9 a.m.
Good morning. Apologies for the very late notice on this, but I just received the
following information and wanted to share for anyone who is interested. It was developed
for the Data Science RIG, but intersects with our interests in COEHD.
Announcement:
MSS Research Talk
Feb. 16
Research Seminar Series
“Stopping the Revolving Door: An Empirical and Textual Study of Crowdfunding and Teacher
Turnover”
Thursday, Feb. 16
2 – 3 p.m.
Virtual meeting: https://utsa.zoom.us/j/98500741960
Samantha Keppler
Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations
University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business
Abstract
Organizations that provide better worker support have better worker retention. In K–12
public education, teachers commonly feel unsupported by their schools and districts as a
result of the gap between top-down, one-size-fits-all resource allocation models and
teachers' individual resource needs. In this study, we examine whether a recent trend
in education—teacher crowdfunding platforms—effectively fills this gap and improves
retention. We construct a novel dataset connecting teachers' employment data to their
actions on the largest teacher crowdfunding platform, DonorsChoose, over a five-year
period (2013-2014 to 2018-2019). We integrate textual analyses of teacher-written
descriptions and empirical analyses of teacher turnover and attrition to provide the first
evidence that crowdfunding improves teacher retention. We find funded projects on
DonorsChoose significantly reduce attrition (leaving the public school system) rates of
funded teachers by 1.7 percentage points (pp). Our textual analyses reveal that the effect
on retention varies among projects. Resources which more substantially help teachers enact
their professional identities as teachers by personalizing their classrooms (i.e.,
furniture and classroom environment resources) and/or their teaching pedagogy (i.e.,
through a more creative use of resources) have the strongest effect: They significantly
reduce both the likelihood a teacher leaves their current school (by 1.7–3.6 pp) and the
likelihood a teacher leaves the public school system (by 1.8–2.4 pp). Our findings speak
to the potential role of identity-relevant physical resources, and the new financial
technologies that enable access to them, for improving worker retention more broadly.
Bio
Samantha Keppler is an Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations at the University
of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Her expertise is in the application of
operations management theories to the education sector. Her research derives insights
about how to improve education operations, or the management of human and material
resources in public schools, educational nonprofits, and edtech companies. Professor
Keppler earned her PhD in Industrial Engineering and Management Science from the McCormick
School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University. Prior to pursuing
her PhD, she was a public high school math teacher for three years in the Bronx, New
York.