A study of Tennessee’s education reforms found that stricter tenure rules for teachers produced lasting improvements in student performance, with the biggest gains appearing in the earliest years of a teacher’s career. The changes combined two key shifts: expanded annual evaluations for all teachers—previously limited to those not yet tenured, and new tenure requirements that demanded higher performance scores in years four and five of employment.
The reforms applied differently to two groups of teachers. Novice educators hired in 2009, 10 or 2010, 11 faced both the evaluation changes and the new tenure incentives. Those already tenured under the old rules, teachers in years four through seven when the reforms began, experienced only the evaluation updates, not the tenure pressure.
The study tracked 11,000 teachers and 720,000 students in grades four through eight, focusing on math and English language arts performance from 2007, 08 to 2014, 15. The data revealed that novice teachers saw a 4.7% increase in value-added—a measure of student learning gains, during their first year under the new system. Math teachers benefited the most, with a 6.5% jump, while English language arts teachers improved by 2.8%. These gains were separate from the usual performance growth new teachers experience early in their careers.
For tenured early-career teachers, those who only faced the evaluation changes without tenure stakes, the improvements were smaller but still significant. Their value-added rose by 2.4%, with math teachers gaining 3.6% and English teachers 1.3%. The difference suggests that future incentives, like tenure, amplify the impact of evaluations by raising the stakes for skill investment.
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When tenure evaluations began counting in year four, the study found only a modest 1.3% increase in teacher performance between years three and four. The estimate was imprecise, meaning the change could have been negligible. However, the largest gains occurred earlier, during years one through three, when teachers anticipated the future incentives but hadn’t yet faced the direct consequences of their scores.
Nearly two-thirds of novice teachers earned tenure after year five, and their scores in year six no longer counted for tenure. The conventional view of performance incentives would predict a decline in value-added after year 5 when tenure incentives end, but that didn’t happen. The data showed no drop in value-added could be rejected, indicating that teachers may have internalized the higher standards.
The persistence of higher value-added after tenure incentives ended suggests that the evaluation system itself, combined with the threat of losing tenure, encouraged teachers to develop stronger skills. Roughly one-third of teachers did not earn tenure by year five, but they continued working under probationary contracts and could eventually qualify by meeting the score requirements in two separate years.
