High Performing Teachers to Low Performing Schools

A few years ago, a local district began an initiative to bring their district's "best" teachers to some of its more challenging schools.  While the idea was met with praise and criticism alike, it was actually not a new idea.  I was a teacher in a local district 15 years ago when my school was considered a high priority school and that we would receive yearly stipends if we stayed and worked in the school. The retention of teachers in these schools was the ultimate goal, and overtime the stipend would increase.  Well, guess what?  It didn't change student achievement outcomes.
Currently, my district offers a bonus to teachers working in schools that have been identified as turnaround schools. The adjacent districts in the metro area also offer monetary incentives to teachers who are willing to work in schools that are struggling.  Sounds like a great idea, right?  The problem is that there has been no evidence that this approach to strengthening under performing schools actually works.
First, teachers aren't that willing to take their talents to those areas.  I thought of working with "those students" just isn't appealing for a number of reasons.  There's the abject poverty from which most of these students arrive to school.  Poverty in of itself can impact students emotionally and academically and make "reaching" them all the more difficult.  As with any society on the face of the globe, current and past, the further a socio-economic group is away from the norm, the more there will be differences in the dialect and nuances of the language accepted in school. This is a barrier just as formidable as students who do not speak English at all. Why we continue to tip toe around this point is beyond me, but a point nonetheless. Finally, and probably more controversially, are teachers in other areas really that much more effective than those who are already at the school that needs the support?  If student achievement is the only measure of "more effective" then the answer is a quick yes.  But those who truly understand effective instruction may not be so quick to agree.  Even student growth percentiles may not be the best measure of teacher effectiveness, given that students are more likely to come with an eagerness to learn new information in areas that are more "successful".  let me be careful here as I do not mean to imply that students in more challenging areas do not come with the same level of eagerness, but that when students want to learn in a more desirable situation, they usually do.