Schools with high concentrations of low income and minority students need effective and well-prepared teachers.

However, these schools often have some of the toughest working conditions in the education system. Some teachers relish the challenge; others prefer to move to a school where there are fewer disruptions and more support.

There are at least two basic approaches to influence where teachers work: "push" and "pull."

• “Push” approaches directly assign teachers to schools, modifying collective bargaining agreements where necessary to increase the district's discretion to make assignments.
• “Pull” approaches use incentives to attract effective teachers to choose such assignments on their own. Such incentives include promises about working conditions, recruitment of a strong school leader, arrangements to move teachers as a group, reduced or flexible work assignments, and (occasionally) increased compensation. Pay matters; school districts use pay incentives to attract teachers to apply for open positions.

Teachers are employed by school districts. Within a big district, teachers can negotiate a move from one school to another without changing their employer. To move to a school in another district is more complicated, because it involves signing a new contract, and probably relinquishing your seniority, which implies a pay cut. This is part of the reason teachers tend to stay put.

The challenge of "mobility"

School districts typically decide how many teachers to employ in each school based on the number of students enrolled. In places where there is high student mobility — that is, where families have a tendency to relocate during the school year — this can be a tricky business. In general, however, districts plan the number of teachers at a site based on a ratio of students and teachers. This ratio doesn't generally take teacher experience into account, which can create unintended consequences.

Because inexperienced teachers earn lower wages than experienced ones, a school with a large percentage of inexperienced teachers has low staff costs.

Because inexperienced teachers earn lower wages than experienced ones, a school with a large percentage of inexperienced teachers has low staff costs.

In California, the only place to find this information is on the School Accountability Report Card (SARC), a dense document full of useful information for those intrepid few who actually read it. The Education Trust-West exposed the extent of invisible underinvestment in high-poverty schools in its 2005 report The Hidden Gap. In order to address this inequitable investment in children, Oakland Unified School District was the first district in America to adopt the practice of accounting for actual salary costs in school budgeting. At the end of the Obama administration this transparency was made the law of the land: as part of the federal ESSA law, districts are required to publicly disclose actual personnel expenditures for each school, not just district averages.

Funding for more teachers in areas of greater needs

In 2013, California adopted the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) a school finance system that directs more money toward school districts where students are learning English, living in lower-income families, or in foster care. Districts were instructed to use the incremental funds for the specific benefit of the high-need students, but were given considerable leeway to decide how best to deploy the money. More money, fewer rules.

An important 2018 study of the impact of the policy, titled Money and Freedom, judged the policy a major success.

The study did not monitor in detail how districts spent the money, but much of it seems to have been directed toward staffing, services and training. The results were unexpectedly quick. For example, the researchers find "among Hispanic children, that a $1,000 increase in per-pupil spending during ages 13-16 leads to an increase of 0.19 standard deviations in math, and 0.11 standard deviations in reading. No statistically significant effects are detectable for white children."

Updated September 2018, Oct 2021