In recent years many states have raised teacher salaries to attract more capable teachers. Since teacher labor markets are typically in a state of excess supply, success of such policies is contingent on containing perverse feedbacks which arise among exit decisions, vacancy rates, and the willingness of prospective teachers to invest in occupation-specific human capital. Using SAT scores as a measure of ability, we find that an across-the-board raise produces modest improvements in the work force at best. Indeed, under plausible parameter values, it is possible for mean ability to decline.
Despite a surplus of candidates for most teaching jobs, a strong academic record does little for an applicant's job prospects. This does not appear to result from lukewarm interest on the part of such applicants or choosiness about the positions they accept. Administrators' lack of interest in these candidates may reflect the weakness of competitive pressures in public education. Policies intended to improve teacher quality need to consider incentives on both the demand and supply sides of the market.
Private school salaries are substantially below those in public school systems. Nonetheless, private school heads are as satisfied as public school principals with the quality of their new teachers and substantially more satisfied with their experienced instructors. This difference remains after controlling for school and community characteristics and for the principal's tenure and educational priorities. In addition, appraisals of experienced and new teachers suggest that private schools are more successful in retaining the best of their new teachers and in developing the teaching skills of their faculties. Apparent reasons include greater flexibility in structuring pay, more supervision and mentoring of new teachers, and freedom to dismiss teachers for poor performance. These findings suggest that improvement in the quality of public school performance will require the use of accountability tools such as pay-for-performance and dismissal.
This paper investigates movements in teachers' relative wage, focusing particularly on the role of market forces within a highly 'administered' labor market. The study draws on time-series data, covering the period between 1949 and 1990, together with evidence from surveys of 1960, 1970, and 1980 graduate cohorts to estimate the impact of market conditions on relative wage adjustment and individual teacher remuneration. In each case, the level of excess demand is shown to exert a strongly significant influence, working in conjunction with other factors such as trade union strength, character of salary negotiation mechanism, and individual teacher attributes.
Conventional models predict that workers consider employment opportunities and monetary rewards expected over their lifetimes when making current period decisions such as whether to quit a job. This article tests the hypothesis that later career opportunities affect quit decisions by examining the relationship between teaching and school administration. Evidence on the extent to which administrative positions are available to teachers, and the salary premia associated with them, is presented. Discrete time logit-hazard models of teacher quits, estimated using data from New York State, provide some support for the hypothesis, though the magnitudes of the estimated effects are small.
A standard efficient-contracts model of employment determination in a unionized labor market is contrasted with a naive model of labor supply and demand that allows for the possibility of monopsony in the market for public school teachers. The standard model is consistent with the data and suggests that employment contracts are strongly efficient, but a more surprising results is that the simple supply/demand model is not rejected by the data either. Estimates of the latter suggest that the demand for teachers is inelastic and that the supply curve is slightly upward sloping, rather than perfectly elastic, at the union wage.
The problem of teacher supply in the United Kingdom has generated considerable concern recently. This paper studies a large cohort of graduates and their decision whether to become teachers or not. A full structure model of the individual's decision is estimated, which corrects for possible sample selection bias and models endogenously the role of relative earnings. The findings provide support for the estimation procedure used and attest to the importance of relative pay in the individual graduate's career decision.
This paper examines how U.K. graduate occupational choices have changed since 1970, with reference to the choice of becoming a teacher using two cohorts of data. Remuneration, morale, status, and image of the teaching profession have been altered dramatically. The sensitivity of the teacher choice to relative wage changes is examined and compared for men and women separately. The paper presents a counterfactual prediction of the decisions that each cohort would have made had they experienced the market conditions of the other and estimates a decomposition of the changes in the average probabilities due to remunerative and other factors.
In this paper, the authors analyze the decision by teachers to leave the profession. Their results affirm the importance of relative earnings in the tenure and turnover decisions of teachers. The econometric modeling approach used yields important insights into the appropriateness of adopting a flexible, semiparametric specification of the duration dependence structure and of the unobserved heterogeneity distribution in duration models.
In this paper, we analyze the decision by teachers to leave the profession in a dependent competing risks framework. The econometric model allows for a flexible, semiparametric specification of the duration-dependence structure and of the unobserved heterogeneity distribution in each exit-specific hazard function. Our results obtained for a large sample of UK teachers affirm the importance of teacher salaries and opportunity wages in the turnover decision of teachers and illustrate the insight gained from differentiating between multiple destinations or exit types.
This research examines the location choice of California private schools in 1978-1979. We make use of some of the recent developments in the analysis of count data. The results indicate that the character of the population and the public schools influence location decisions. Private schools with different religious affiliations respond differently to population characteristics, which we argue is evidence of differences in the objectives of these different types of private schools. Location decisions of all types of private schools depend most on characteristics of the community in which a school locates, with attributes of surrounding communities having small effects on the location decision.
This paper uses data from the High School and Beyond longitudinal study. We estimate the extent to which school characteristics and teacher characteristics influence the probability that public school students drop out of high school between their sophomore and senior years and, for those who do not drop out, whether these characteristics influence the extent to which students' scores on achievement tests increase during the 2-year period. The paper allows for the possibility that school and teacher characteristics are the result of both parent and teacher choices. It also statistically controls for the fact that "gain scores" are available only for students who did not drop out. School and teacher characteristics generally appear to influence gain scores more than they do drop-out probabilities. Students' gain scores are higher when teachers come from more selective institutions. The "selectivity" of a teacher's school may reflect intelligence or verbal ability, and analyses indicate that districts that pay higher salaries attract teachers from more selective institutions.
In this paper, the authors reanalyze data from the classic 1966 study "Equality of Educational Opportunity," or "Coleman Report." The paper addresses whether teacher characteristics, including verbal ability and race, influenced "synthetic gain scores" of students (mean test scores of upper grade students in a school minus mean test scores of lower grade students in a school), in the context of an econometric model that allows for the possibility that teacher characteristics in a school are endogenously determined. The authors find that verbal aptitude scores of teachers influenced synthetic gain scores for both black and white students. Verbal aptitude mattered as much for black teachers as it did for white teachers. Finally, holding teacher characteristics other than race constant, in some specifications black teachers were associated with higher gain scores for black high school students, but lower gain scores for white elementary and secondary students. Because these findings are for American schools in the mid-1960s, they do not directly apply to our contemporary experience. However, they do raise issues that should be addressed in discussions of hiring policies in American education.
This study uses a unique national longitudinal survey, the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), which permits researchers to match individual students and teachers, to analyze issues relating to how a teacher's race, gender, and ethnicity, per se, influence students from both the same and different race, gender, and ethnic groups. In contrast to much of the previous literature, we focus both on how teachers subjectively relate to and evaluate their students and on objectively how much their students learn. On balance, we find that teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity, per se, are much more likely to influence teachers' subjective evaluations of their students than they are to influence how much the students objectively learn. For example, while white female teachers do not appear to be associated with larger increases in test scores for white female students in mathematics and science than white male teachers 'produce', white female teachers do have higher subjective evaluations than their white male counterparts of their white female students. We relate our findings to the more general literature on gender, race, and ethnic bias in subjective performance evaluations in the world of work and trace their implications for educational and labor markets.
n.a.
To develop the understanding of public sector growth, this paper addresses the determinants of one important component of public spending, public education. Disaggregation of school expenditure allows for an analysis of how different decisions at the national and the local government level contribute to increased spending. A bargaining model between the central government and a teacher union is combined with a demand model of educational services at the local government level. Political characteristics are assumed to influence the central government bargaining strength over teacher wages and working hours. The model is implemented using a database for economic, political and school factors in Norway during 1880–1990. Political strength, measured as stable government and low party fragmentation of parliament, is shown to be important to hold down teacher employment. Socialist orientation of the government tends to drive up both teacher wages and employment. The inelastic response of local governments to centrally determined cost factors imply that they are not able to hold back spending growth following higher costs.
© 2004 European Expert Network on Economics of Education This e-mail address is protected against spambots. Please activate JavaScript in order to see them. | Home | Site Map | Contacts | Impressum | Printversion
