Is Teacher Effectiveness Fully Portable?

 This study examines how performance changes when teachers transfer across very different school contexts. The Talent Transfer Initiative program created a rare natural experiment to study such transfers by randomly assigning low-achieving schools the ability to offer high-performing teachers at higher-achieving schools a $20,000 transfer stipend. 

Forecast tests show that these high-performing teachers’ prior value added is only moderately predictive of their effectiveness in low-achieving schools. 

Using a difference-in-differences framework, the authors estimate that incentivized-transfer teachers’ value added dropped by 0.12 student standard deviations. This decline appears to be driven by lower match quality, negative indirect school effects, and the loss of student-specific human capital.