A recent survey of 41 different state boards of education revealed that officials from 28 states indicate that they are experiencing teacher shortages. The shortages in some states are significant. While the teacher shortage in many states is tied to different factors, one frequently cited reason for leaving the teaching profession is low pay.…

This paper discusses the theoretical background of the pay-for-performance incentive as well as its implication for administrators in higher education institutions. Using pay data of a large state university system in the U.S., the paper finds that presidents in public research universities receive significantly higher pay than their counterparts…

On February 24, 2017, all of the authors of the state-of-the-state manuscripts published in the "Journal of Education Finance" met in Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in a roundtable discussion focused on recent legislative actions in 38 states. A majority of those papers were revised to reflect a final report on legislative actions…

Ever wonder why union members' salary and benefits, workload agreements, and other aspects of their collective bargaining agreements, or "contracts," often remain unchanged and enforced during the all-too-common periods when public employees labor without a contract? In New York, the answer boils down to an understanding of the Public…

There is ample opportunity for state boards to improve outcomes for children by strengthening the early care and education workforce and thereby improving the quality of early care and education. Ensuring that ECE professionals have the knowledge, supports, and resources they need to support children's learning is one avenue to improving the…

We use data from 2015-2016 to document faculty representation and wage gaps by race-ethnicity and gender in six fields at selective public universities. Consistent with widely available information, Black, Hispanic, and female professors are underrepresented and White and Asian professors are overrepresented in our data. Disadvantaged minority and…

This article identifies a set of location incentives created by New York's charter school financing and accountability provisions. We then use regression models to examine the location of charter schools across and within districts. We find that charter schools (1) are significantly more likely to locate in districts with high operating expenses…

Teach For America (TFA) began in 1990 as an organization purportedly interested in working towards ameliorating a national teacher shortage by sending its corps members into urban and rural schools. In the decades that followed, especially during and immediately following a nationwide onslaught of teacher layoffs instigated by the 2008 Great…

Two competing pressures--downsized budgets and rising policy interest--have left the future of performance-based teacher compensation uncertain. A dicey fiscal climate and research that has shown limited impact have led some states and districts to scale back, abandon, or change their fledgling merit-pay programs, causing observers to wonder what…

Despite three decades of scholarship on economic restructuring in the United States, employers' violations of minimum wage, overtime and other workplace laws remain understudied. This article begins to fill the gap by presenting evidence from a large-scale, original worker survey that draws on recent advances in sampling methodology to reach…

The inequitable distribution of well-qualified teachers to students in the United States is a longstanding issue. Despite federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind Act and the use of a range of incentives to attract teachers to high-need schools, the problem remains acute in many states. This study examines how and why teacher quality is…

Expanding accountability systems that impose policies across all schools have amplified assertions that rural teacher labor markets differ from non-rural labor markets in meaningful ways that complicate rural schools' efforts to comply with the policy directives. The analysis presented here examines this claim by exploring teacher labor market…

Performance-based compensation systems have been under discussion for years and are now a required component of any state plan for Race to the Top funds. This article describes a system of performance-based compensation that has been in place at a K-12 school for the past four years. The system was developed by a team of teachers, union members,…

This article examines three interlinked problems facing public schools today: how to recruit, retain, and pay our teachers. The article begins with an overview of the current situation in the United States, paying particular attention to schools in areas where minorities are the majority. It goes on to examine some of the causes of teacher…

It's getting to be that one needs a scorecard to identify district administrators by their titles. To keep up with changing needs, many districts are creating new management positions or adding new responsibilities to old ones and then coming up with titles that sometimes only hint at what they are about. In addition to 2008-2009 salary survey…