A considerable amount of this attention has been focused on schools with large concentrations of economically disadvantaged and minority students because students in these schools, on average, do not have equal likelihood of being in a sequence of classrooms with the same level of instructional quality as students in other schools. Select states and districts have proposed and implemented financial incentives to recruit and retain highly-effective teachers in these high need schools. A key challenge against programs offering financial incentives to highly effective teachers to either move to, or remain in, a high need school is a lack of quantitative research on whether teachers produce comparable results when they move to a school with a different socioeconomic environment from their previous school. In an effort to provide systematic information on this important question, this paper examines the relationship between measures of teaching effectiveness before and after teachers change schools which service student populations with demographics different from the previous school.

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