Recently public schools have increased teacher salaries in an apparent effort to recruit higher quality teachers. This paper finds a significant relationship between teacher salaries and quality (measured by undergraduate college selectivity and subject matter expertise) within local teacher labor markets.
This in-depth report, recently released by the Fordham foundation, focuses on issues of teacher quality and on school reforms, including alternative assessments. The report includes chapters by leading education researchers and state officials and argues against what the authors see as conventional wisdom regarding teacher preparation and school reform. One section of the report, for example, asserts that "math and science students whose teachers hold 'emergency' credentials do no worse on tests than students whose teachers are fully certified, all else being equal."
Rapidly growing costs of elementary and secondary education are studied in the context of the rising value of women's time. The dramatic increase in direct costs of education per student in the past three decades is empirically linked to increasing demand and utilization of teacher and staff inputs, attributable to growing market opportunities for women and changes in the structure of families. On the supply side, the 'flexibility option' that female teachers who take temporary leaves do not suffer subsequent wage loss upon reentry is shown to be an important attraction of the teaching profession to women.
In this paper, we use data drawn from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, which allows students to be linked to particular teachers and classes, to estimate the impact of observable and unobservable schooling characteristics on student outcomes. A variety of models show some schooling resources (in particular, teacher qualifications) to be significant in influencing tenth grade mathematics test scores. Unobservable school, teacher, and class characteristics are important in explaining student achievement but do not appear to be correlated with observable variables in our sample. Thus, our results suggest that the omission of unobservables does not cause biased estimates in standard educational production functions.
This paper shows that teachers work for less time in districts that spend more for central administration or for non-teachers involved in classroom instruction, that female teachers stay longer when local teacher salaries increase relative to salaries available in other local employment and that males stay longer when teachers are paid more across the state. The research is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the career histories of 9,756 Washington teachers. The empirical work uses a generalized variant of a transition probability model and conducts simulations to explore the influence of important policy variables.
This paper investigates how the fiscal environment and the budgetary process affect wage and employment determination in the local public sector. The structure of the local tax system is found to be influential with significantly higher wages occurring in cities with access to local sales and/or income taxes. State-imposed property tax limits are found to be associated with wages (but not overall payrolls per capita). The authors find evidence that skill enhancement may be an important policy tool. Local governments appear to successfully use it to mitigate the wage premia associated with strong state collective bargaining legislation. They also find that controlling for the human capital of teachers substantially reduces the well-known positive correlation between teacher wages and community income.
Decisions of college students determine who is prepared to teach. Analysis of a college cohort from the early 1980s indicates that graduates completing teacher training have roughly the same distribution of cognitive skills as all entrants into college. Yet, since college graduates are a select group, potential teachers fall low both in the overall graduate distribution and in the distribution by gender and race. Teacher training completion is significantly lowered by state requirements for courses and teacher tests, even though their effect on teacher performance is unclear. Surprisingly, participation in teacher training is not significantly affected by relative teacher earnings.
This paper considers how the structures of teacher salaries in public school districts have changed over the last quarter century and whether salary increases have been allocated so as to achieve the greatest gain in educational quality. Using New York state data for the 1970–1994 period, we find that even though some districts appear to behave in ways consistent with the often expressed goal of recruiting and retaining the most able college graduates, most districts do not. The vast majority of districts have inefficiently allocated a disproportionately large share of resources to veteran teachers for whom job tenure is only marginally affected. This finding has important implications for the policy debate regarding whether increased spending on education will, or could, improve educational performance as well as the design of alternative compensation schemes.
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Data drawn from the Longitudinal Survey of American Youth are the basis of this inquiry into the effects of mathematics and science subject matter preparation of secondary school teachers on pupil performance gains in these subjects. Results suggest that measures of how much a student's teacher knows about what he or she is teaching has a positive effect on pupils' learning gains. The evidence also suggests that the effects of subject matter preparation diminish with time and vary across types of students. Explicit attention is paid to policy implications for teacher education, recruitment, and retention.
This paper examines the effect of class load and other factors on teacher turnover. Unlike previous studies, class load characteristics--class size, number of classes taught, and percentage of class time spent in areas outside a teacher's certification area--are included along with salary, personal characteristics, and district characteristics in a discrete time hazard model to simulate the effects of changing classroom characteristics on high school teacher turnover. The results indicate that class load characteristics are important correlates of job turnover. Policy implications for school districts, given a growing school-age population, are discussed.
Using data from a national longitudinal survey, current duration analysis techniques are used to examine the first spell in teaching for a sample of certified elementary and secondary school teachers. A rich set of observable demographic and school characteristics is included in a proportional hazard model which also accomodates unobservable differences (heterogeneity) in both individuals and schools. The estimates of the model indicate that the length of a teacher's first spell in teaching is more responsive to wages than improved working conditions such as smaller student-teacher ratios. The paper also finds that marriage and fertility variables, which have not been included in previous models of teacher attrition, are important determinants of the length of time that a teacher remains in the field.
This paper utilizes recent simulation techniques in a two-stage estimation method which is applicable for a wide range of statistical models in the presence of missing data. The first stage of the method provides a way to estimate (and simulate from) the joint distribution of missing variables when the missing variables are continuous, binary, or ordered discrete. The second stage uses the first-stage estimates to ''integrate'' out the effects of the missing variables and obtain model estimates. The implementation of the method in this paper allows theoretically important, partially missing wage and school characteristic variables-which are not necessarily independently determined-to be included in a proportional hazard model of teacher attrition.
This study quantifies the relationships among the personal and professional attributes of elementary and secondary teachers, the financial, institutional, and demographic characteristics of school districts, and the retention behavior of teachers employed by these districts. A decision to continue teaching in the same district the following year is negatively related to property wealth and the percentage of Indians and Asians in the student population, is positively correlated to teaching experience, salary, an elementary teaching assignment, and district enrollment, and is a quadratic function of age and pupil-certificated staff ratios.
This paper shows that teachers ending their first employment spells are more likely to transfer to another teaching position when state teacher salaries are increased or when they are leaving districts with high central office spending. Teachers are also more likely to leave teaching when they end spells in districts with high spending for classified instructional staff. The research is based on a new longitudinal dataset providing information on the career histories of 9,756 Washington teachers. The empirical work uses a generalized variant of a transition probability model and conducts simulations to explore the influence of omportant policy variables.
Comparisons of public school teachers' salaries across states are frequently used by the media, teacher organizations, and others to judge how well the teachers in a particular state are paid. These comparisons and the rankings they engender typically do not control for economic factors which could cause salaries to vary across states. In this paper we examine to what degree variation in average teacher salaries is caused by differences across states in the cost of living, the personal characteristics of teachers, the characteristics of teachers' jobs, and the demand for education. We use our results to adjust the average salaries and we compute new state rankings based on these adjusted salaries. For some states the rank based on our adjusted salaries is significantly different from the rank based upon unadjusted salaries.
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