The National Secretary for Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation in Ecuador (locally SENESCYT) started an ambitious grants program in 2011. The main objective of the program was to send Ecuadorian students to undertake postgraduate studies at universities overseas. This article evaluates the impact of this grant policy on the labor…

An increasing number of states and school districts across the country are tying teacher pay to student performance. A recent RAND Education study found that nationwide spending on teacher performance pay increased from $99 million in 2006 to $439 million in 2010. However, many states and school districts face significant hurdles when they attempt…

The author reports on an experimental study of performance-based teacher compensation conducted in the U.S. which shows that a nationally watched bonus-pay system had no overall impact on student achievement. Nearly 300 middle school mathematics teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, voluntarily took part in the Project on Incentives in Teaching, a…

Tying teachers' pay to their classroom performance should, says Victor Lavy, improve the current educational system both by clarifying teaching goals and by attracting and retaining the most productive teachers. But implementing pay for performance poses many practical challenges, because measuring individual teachers' performance is difficult.…

In the United States there is considerable focus on the need for continuous improvement in the quality of schools, including student achievement and teacher performance. Performance-based pay has been repeatedly suggested as a way to improve teaching in school systems. Therefore, a more thorough understanding of the differences in the perceptions…

The U.S. educational system invests heavily, in both time and money, in continuing education for teachers. In this article Heather Hill examines the effectiveness of two forms of teacher learning--graduate coursework and professional development. She focuses first on graduate education. Almost half of all teachers have a master's degree. Many…

Thinking and acting strategically about human capital development and management is the lifeblood of most high-performing businesses and organizations. Public education in this nation should be no different. Principals' and teachers' performance has more effect on student achievement than any other factor and their effectiveness in increasing…

Elementary- and secondary-school teachers in the United States traditionally have been compensated according to salary schedules based solely on experience and education. Concerned that this system makes it difficult to retain talented teachers and provides few incentives for them to work to raise student achievement while in the classroom, many…

How public school teachers are paid in the U.S. has been a controversial issue for many years. Critics of the traditional system, in which teachers are paid on the basis of years of experience and educational attainment, claim that it does not reward or promote good teaching as fairly as systems that tie pay to performance: having certain skills,…

In developed countries like the United States and Britain, the continuing challenge for educators is to sort through the choices of an all-you-can-eat school system and teach the basic skills. Despite so-called universal education, an alarming number of people still fail to reach even basic levels of literacy. The "literacy hour" was…

This policy brief provides the context and the research supporting the American Federation of Teacher's call for universal early childhood education. It focuses on the current challenges the nation faces in achieving such a program; and it includes the signs of progress, a description of what other industrialized countries are doing, the features…

The Minnesota Family Investment Program, the Canadian Self-Sufficiency Project, and Milwaukee's New Hope Project are three antipoverty programs that were undertaken in the 1990s to end dependency on welfare by "making work pay." The impacts of all three programs were reviewed and compared to those of the Seattle/Denver Income Maintenance…

A study analyzed past and present United States initiatives for promoting equal employment opportunity and wage equality for women. It was determined that, during the past 20 years, the United States Government has established the legal procedures to combat inequities in educational opportunities and employment-related practices. While these…

This book discusses the evolution of workfare policies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Chapter 1 defines the term "workfare" and examines the concepts of transnationalizing workfare and workfarist labor regulation. Chapter 2 establishes workfare's theoretical context and explores the relationship between welfare…