Education Week - January 24, 2018 - 18

RECRUIT

RETAIN

Are Teacher
Housing Perks
A Good Idea?
LIANA LOEWUS

t sounds like a common-sense recruitment strategy: Since teachers are thought to be underpaid,
help them out with housing.
A growing number of districts are using housing
incentives as a way to try to attract and retain K-12
educators-building teacher complexes with below-market rental rates, giving teachers living stipends, or offering
discounts on home rentals and purchases.
And yet it turns out there's little proof that offering
housing incentives actually makes for good K-12 policy.
Few researchers have looked at teacher-housing programs

Some question whether
providing housing for teachers
is sound public policy
closely, and advocates for those policies have tended to rely
on anecdotal evidence or tangential research about compensation to make their case.
"Unfortunately, there hasn't been any rigorous evaluation of housing incentives to determine if they are in fact
effective at recruiting and retaining teachers," said Anne
Podolsky, a researcher and policy analyst at the Learning
Policy Institute, a nonprofit education research organization.
Among the only national data points on how well such
subsidies work comes from a 2012-13 survey administered
by the U.S. Department of Education's research arm, and
it doesn't make a convincing argument for them. Nearly
55 percent of former teachers who said they would consider
returning to the classroom said housing incentives would be
"not at all important" in influencing that decision.
But the lore around the need for housing incentives prevails, with proponents saying teachers are happier and
communities are stronger when educators can afford to
live near where they work.
"We always have waiting lists for the housing complex.
We know it continues to be an asset," said Jennifer Dericco,
the public-information officer for California's Santa Clara
Unified school district, which has 70 below-market apart-

Education Week * January 24, 2018

ments that teachers can rent.
Housing is a form of compensation, some advocates
point out, which research has shown affects whether
teachers stay in the profession.
Even many teachers, though, say that districts should go
straight to increasing salaries.
"Ultimately, if teachers were paid adequately for the
value they give society, we wouldn't have to have programs
to subsidize their housing," said Michael Hickey, the president of United Teachers of Santa Clara.
An online survey of district recruiters administered by
Education Week's TopSchoolJobs website found that about
two-thirds of respondents had never received questions
or requests from job applicants about benefits related to
teacher housing. Just 10 percent said their district offered
any such benefits. (About 150 job recruiters answered the
November 2017 survey, which was not nationally representative.)

Districts Say Housing Works
Santa Clara was among the first districts to target teacher
housing as a way of curbing turnover. Located in the heart
of Silicon Valley, the school system began building its Casa
Del Maestro complex on district-owned land in 2002 to
help retain teachers in the increasingly expensive technology hub. The district sold nearly $7 million in bonds
to finance the effort, and those are being paid back with
the tenants' rent, which costs about $1,200 to $1,900 per
month. (Rent for a one-bedroom in the area generally runs
closer to $2,500.)
"Anecdotally, the feedback from staff is they really value
being able to live amongst peers in ... similar professions
and a similar mode of life," said Dericco. "They enjoy being
able to afford to live where their students and families do."
The district doesn't track data on the residents anymore
because it has no trouble filling housing spots. But officials
say early outcomes showed teachers living in the complex
had less attrition than other teachers in the district.
The Dare County school system in Nags Head, N.C., a
beach-resort community, built two affordable housing
complexes for teachers with 36 total units. The district
says the initiative, which began in 2009 and was financed
in part by interest-free loans from a local credit union, has
helped recruit teachers for high-needs subjects such as
foreign languages and special education.
"I can definitely tell you it is working. It's not just a recruitment tool; it's also a retention tool," said Elisabeth
Silverthorne, the executive director of the Dare Education
Foundation, a nonprofit that works with the school system
and administers the housing program.
The area has plenty of vacation homes but less yearround housing that's affordable. The two-bedroom apartments cost $750 a month (about 20 percent below market
rate), which enables teachers to live close by the schools
where they teach.
While many teacher-housing programs are focused
on making expensive areas affordable, a program in

Education Week - January 24, 2018

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