Staffing for School Turnaround in Rural Settings

ABSTRACT

Recruiting and retaining effective teachers is critical to school turnaround. However, research on how improving educator quality in low-performing schools contributes to school improvement is largely situated in urban settings. This study examines staffing practices through a descriptive analysis of the first cohort of Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI) schools in North Carolina. In the 94 schools slated for turnaround, ineffective teachers in rural schools were less likely to turn over than in non-rural schools. Instead of filling vacancies with more effective teachers than they lost, rural schools tended to assign their more effective teachers to tested grades and subjects.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I exclude 13 charter schools and two lab schools because their autonomy to hire and fire educators is different from in traditional public schools.

2. Thirty-two schools were identified based on graduation rates alone, five were in the bottom 5% in school performance and graduation rates below 66.7%, and the remaining 57 were identified by their school performance score only.

3. The U.S. Census Bureau has four high-level urbanicity codes: urban, suburban, town, and rural. I collapse the first three categories into a single non-rural category because there are very few CSI schools (about 10% total) in suburban and town locales in North Carolina.

4. A similar set of models including school-level covariates find similar patterns and no meaningful gain in precision. I therefore present the models without covariates for simplicity.

5. These estimates were all significant at the p < 0.05 level.

6. These estimates were significant at the p < 0.05 level.

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant Institute of Education Sciences (IES) R305E150017 to Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education