This study explores ways in which salary can be structured to reduce leadership shortages by investigating how comparative wage dispersion and position alter the relationship of salary to principal turnover. Using a seventeen-year longitudinal dataset covering over sixteen thousand principals in Texas, discrete-time hazard models demonstrate that…

The quality of the early environment children experience influences their human capital development. We investigate retention and compensation in the Early Care and Education workforce by merging datasets from three different government agencies in Texas. We employ non-structural methods to compare turnover and pay in Early Care and Education with…

This study focuses on the increasing disparities in STEM education achievement and long-term wage earnings of under-represented minority groups. As part of national efforts to improve the diversity of the STEM workforce, this study uses longitudinal data from the University of Houston's Education Research Center (UH-ERC) to examine the effect of…

A postsecondary credential is associated with higher levels of earnings, not just in the short term, but over a lifetime. Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce found that college graduates earn more than one million dollars more in lifetime wages, compared to high school graduates. However, many factors influence…

The American workforce is currently experiencing an increased level of diversity in comparison to previous decades due to augmented representation of people of different races, socio-economic backgrounds and genders across sectors (Warner, 2014). However, there is one variable that has remained largely unchanged, the underrepresentation of African…

The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) has developed an extensive data system that captures the wages earned by graduates of public colleges and universities, by major. The board then makes those data available, providing a highly detailed look at the wages of completers at various points between 1 and 10 years after attaining a…

This study assesses the human capital development and wage performance of low-income students from geographically isolated and substandard housing settlements known as colonias. The research follows Texas high school students from the classroom to employment over a span of two decades and, specifically, tracks the three border regions where most…

In December 2012, the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation (TG) released a report outlining an unexpected set of conclusions. Citing data from the U.S. Department of Education's Baccalaureate and Beyond (B&B) study, the report found that, among students who earned bachelor's degrees during the 2007-2008 academic year (AY) and borrowed…

This study examined three years of data obtained from the Academic Excellence Indicator System of the State of Texas regarding teacher turnover rate and teacher salary. Across all public school districts, teacher salary was consistently negatively related to teacher turnover; that is, where salary was lower, turnover rate was higher When data were…

The University of Houston-Victoria's (UHV) approach to addressing salary equity, which has been successfully implemented for a decade, employs a methodology that derives salary targets by field, rank, and seniority from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) national salary survey. Based primarily on a…

Merit pay programs for educators--sometimes referred to a "pay for performance"--attempt to tie a teacher's compensation to his/her performance in the classroom. While the idea of merit pay for classroom teachers has been around for several decades, only now is it starting to be implemented in a growing number of districts around the…

Teacher compensation reforms have been on the rise in recent years, yet research has yet to fully demonstrate how teachers interpret these policies and how they may influence their instructional practices and professional decisions. This qualitative study of a performance pay program in an urban district in Texas drew on cognitive approaches to…

District Awards for Teacher Excellence (D.A.T.E.) is a state-funded program in Texas that provides grants to districts for the implementation of locally-designed performance pay plans. All districts in the state are eligible to receive grants, but participation is voluntary. As D.A.T.E. continues in its second year of operation with approximately…

The decision to leave a successful career and great earning potential to start over as a novice with new surroundings and expectations is not made without consideration of a wide array of variables. Making the transition to higher education was not an easy one and the transition itself has presented various other challenges and joys that I have…

A recent report published by the National Center on Performance Incentives (NCPI) presents findings from the second-year of a multi-year evaluation of the Texas Educator Excellence Grant (TEEG) program, a statewide educator incentive program that operated in Texas. As part of this larger study, evaluators examined how participation in the TEEG…