value Added
Increasingly, states and districts are combining student growth measures with rigorous, rubric-aligned teacher observations in constructing teacher evaluation measures. Although the student growth or value-added components of these measures have received much research and policy attention, the results of this study suggest that the data generated by high-quality observation systems have potential to inform principals’ use of data for human capita…
Public information, public learning and public opinion
Theories of political accountability assume citizens use information about the performance of government to hold public officials accountable, but whether citizens actually use information is difficult to directly examine. We take advantage of the importance of citizen-driven, performance-based accountability for education policy in Tennessee to conduct a survey experiment that identifies the effect of new information, mistaken beliefs and differ…
Triangulating Principal Effectiveness
While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have identified specific skills that principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers, and parents with rich administrative data to determine which principal skills correlate most highly with school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill…
The Determinants of Conflict on Governing Boards in Public Organizations
This article examines the influence of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on decision-making conflict on governing boards in public organizations. Using survey data from more than 700 school board members in California, I investigate the degree to which various characteristics of the environment in which the board operates, processes the board implements, and traits of board members themselves predict how often the board experiences division among i…
Is Discord Detrimental? Using Institutional Variation to Identify the Impact of Public Governing Board Conflict on Outcomes
Few studies have examined the impact of governing board decision processes on board and organizational outcomes. This study draws on research on small work teams in the private sector to develop expectations about the relationship between outcomes and one aspect of board dynamics that affects decision making: intraboard conflict. Using administrative and survey data from school board members and school district superintendents in California, I sh…
Effective Instructional Time Use for School Leaders
Scholars have long argued that principals should be instructional leaders, but few studies have empirically linked specific instructional leadership behaviors to school performance. This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day observations of approximately 100 urban principals collected over 3 school years. We find that principals’ time spent broadl…
Strategic Retention
Studies link principal effectiveness to lower average rates of teacher turnover. However, principals need not target retention efforts equally to all teachers. Instead, strong principals may seek to strategically influence the composition of their school’s teaching force by retaining high performers and not retaining lower performers. We investigate such strategic retention behaviors with longitudinal data from Tennessee. Using multiple measures …
Leading Schools and Districts in Times of Crisis
The COVID-19 school closures highlighted the importance of crisis management for school and district leaders. Crisis management, however, has not received sufficient attention from school leadership preparation programs or education leadership researchers. This article synthesizes research spanning schools and other organizations, including those in the private sector, to describe a framework for understanding crises and crisis management in scho…
The Micropolitics of Educational Inequality
Politics of education researchers have long recognized the role of micropolitics in school decision-making processes. We argue that investigating micropolitical dynamics is key to an important set of school decisions that are fundamental to inequities in access to high-quality teachers: assignments of teachers and students to classrooms. Focusing on the intraorganizational political power of experienced teachers, our analysis of survey and admini…
Why Superintendents Turn Over
Although superintendent turnover can hinder district reform and improvement, research examining superintendent exits is scarce. This study identifies factors contributing to superintendent turnover in California by matching original superintendent and school board survey data with administrative data and information hand-collected from news sources on why superintendents left and where they went. Among 215 superintendents studied beginning in 200…
Revisiting the Impact of Participative Decision Making on Public Employee Retention
A large body of management research has linked participation by employees in organizational decision making to employee-level outcomes such as job satisfaction, with nearly all studies finding positive associations. This study questions whether the impact of employee policy influence on employee-level outcomes is contingent on management effectiveness, hypothesizing that employee outcomes may be negatively affected by the exercise of influence if…
Potential Race and Gender Biases in High‐Stakes Teacher Observations
Classroom observations are the largest component of evaluation ratings given to teachers in the multiple‐measure evaluation systems states have implemented in the last decade. Using data from the first eight years of Tennessee's teacher evaluation system, we document race and gender gaps in observation ratings and ask whether these gaps reflect true differences in instructional effectiveness. White and female teachers receive, on average, 0.15 st…
Country of Origin and Representative Bureaucracy
A large body of research shows that clients of government services benefit from the presence of bureaucrats with whom they share race or ethnicity. These benefits arise from active or symbolic representation, which scholars argue are grounded in the shared backgrounds, language, and values that race and ethnicity proxy. We suggest that these shared connections are likely to be even more salient for clients and bureaucrats who share not just the s…
Teacher-Child Racial/Ethnic Match and Parental Engagement With Head Start
Parental engagement is central to Head Start’s two-generation mission. Drawing on research linking teacher-child racial/ethnic match to educational outcomes, the present study explores whether teacher-child match increases parental involvement in Head Start activities designed to support children and families. Using data from the 2006 and 2009 waves of the Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey, we estimate the relationship between teache…
Strategic Staffing? How Performance Pressures Affect the Distribution of Teachers Within Schools and Resulting Student Achievement
School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data—including achievement data from untested grades—and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find that teachers with more positive performance measures in both tested and untested classrooms are more li…
Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance
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 across schools remains hotly contested. Little research has examined involuntary teacher transfer policies or their effects on schools, teachers, or students. This article uses administrative data from Miami‐Dade County Public Schools to invest…
(Dis)connection at Work
Teachers of color often work in schools with few colleagues from the same racial or ethnic background. This racial isolation may affect their work experiences and important job outcomes, including retention. Using longitudinal administrative and survey data, we investigate the degree to which Tennessee teachers who are more racially isolated are more likely to turn over. Accounting for other factors, we find that racially isolated Black teachers …
Local Legislative Professionalism
Although research on professionalism in state legislatures has been substantial, professionalism research has ignored legislative bodies in local government, such as city councils and school boards. Using detailed school district-level data and an original survey of school board members in 210 school districts in California, we develop measures of professionalism in the local government context. We then use these measures to examine which charact…
Race, Region, and Representative Bureaucracy
Scholars of representative bureaucracy have long been interested in the linkage between passive representation in public agencies and the pursuit of specific policies designed to benefit minority groups. Research in this area suggests that the structural characteristics of those organizations, the external political environment, and the perceptions of individual bureaucrats each help to facilitate that relationship. Work to date has not, however,…
Investing in Administrator Efficacy
A primary goal of school districts’ investments in professional development for principals is to enhance their effectiveness. This study examines the connection between administrator professional development and performance in a national sample of schools. We show that not all types of administrator professional development participation correlate positively with teachers’ ratings of principal performance. In particular, we find evidence that pri…
The Determinants of Conflict on Governing Boards in Public Organizations
This article examines the influence of extrinsic and intrinsic factors on decision-making conflict on governing boards in public organizations. Using survey data from more than 700 school board members in California, I investigate the degree to which various characteristics of the environment in which the board operates, processes the board implements, and traits of board members themselves predict how often the board experiences division among i…
Can Good Principals Keep Teachers in Disadvantaged Schools? Linking Principal Effectiveness to Teacher Satisfaction and Turnover in Hard-to-Staff Environments
Background High rates of teacher turnover likely mean greater school instability, disruption of curricular cohesiveness, and a continual need to hire inexperienced teachers, who typically are less effective, as replacements for teachers who leave. Unfortunately, research consistently finds that teachers who work in schools with large numbers of poor students and students of color feel less satisfied and are more likely to turn over, meaning that …
A supervisor like me
Studies of race representation in public organizations illustrate the importance of bureaucrat race in determining client‐level outcomes. Building “upward” from this research, this study examines how supervisor race impacts outcomes for street‐level bureaucrats using data from a nationally representative sample of public schools. Employing multiple estimation methods, we find that, consistent with the predictions of representation theory, teacher…
Revisiting the Impact of Participative Decision Making on Public Employee Retention
A large body of management research has linked participation by employees in organizational decision making to employee-level outcomes such as job satisfaction, with nearly all studies finding positive associations. This study questions whether the impact of employee policy influence on employee-level outcomes is contingent on management effectiveness, hypothesizing that employee outcomes may be negatively affected by the exercise of influence if…
Triangulating Principal Effectiveness
While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have identified specific skills that principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers, and parents with rich administrative data to determine which principal skills correlate most highly with school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill…
Bureaucratic Representation, Distributional Equity, and Democratic Values in the Administration of Public Programs
Work on bureaucratic representation suggests that minority citizens benefit when the programs that serve them are administered by bureaucrats with similar characteristics. This literature has not sufficiently dealt with the long-standing concern that minority benefits may come at the expense of citizens from other groups, which some critics argue makes representative bureaucracy irreconcilable with democratic values. This article suggests distrib…
Why Superintendents Turn Over
Although superintendent turnover can hinder district reform and improvement, research examining superintendent exits is scarce. This study identifies factors contributing to superintendent turnover in California by matching original superintendent and school board survey data with administrative data and information hand-collected from news sources on why superintendents left and where they went. Among 215 superintendents studied beginning in 200…
Does My Boss's Gender Matter? Explaining Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover in the Public Sector
Substantial literatures exist examining public personnel turnover and the role of gender in public management. We bring these two strands of research together to test hypotheses concerning the impact of manager gender on the job satisfaction and turnover of public sector workers. In particular, we test whether manager gender influences satisfaction and turnover per se versus the competing claim that gender congruence between managers and employee…
Strategic Involuntary Teacher Transfers and Teacher Performance
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 across schools remains hotly contested. Little research has examined involuntary teacher transfer policies or their effects on schools, teachers, or students. This article uses administrative data from Miami‐Dade County Public Schools to invest…
Effective Instructional Time Use for School Leaders
Scholars have long argued that principals should be instructional leaders, but few studies have empirically linked specific instructional leadership behaviors to school performance. This study examines the associations between leadership behaviors and student achievement gains using a unique data source: in-person, full-day observations of approximately 100 urban principals collected over 3 school years. We find that principals’ time spent broadl…
Local Legislative Professionalism
Although research on professionalism in state legislatures has been substantial, professionalism research has ignored legislative bodies in local government, such as city councils and school boards. Using detailed school district-level data and an original survey of school board members in 210 school districts in California, we develop measures of professionalism in the local government context. We then use these measures to examine which charact…
Is Discord Detrimental? Using Institutional Variation to Identify the Impact of Public Governing Board Conflict on Outcomes
Few studies have examined the impact of governing board decision processes on board and organizational outcomes. This study draws on research on small work teams in the private sector to develop expectations about the relationship between outcomes and one aspect of board dynamics that affects decision making: intraboard conflict. Using administrative and survey data from school board members and school district superintendents in California, I sh…
The Micropolitics of Educational Inequality
Politics of education researchers have long recognized the role of micropolitics in school decision-making processes. We argue that investigating micropolitical dynamics is key to an important set of school decisions that are fundamental to inequities in access to high-quality teachers: assignments of teachers and students to classrooms. Focusing on the intraorganizational political power of experienced teachers, our analysis of survey and admini…
Understanding Employee Turnover in the Public Sector
Employee turnover is a key area for public administration research, but one about which there is much still to be learned. Insights from an extensive body of research on employee turnover in a specific area of the public sector—public education—contributes to the understanding of employee mobility in public organizations more generally. The authors present a conceptual framework for understanding employee turnover that is grounded in economic the…
The “Representative Bureaucracy” in Education
Bureaucratic representation—the idea that a governmental organization is better situated to serve its clients when its employee composition reflects that of its client population—has received considerable scholarly attention in the study of public institutions in the fields of political science and public administration. In a wide variety of settings, this research has demonstrated important connections between the racial, ethnic, and gender comp…
Make Room Value Added
Increasingly, states and districts are combining student growth measures with rigorous, rubric-aligned teacher observations in constructing teacher evaluation measures. Although the student growth or value-added components of these measures have received much research and policy attention, the results of this study suggest that the data generated by high-quality observation systems have potential to inform principals’ use of data for human capita…
Teacher Collaboration in Instructional Teams and Student Achievement
This study draws upon survey and administrative data on over 9,000 teachers in 336 Miami-Dade County public schools over 2 years to investigate the kinds of collaborations that exist in instructional teams across the district and whether these collaborations predict student achievement. While different kinds of teachers and schools report different collaboration quality, we find average collaboration quality is related to student achievement. Tea…
Public information, public learning and public opinion
Theories of political accountability assume citizens use information about the performance of government to hold public officials accountable, but whether citizens actually use information is difficult to directly examine. We take advantage of the importance of citizen-driven, performance-based accountability for education policy in Tennessee to conduct a survey experiment that identifies the effect of new information, mistaken beliefs and differ…
Discretion and Disproportionality
Students of color are underrepresented in gifted programs relative to White students, but the reasons for this underrepresentation are poorly understood. We investigate the predictors of gifted assignment using nationally representative, longitudinal data on elementary students. We document that even among students with high standardized test scores, Black students are less likely to be assigned to gifted services in both math and reading, a patt…
Disentangling the Causal Mechanisms of Representative Bureaucracy
Scholars have suggested that the benefits of representative bureaucracy arise from bureaucrats acting in the interests of clients who share their characteristics, increased diversity encouraging even nonminority bureaucrats work to further the interests of minority clients, and/or the actions of clients that are more responsive to bureaucrats that share their characteristics. Despite decades of research, the literature has been unable to empirica…
Central Office Supports for Data-Driven Talent Management Decisions
School districts increasingly push school leaders to utilize multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, such as observation ratings or value-added scores, in making talent management decisions, including teacher hiring, assignment, support, and retention, but we know little about the local conditions that promote or impede these processes. We investigate the barriers to principals’ use of teacher effectiveness measures in eight urban districts a…
Strategic Staffing? How Performance Pressures Affect the Distribution of Teachers Within Schools and Resulting Student Achievement
School performance pressures apply disproportionately to tested grades and subjects. Using longitudinal administrative data—including achievement data from untested grades—and teacher survey data from a large urban district, we examine schools' responses to those pressures in assigning teachers to high-stakes and low-stakes classrooms. We find that teachers with more positive performance measures in both tested and untested classrooms are more li…
Strategic Retention
Studies link principal effectiveness to lower average rates of teacher turnover. However, principals need not target retention efforts equally to all teachers. Instead, strong principals may seek to strategically influence the composition of their school’s teaching force by retaining high performers and not retaining lower performers. We investigate such strategic retention behaviors with longitudinal data from Tennessee. Using multiple measures …
Psychology (32 works) · Political science (28 works) · Mathematics education (18 works) · School Choice and Performance (17 works) · Economics (15 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Pedagogy (13 works) · Public Policy and Administration Research (13 works) · Teacher Education and Leadership Studies (13 works) · Educational Assessment and Improvement (11 works)