The promises and pitfalls of government-funded teacher staffing initiatives on teacher employment in hard-to-staff schools: Evidence from South Carolina

Abstract

Situated against teacher demand problems worldwide, rising teacher turnover and declining teacher education enrollment have rendered the state of South Carolina a region commonly described as facing a “teacher shortage crisis.” This paper reports results from an evaluation of the Rural Recruitment Initiative (RRI), a state-level teacher staffing policy for SC’s hard-to-staff districts. Based on a decade of data analysis, we assess RRI’s causal effect using a Difference-in-Differences model with Arellano–Bond maximum likelihood design and find that RRI funding reduces teacher turnover rate by 1% for fund-receiving districts. We conclude by discussing how the initiative could be improved and what policymakers can learn from our results.