Stopping the Revolving Door: A Causal and Textual Analysis of Crowdfunding and Teacher Turnover

Problem definition: Though the effectiveness and efficiency of education systems depend in part on a committed teacher workforce, high rates of teacher leaving have plagued the U.S. public schools. There are many complex factors at play. A foundational one is that teachers are frustrated by the difficulty and expense of needing to procure many classroom supplies and materials on their own. This has recently become more prominent with the emergence of teacher crowdfunding platforms. With the understanding that securing resources through crowdfunding may be different and perhaps better than doing so offline, this paper investigates whether and how teacher crowdfunding affects teacher retention. Methodology/results: We integrate proprietary, identified teacher-level data from the largest teacher crowdfunding platform, DonorsChoose, with publicly available teacher workforce records from the state of Pennsylvania over a five-year period from 2013–2014 to 2018–2019 (n = 759,766). We create a set of instrumental variables to identify the effect of successful DonorsChoose resource requests (“projects”) on teacher retention and then integrate textual analyses of teacher-written project descriptions to understand which types of projects are more effective. We find that teachers funded on DonorsChoose are 1.6 percentage points less likely to leave their schools and 1.9 percentage points less likely to leave the teaching profession—a 14% and 41% reduction, respectively. The effect is larger for classroom environment (i.e., furniture) projects (4.2 and 2.8 percentage points) and for more unique projects (2.1 and 1.9 percentage points), suggesting that teachers are most impacted when they leverage the platform for resources particularly hard to get otherwise. It is not just that crowdfunding helps teachers get more or better resources; it helps teachers get resources more efficiently. Managerial implications: Improved U.S. educational supply operations are needed to remedy the persistent gap between what resources teachers want and what they have. While that gap persists, teacher crowdfunding platforms appear to be a critical tool to stem teacher turnover and attrition.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.0206.