Matching Teach For America Teachers to Schools, by Jonathan Davis

Some years ago Clayton Featherstone and I worked with Teach for America to design their process for matching new recruits to school districts.  Now here's a paper on the next step in the assignment process: matching teachers to particular schools.

Labor Market Design Can Improve Match Outcomes: Evidence from Matching Teach For America Teachers to Schools   by Jonathan M.V. Davis

Abstract: "I worked with Teach For America (TFA) to match high school teachers to schools in Chicago using the deferred acceptance algorithm (DA), while keeping its original mechanism unchanged for elementary teachers. Comparing actual matches under DA to simulated counterfactual matches suggests half of teachers strictly prefer their matches under DA and very few teachers are worse off. This improved matching yields longer-run benefits: matching with DA increased teachers retention through their two-year commitment to TFA by between 6 and 12 percent. This provides empirical support for the hypothesis that economic design can improve match outcomes in labor markets without negotiable wages. "

"Before I began working with TFA, interview day matches were determined by what I will refer to as the First Offer Mechanism (FO). This mechanism works as follows:

"Step 1. Complete round 1 interviews. After completing the round 1 interview, each school decides whether to make an offer to the teacher they interviewed. If given an offer, the teacher must accept it or exit Teach For America.

"Step 2 ≤ k ≤ K. Complete round k interviews involving unhired teachers. Each school decides whether to make an offer to the teacher they interviewed. If given an offer, the teacher must accept it or exit Teach For America.

...

"In fall 2013, I contacted TFA and suggested that they may benefit from replacing FO with DA. Given TFA’s policy that teachers accept their first offer and the organizational value that “TFA teachers go wherever they are needed”, the school position proposing version of DA was selected. In order to credibly identify the impact of the change, I worked with TFA to initially implement DA at its high school interview days for its 2014 cohort. This cohort was admitted to TFA in early 2014 and committed to teaching with TFA during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years. They continued using FO at the elementary interview days for this cohort."