The relationship between teachers' characteristics and their pupils' achievement has been the subject of many studies. Most of this research focuses on the impact of teacher salaries, experience, and measures of teachers' pre-service training such as educational background. The effect of on-the-job or in-service training has received much less attention. In this paper, we estimate the effect of in-service teacher training on children's reading and mathematics achievement in Jerusalem elementary schools. The training was based on pedagogical methods developed in US schools. Our research uses a matched-comparison design which exploits the fact that only a few schools received extra funds for training. Differences-in-differences, regression, and nonparametric matching estimates are reported. The results suggest that the training received by teachers in the non-religious branch of the Jerusalem school system led to an improvement in their pupils' test scores. The estimates for religious schools are not clear cut, but this may be because the training program in religious schools started later and was implemented on a smaller scale. The estimates for non-religious schools suggest that, at least in this case, teacher training provided a less costly means of increasing test scores than reducing class size or adding school hours.
The education reform movement includes efforts to raise teacher quality through stricter certification and licensing provisions. Most US states now require public school teachers to pass a standardized test such as the National Teacher Examination. Although any barrier to entry is likely to raise wages in the affected occupation, the theoretical effects of such requirements on teacher quality are ambiguous. Teacher testing places a floor on whatever skills are measured by the required test, but testing is also costly for applicants. These costs shift teacher supply to the left and may be especially likely to deter high-quality applicants from teaching in the public schools. We use the Schools and Staffing Survey to estimate the effect of state teacher testing requirements on teacher wages and teacher quality as measured by educational background. The results suggest that state-mandated teacher testing increases teacher wages with no corresponding increase in quality.
This paper evaluates the impact of a performance-related pay scheme for teachers in England. Using teacher level data, matched with test scores and value-added, we test whether the introduction of a payment scheme based on pupil attainment increased teacher effort. Our evaluation design controls for pupil effects, school effects and teacher effects, and adopts a difference-in-difference methodology. We find that the scheme did improve test scores and value added, on average by about half a grade per pupil. We also find heterogeneity across subjects, with maths teachers showing no improvement.
Previous research on teacher merit pay has concluded that its failure is due to the complexity of teachers' jobs and the need for teamwork and cooperation in schools. This research re-opens the issue by comparing the use of merit pay in public and private schools. Merit pay is used in a large number of private schools. Awards are not trivial; nor is it the case that merit pay is awarded to nearly everyone. Reasons for the failure of merit pay are not inherent in teaching, but are due to specific circumstances in public education, notably the opposition of teacher unions.
Returns to seniority account for a substantial share of public K-12 expenditures. Over the first ten to 15 years of a career, public school teachers enjoy average wage growth at least equivalent to that of other white-collar workers. Explanations for this structure in terms of human capital or costly monitoring lack theoretical and empirical support. A steeper wage-tenure profile reduces turnover, but it is doubtful that the costs of turnover are high enough to make this an optimal use of school resources. We conclude that the structure of teacher pay in public education is more consistent with rent-seeking than efficient contracting.
This report focuses on three crucial questions about resources in California's K-12 schools: (i) How do resources—measured in terms of class size, curriculum, and teachers' education, credentials, and experience—vary among schools? (ii) Do schools serving relatively disadvantaged populations tend to receive fewer resources? (iii) Do existing inequalities in school resources contribute to unequal student outcomes? The findings of the study have a strong bearing on education issues in California, and the authors offer a number of policy recommendations.
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This paper explores a little-understood aspect of labor markets, their spatial geography. Using data from New York State, we find teacher labor markets to be geographically very small. Teachers express preferences to teach close to where they grew up and, controlling for proximity, they prefer areas with characteristics similar to their hometown. We discuss implications of these preferences for the successful recruitment of teachers, including the potential benefits of local recruiting and training. We also discuss implications for the modeling of teacher labor markets, including the possible biases that arise in estimates of compensating differentials when distance is omitted from the analyses. This study contributes to the literature on the geography of labor markets more generally by employing data on residential location during childhood instead of current residence, which may be endogenous to job choice.
This paper addresses a central difficulty in the estimation of causal relationships between teacher characteristics and student achievement: the tendency for highly qualified teachers to teach in schools serving more advantaged students, and the tendency for parents to seek out teachers with better credentials within schools. These two processes tend to bias estimates of teacher effects upward. Using administrative data on North Carolina public schools, we employ several strategies for eliminating this bias: controlling for a rich set of student covariates, using school fixed effects, and restricting the analysis to schools that appear to assign students randomly to classrooms. In all our analyses, we find significant returns to teacher experience and licensure test scores. We also find that these returns are greater for students from advantaged families, a pattern that may help explain why nonrandom matching that benefits the affluent is allowed to persist in equilibrium.
This paper focuses on one potentially important contributor to the achievement gap between black and white students, differences in their exposure to novice teachers. We present a model that explores the pressures that may lead school administrators to distribute novice teachers unequally across or within schools. Using a rich micro-level data set provided by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, we find that novice teachers are distributed among schools and among classrooms within schools in a way that disadvantages black students.
Administrative data from North Carolina are used to explore the extent to which that state's relatively sophisticated school-based accountability system has exacerbated the challenges that schools serving low-performing students face in retaining and attracting high-quality teachers. Most clear are the adverse effects on retention rates, and hence on teacher turnover, in such schools. Less clear is the extent to which that higher turnover has translated into a decline in the average qualifications of the teachers in the low-performing schools. Other states with more primitive accountability systems can expect even greater adverse effects on teacher turnover in low-performing schools.
This paper looks at data from all 50 states to examine relationships between teacher qualifications and student achievement. According to Darling-Hammond, "The findings of both the qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest that policy investments in the quality of teachers may be related to improvements in student performance. ... policies adopted by states regarding teacher education, licensing, hiring, and professional development may make an important difference in the qualifications and capacities that teachers bring to their work."
We review the evidence on the effects of teachers’ unions on public schools. Much of this evidence will be discomforting to critics of teachers’ unions; other evidence discomforting to teachers’ unions. In the end, though, we seek to identify concrete issues about the interaction of schools and teachers’ unions that may help focus efforts at improving schools. Next, we survey key trends in the “standards and accountability” movement, along with evidence on their effectiveness; review the evidence on “pay for performance” or “incentive pay” plans; evaluate the evidence on the relative effectiveness of public versus private- and charter-school alternatives, as well as voucher and plans designed to encourage alternatives; discuss the relationship between these issues and the recent federal education reform act; and consider the National Education Associations move toward a “New Unionism.” We conclude with a summary of key findings and a discussion of future directions for reform.
This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of individual merit pay systems for teachers on student achievement, and it presents new empirical results based on a system established within a collective bargaining environment. While many merit pay systems have been established in school districts across the U.S., very little empirical evidence concerning their influence on student achievement exists. A natural experiment arose in a county in which one high school piloted a merit pay system that rewarded student retention and student evaluations of teachers while another comparable high school maintained a traditional compensation system. A difference-in-differences analysis implies that this system had no effect on grade point averages, reduced the percentage of students who dropped out of courses, reduced average daily attendance, and increased the percentage of students who failed. The outcomes of this merit pay system illustrate the difficulty of instituting such a compensation system in schools. The goal of the system was to increase student retention. A student was considered to be retained in a class if the student was present during a randomly selected day of the last week of classes. The system "worked" by this measure because the school experienced a significant reduction in course noncompleters. However it is not clear that this measure was correlated with student achievement or even average attendance, and indeed, neither of these outcomes were improved.
A growing body of empirical evidence shows teacher quality to be the most important schooling factor predicting students' learning gains. Unfortunately, US public schools face difficulties attracting the best and brightest college graduates. Over the last several decades there has been a notable shift in the occupational choices of prospective teachers. The most academically proficient college graduates were, in the 1960s, as likely to enter teaching as any other occupation. Today, however, teachers are disproportionately drawn from the lower end of the academic proficiency distribution. We explore these trends and speculate on the reasons for them. In particular, we focus on the roles of compensation structures and changes in the labour market in explaining the occupational decisions made by existing college graduates and what these foreshadow for the teacher work-force in the future.
This paper utilizes institutional features to identify the supply of labour directed towards individual enterprises. The labour market for Norwegian teachers is characterized by a high degree of central regulations. In the empirical period, the only variation in the wage level was determined centrally, and together with information on whether there is excess demand, this identifies the elasticity of labour supply. Using a sample selection model with fixed school effects, the estimated supply elasticity faced by the individual schools is close to unity and seems to be robust with respect to the model specification.
Evidence on teacher behavior and the functioning of the teacher labor market is essential for the understanding of the performance of school systems. In this paper we utilize extremely rich data to study the teachers’ quit decision in Norway. We distinguish between decisions to move between public schools within school districts, to another school district in the same labor market region, across labor market regions, and whether to leave public schools. The results indicate that the quit propensity to three of the four destinations is negatively related to student performance. The result is qualitatively independent of whether student performance is measured by exam results or teacher graduation, and the effect on moves out of the school district is strongest for married teachers without school aged children working outside their birth region.
This paper studies teacher mobility using matched employee-employer panel data from Norwegian primary and lower secondary schools. The Norwegian institutional set-up with completely centralized wage setting for teachers is ideal to analyze the effect of non-pecuniary job attributes on quit decisions. We find that teachers tend to leave schools with high share of minority students and high share of students with special needs. In addition, the composition of teachers and the school size affect the propensity to quit. These results are robust across different econometric specifications and sub-samples.
Since the early 1980s, real teacher salaries in U.S. public schools have increased considerably faster than salaries of other Americans with similar levels of education and training. Providing an important impetus for this development were claims that increased salaries would allow the recruitment of betterqualified teachers. This analysis, which uses panel data on new teachers in 188 public school districts that changed their salaries between 1987–88 and 1993–94, investigates whether a school district can, by unilaterally increasing teacher salaries, improve the quality of the teachers it hires, as indicated by their having graduated from selective colleges and majored in the specific subject matter they teach. For nonunion school districts, the author finds a positive, statistically significant relationship between a given district’s teacher salaries and that district’s probability of hiring well-qualified teachers. Several tests indicate that this relationship is not found in unionized school districts.
This paper examines the impact of local tax limits on new teacher quality. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics we find that tax limits systematically reduce the average quality of education majors, as well as new public school teachers in states that have passed these limits. The average relative test scores of education majors in tax limit states declined by ten percent as compared to the relative test scores of education majors in states that did not pass limits. This relationship is strengthened if we control for school finance equalization reforms or examine tax limits passed in two different periods.
The question we address in this paper is which factors influence the quitting decision of public sector teachers in England and Wales, using a nationally representative panel data set over 1997-2003. We document the outcomes of former teachers, fit single and competingrisks duration models and examine the influence of relative pay on retention. Surprisingly, we find that teachers who move to outside employment earn 22% less pay, work longer hours, in largely nonprofessional occupations and mainly stay within the public sector. We estimate that a 10% increase in teachers’ relative pay would reduce annual quitting rates by less than 1%.
In this paper, we describe the results of the first large-scale study, based on a unique data set from North Carolina, assessing the relationship between the certification of teachers by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and elementary- level student achievement. Our findings indicate that NBPTS is successfully identifying the more effective teachers among applicants, and that NBPTS-certified teachers, prior to becoming certified, were more effective than their non-certified counterparts at increasing student achievement. The statistical significance and magnitude of the “NBPTS effect,” however, differs significantly by grade level and student type.
We empirically test how 12th-grade students of teachers with probationary certification, emergency certification, private school certification, or no certification in their subject area compare relative to students of teachers who have standard certification in their subject area. We also determine whether specific state-by-state differences in teacher licensure requirements systematically affect student achievement. In mathematics, we find teachers who have a standard certification have a statistically significant positive impact on student test scores relative to teachers who either hold private school certification or are not certified in their subject area. Contrary to conventional wisdom, mathematics and science students who have teachers with emergency credentials do no worse than students whose teachers have standard teaching credentials.
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