Do financial incentives help low-performing schools attract and keep academically talented teachers?

This study capitalizes on a natural experiment that occurred in California between 2000-01 and 2001-02, when the state offered a competitive $20,000 incentive called the Governor's Teaching Fellowship (GTF) to attract 1,250 academically talented, novice teachers to designated low-performing schools and retain them in those schools for at least four years. The abrupt introduction of the GTF program provides an opportunity to use a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the program's causal impact on the propensity of academically talented, novice teachers to begin and continue working in low-performing schools. Using longitudinal employment data for 19,822 Californians enrolled in teacher licensure programs from 1998 through 2002, I estimate that the availability of the GTF increased by 3.4 percentage points, or 8.4 percent, the probability that academically talented licensure candidates entered low-performing schools within three years after licensure program enrollment. Furthermore, estimates of the GTF effect are similar across the distribution of low-performing schools. However, among academically talented teachers who entered low-performing schools, the GTF program does not appear to have influenced the length of time they remained in those schools.