City Teacher Qualifications

The Narrowing Gap in New York
City Teacher Qualifications and
Its Implications for Student
Achievement in High-Poverty
Schools

Donald Boyd
Hamilton Lankford
Susanna Loeb
Jonah Rockoff
James Wyckoff

INTRODUCTION
What is the distribution of educational resources across schools and what effect do disparities in resources have on the achievement of poor and minority students? This question dates to the Coleman Report (1966), but continues to be hotly debated, involving the courts as well as federal, state, and local governments. Arguably, the most important educational resource is teachers. Disparities in teacher qualifications figure prominently in most educational policy discussions and are a central feature of the No Child Left Behind Act
However, the effects of most teacher attributes appear small in comparison to the substantial variation across students in how much they learn in a year, as measured by achievement tests. Studies of teachers’ value added to student achievement typically use state or district administrative data and thus are usually limited to assessing the effects of teacher characteristics collected by these entities. Teacher experience and certification are among the most studied.
Students of first-year teachers learn less, on average, than students of more experienced teachers. While some of this difference may be driven by differential attrition of the worst teachers (Hanushek et al., 2005; Krieg, 2006; Goldhaber, Gross, &
Player, 2007; Boyd et al., 2007), studies that account for the effects of compositional change find that first-year teachers produce student achievement gains that are significantly lower than otherwise similar teachers with 10 to 15 years of experience (Rockoff, 2004; Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005; Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger,
2007). Most of these gains from experience occur within the first four years
However, in New York City, even schools in the decile or quartile with the lowest percentage of free lunch-eligible students contain some students who are poor as measured by this proxy. Thus, when we employ the terms affluent or rich in describing schools, it is intended as a relative concept. By these measures, the distribution of teachers in 2000 was unequal. For example, Figure 1 shows that high-poverty schools were far more likely to have novice teachers: 25 percent of teachers in schools in the highest-poverty group (top 10 percent) were in their first two years of teaching, compared with 15 percent of teachers in the lowest-poverty group (bottom 10 percent). These patterns held across other available measures of teacher qualifications (Table 1). Teachers in the highest-poverty schools had much lower scores on the SAT exams, were five times more likely to be uncertified, were much more likely to have graduated from the least-competitive colleges, had much lower scores on SAT exams, and failed the Liberal Arts and Sciences Test (LAST), a state teacher certification exam that measures general knowledge, nearly three times as frequently as teachers in low-poverty