WWC Review of the Report 'Transfer Incentives for High-Performing Teachers: Final Results from a Multisite Randomized Experiment.' What Works Clearinghouse Single Study Review

For the 2013 study, "Transfer Incentives for High-Performing Teachers: Final Results from a Multisite Randomized Experiment," researchers examined the impact of the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) on students' reading and mathematics achievement in 10 school districts. The TTI enabled principals of low-performing schools to provide bonuses to high-performing teachers when they transferred to and stayed in the low-performing schools. Researchers randomly assigned teacher teams to the TTI program or to a comparison group over two years. They found that elementary students from TTI teams scored higher on state-specific mathematics and reading standardized tests at the end of program Year 2 than those from comparison teams. There were no impacts in test scores at the end of the program Year 1 for the elementary and middle school samples and no impacts at the end of the program Year 2 for the middle school samples. A subset of the analyses has low attrition and meets WWC group design standards without reservations. The following are appended: (1) Study Details; (2) Outcome Measures for Each Domain; and (3) Study Findings for Each Domain. [The following study is the focus of this Single Study Review: Glazerman, S., Protik, A., Teh, B., Bruch, J., & Max, J. (2013). "Transfer incentives for high-performing teachers: Final results from a multisite randomized experiment" (NCEE 2014-4003). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED544269.pdf. For the full report, see ED544269.]