Although the shortage of qualified STEM and Special Education teachers is well documented and often discussed, there has been little improvement in increasing the number of teachers in these subject areas. This policy brief reports on the front-end of the teacher pipeline and shows that in Washington State, like across the country, there has been…

Some scholars and policymakers who are concerned about the inequitable distribution of quality teachers suggest offering financial incentives for working in hard-to-staff schools. Previous studies have estimated compensating differentials using hedonic modeling, an approach potentially undermined by district-wide salary schedules and the lack of…

Education research convincingly shows that teacher quality is the most important "schooling" factor influencing student achievement. A very good teacher as opposed to a very bad one can make as much as a "full year's" difference in learning growth for students. Indeed, the effect of increases in teacher quality swamps the impact of any other…

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, even though these proxies correlate only weakly with student performance. This paper examines the attrition and mobility of early-career teachers of varying quality using value-added measures of teacher…

This paper explores the politics of various types of teacher compensation reforms, with a particular focus on pay for performance. It examines the political positions taken by the nations two teachers' unions, the extent to which these reflect the preferences of teachers, and how both influence the decisions by localities to implement reforms. New…

Most studies that have fueled alarm over the attrition and mobility rates of high-quality teachers have relied on proxy indicators of teacher quality, which recent research finds to be only weakly correlated with value-added measures of teachers' performance. We examine attrition and mobility of teachers using teacher value-added measures for…