Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers in the profession is a matter of significant policy concern. Increasing teacher salaries and creating more attractive compensation packages are often proposed to achieve this goal. However, average real teacher salaries have remained stagnant over the past decade and have not fully recovered from the…

Charter schools see as many as one in four teachers leave annually, and recent evidence attributes much of this turnover to provisions affected by collective bargaining processes and state laws such as salary, benefits, job security, and working hours. There have been many recent efforts to improve teacher voice in charter schools (Kahlenberg…

In this article, we explain how overly prescriptive, rigid state statutory and regulatory policy frameworks regarding teacher evaluation, tenure and employment decisions outstrip the statistical reliability and validity of proposed measures of teaching effectiveness. We begin with a discussion of the emergence of highly prescriptive state…

The authors analyze the Arkansas teacher pension plan and empirically gauge the behavioral response to incentives embedded in that plan and to possible reforms. The pattern of pension wealth accrual creates sharp incentives to work until eligible for early or normal retirement, often in one's early fifties, and to separate shortly thereafter. We…

This report presents findings from the Pilot Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS), which collected data for school year 2005-2006. This pilot collection is a research and development effort to see if it is possible to collect and publish teacher-level data from the administrative records residing in state departments of education. Seven states…

The Common Core of Data (CCD) is an annual collection of public elementary and secondary education data administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and its collection agent, the U.S. Census Bureau. Data for CCD surveys are provided by state education agencies (SEAs). This report presents summary data from the Pilot Teacher…