Teacher Quality and Sorting across Traditional Public and Charter Schools in the Detroit Metropolitan Region

In the quest to raise student achievement in low-performing urban schools, researchers often point to the central importance of recruitment and retention of a high quality teacher workforce (Lankford, Loeb and Wyckoff 2002; Rivkin, Hanushek and Kain 2005; Jacob 2007).1 At the same time, advocates have proposed charter schools not only as a means to reform traditional public schools, but also as a strategy to close the achievement gap between urban students and their suburban counterparts in no small part because charter schools are often freed from many of the constraints faced by traditional public schools, allowing them greater flexibility to recruit and retain a qualitatively different teacher workforce (Center for Education Reform n.d.). Using data for the Detroit metropolitan region of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb counties for the 2005-2006 school year, this study sought to answer four research questions: (1) Did charter school teachers differ in measures of teacher quality from traditional public school teachers; (2) Was there variability in teacher quality within traditional public and charter schools; (3) To what extent were teacher quality indicators associated with teacher effectiveness; and (4) Did teacher sorting take place across charter and traditional public schools? This article is divided into eight sections. It begins with a background section on charter schools in Michigan, followed by a section on research on teacher quality and sorting. The third section presents research methods used in the study while findings are discussed in the next four sections, one for each of the research questions. The article closes with a summary, conclusions, and recommendations for future research.