How Predictive of Teacher Retention Are Ratings of Applicants from Professional References?

Teacher hiring plays an important role in determining the composition of the teacher workforce and a small but growing body of research has sought to better understand the degree to which various types of applicant information predict teacher outcomes. We add to this literature by examining the relationship between structured ratings of applicants collected from their professional references and teacher retention, an outcome that has implications for student achievement as well as school and district recruitment and onboarding costs. We find that teachers who scored one standard deviation above average in their reference ratings were 2.6 percentage points more likely to remain at the schools that hired them. When we include rater-fixed effects in the model (so comparisons are between teacher applicants within rater), we find reference ratings are substantially more predictive of retention (including district- and state-level retention), suggesting that attention to issues of interrater reliability could make applicant ratings more useful. The results of this study support the idea that surveying professional references to get assessments of teacher applicants is a promising and low-cost approach to assessing job candidates that can complement other screening practices.