STRATEGIC SCHOOL STAFFING: WHAT PERSONELL INVESTMENTS DO TEACHERS FAVOR?

A critical responsibility of school and district leaders is to attract, develop, and retain teachers. Efforts to succeed in these core tasks have proven notoriously challenging for many school districts across the United States. One factor that adds to this challenge is that policymakers must make decisions on how to manage the teacher workforce with insufficient information on teachers’ preferences. In this study, we collect information on teachers' preferences over compensation, benefits, and other non-pecuniary rewards. To identify the personnel investments teachers favor, we conduct a discrete choice survey experiment where we ask teachers to consider five sets of two hypothetical school profiles and then indicate which school they prefer. We describe each school profile using seven attributes, each of which represents a distinct personnel investment.

Better understanding how teachers value plausible alternative personnel investments is particularly important for at least two reasons. First, personnel costs are the single largest line item on a school budget, accounting for 80% of expenditures in the average public school (NCES, 2020). Second, personnel decisions determine teachers’ salaries and benefits, their class size, and their access to helpful colleagues (e.g. nurses, counselors, instructional coaches)- each of which may play an important role in shaping teachers' employment decisions.