Teacher Labor Market Research and the Arkansas LEARNS Act

Published on March 3, 2023

Gema Zamarro, Josh McGee & Andrew Camp

Education policy has been front and center since Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders took office, vowing to be an education governor. Over the past two weeks, both the Arkansas House and Senate have passed the Governor’s proposed education bill, the LEARNS Act, by overwhelming majorities. The bill is now headed back to the Senate for a concurrence vote and will likely be on the Governor’s desk for signature sometime next week. The legislation bundles several education reforms, many of which would affect teachers. In this post, we dig into what research says about these reforms and provide some advice based on the evidence.

It is undeniable that Arkansas is in urgent need of educational improvement. Students in Arkansas perform far below the national average in both reading and math on the NAEP exam. Only about 30% of 4th graders were proficient in reading and 28% in math on the most recent test (see 2022 NAEP scores). Despite having relatively high levels of in-person learning during the pandemic, student performance in Arkansas declined significantly, tracking declines across the country. This missed learning creates an even stronger imperative for improvement.

In many areas of the state, districts struggle to hire high-quality teachers who are certified to teach the subjects/grades to which they are assigned. We calculate that between 8 to 9% of Arkansas’s teachers have some type of licensure waiver, about half of which are uncertified. The state’s proportion of uncertified teachers is more than double the national average.

However, this challenge is not evenly distributed across the state. The figure below shows that teacher licensure exceptions are most concentrated in the delta region of the state, which is also the region with the highest levels of childhood poverty. The use of licensure exceptions is a key indicator of teacher shortages.

Finding ways to better recruit and retain high-quality teachers, especially in areas where there are shortages, is crucial for improving student outcomes. The proposed bill includes several initiatives meant to address this challenge. We hope to shed some light on what research says about the proposed reforms’ potential impact on teacher labor markets.

First, the LEARNS Act would increase the minimum teacher salary to $50,000. We looked at the proportion of teachers in each district that currently have base salaries that are less than $50,000. We found that more than half of teachers statewide would benefit from the proposed increase and that these teachers are most concentrated in high-poverty areas that were more likely to have teacher shortages. The proposed minimum teacher salary increase could help alleviate the hiring challenges these districts face.

Similarly, the proposed $2,000 pay increase for all teachers and the addition of 12 weeks of paid maternity leave could help make the teaching profession more attractive across the state. Currently, most districts do not offer paid maternity leave and teachers are often required to prepare lesson plans before taking unpaid FMLA leave.

While increasing the minimum teaching salary will make a difference, it will not fully address the challenges. More needs to be done to eliminate shortages and make teaching more attractive, especially in eastern and southern Arkansas. In that respect, the bill’s proposed incentive and loan forgiveness programs for teachers in hard-to-staff schools are likely going to be crucial to help attract teachers to those areas in the state.

Similar programs have shown evidence of success in other states. For example, researchers studied student loan forgiveness and bonus programs in Florida that offered teachers in identified shortage areas up to $10,000 over four years to repay their student loans. Florida also offered one-time retention bonuses for teachers with satisfactory ratings who teach in shortage areas. The research showed that these programs helped retain teachers in hard-to-staff schools and subjects.

Arkansas, however, already has loan forgiveness and incentive programs like these in place, but they appear to have been underutilized so far. It is unclear why that might be the case – the incentives may not be large enough, the teachers who might benefit may not be aware of the programs, etc. To ensure these programs deliver their intended results, we must follow their outcomes. Good data and ongoing research are necessary to know whether these programs are succeeding and how we might improve them when they are not.

Even with higher pay and incentives, it will likely still be difficult to recruit teachers to move into the areas of our state that face the most severe teacher shortages. One promising solution is to recruit and support people who are already in and connected to those communities to become teachers. The Arkansas Teacher Residency Model is an example of this “Grow-your-Own” approach. In addition to the recruitment potential, recent research suggests that these types of programs help produce teachers with higher initial classroom effectiveness and higher growth over time.

Beyond residency models, research has also shown the importance of student teaching experiences more broadly. Teacher candidates hired into schools and classrooms with similar demographics as their student teaching experiences were better retained in the profession in Washington State. Developing student teaching opportunities for students to experience teaching in those areas where we need them most could help support their retention in the state.

In several places, the LEARNS Act focuses on teachers’ classroom effectiveness as captured by their contribution to student test scores (i.e., through Value-added models – VAMs), among other measures. As a recent article in the Handbook of the Economics of Education (available here) puts it, “Research over the past decade provides compelling evidence that estimates of teacher value-added from well-designed models are unbiased, on average.” However, as the quote suggests, the devil is in the details. VAM models must be “well-designed” to be reliable.

Unlike other indicators of school performance, academic growth, as measured by VAMs, is not very correlated with school demographics, and that’s a good thing. This means it is reflective of what students are learning in school, not what challenges they may face due to out-of-school factors. The map below shows average school-district level VAM scores for math. As we can see, average VAM scores are not evenly distributed across the state, which is an indication of the challenges many districts face in delivering high-quality instruction in some subjects.

Having that said, there are bright spots across the state. When the Office for Education Policy recently gave awards to the schools producing the highest student growth, we identified schools from every region that were producing excellent student growth in high-poverty areas (see OEP Awards and Beating the Odds).

The LEARNS Act also allows districts to adopt more flexible pay by eliminating the minimum salary schedule and introducing bonus pay for high-quality teachers. Although there is research showing flexible pay and performance bonuses can have a positive impact on student outcomes (see, e.g., DC Impact Program evaluation and Wisconsin experience allowing teacher flexible pay), those improvements materialize over time and not quickly. That is because the improvements were the result of changing who entered and stayed in teaching.

In the case of the DC Impact Program, less effective teachers left the profession and on average were substituted by higher-quality entrants. It’s also worth noting too that Impact paired accountability and bonuses with significant support and coaching. In Wisconsin, more effective teachers moved to districts with pay flexibility, resulting in increased student outcomes in those districts. We will need to be patient for these types of reforms to have an impact on student outcomes.

The research is more mixed about whether performance pay could help increase teachers’ effectiveness on the job by providing incentives for teachers to improve. While some programs have demonstrated promising results, the literature finds that program design is key. Who gets rewarded; what gets rewarded; and how rewards get distributed are all important implementation questions for its potential success and to limit adverse effects. For a summary of pay-for-performance program results and the key design features to focus on, see this recent meta-analysis.

State education leaders also need to think about how job conditions beyond pay and perceptions of teaching as a profession influence the teacher labor market. In a recent blog post, we showed that the roughly 10 percent of teachers who leave Arkansas public school employment each year made about $4,000 less in their first year after leaving compared to those who stick around . While pay is important, clearly other factors are influencing these teachers’ decisions.

A study of reforms to statewide teacher accountability systems, some of which are similar to elements of LEARNS, found that these reforms were successful at increasing teacher quality. Those gains, however, came at the cost of reducing the number of new teachers entering the labor force. The authors found that decreases in perceived job security and satisfaction were likely explanations of why fewer individuals entered the teacher workforce after the reforms occurred.

Unfortunately, many of the narratives around the teaching profession have a negative framing – whether it be about low pay, long hours, lack of respect etc. And these negative messages impact the labor market. In a recent survey, when we asked parents if they wanted their child to become a teacher, well below half of parents answered yes. Arkansas educator preparation programs already produce fewer teachers than leave the workforce each year.

If we want a high-quality teaching workforce, Arkansas must work to make teaching a more desirable profession through good policy and by positively promoting teaching. The LEARNS Act includes several components that should be attractive to teachers, for example higher pay, bonus programs, loan forgiveness etc. Promoting these aspects of the legislation could help retain our best teachers and attract new, high-quality entrants into the profession. It will, however, also be important for education leaders to be cognizant of the impact that changing perceptions around job security and support can have on the teaching labor market.

Arkansas desperately needs to improve its educational performance to help all students reach their full potential and compete in the global economy. Finding ways to better recruit, support, and retain high-quality teachers will undoubtedly be a big part of any solution. The LEARNS Act has the potential to have a positive impact on Arkansas’ teachers, but how the legislation is implemented will be key to its success. As we noted earlier, high-quality data and ongoing research is necessary to know whether these initiatives are succeeding and how we might improve them when they are not.