This article draws on recent insight regarding the distribution and mobility of highly effective teachers, student access to top-performing educators, and research on the effectiveness of strategic compensation reforms to argue that the single-salary pay schedule has resulted in disturbing inequities for students and inefficiencies in resource…

In 2015, a new performance-related pay scheme was introduced for schoolteachers in Italy as part of education accountability policies aimed at improving their performance. Beginning in that year, all Italian state school principals were offered the opportunity to distribute wage bonuses to deserving teachers. During the first year of…

Despite compelling evidence that master's degrees don't systematically make teachers more effective for their students, most US school districts provide a pay premium for them. They should stop, the sooner the better, and states should take the lead in pushing them to do so. Education dollars--whether COVID-19 relief funds or predictable annual…

Quality teachers are one of the most important factors in student achievement. Yet since the recession, the real value of teacher salaries (adjusted for inflation) has decreased in the majority of states. At the heart of the teacher salary issue are growing funding inequities among the states. Some states may need to invest more in education to…

California enacted the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) in 2013-14 in an effort to simplify school finance, revamp accountability, and increase funding for high-need students--those who are low income, English Learners, homeless, and/or foster youth. The LCFF represents an overhaul of the previous system of K-12 school finance that had been in…

The 2019 Local School Finance Study examines data from the 2016-17 school year. The purpose of this annual study is to isolate local spending from state and federal spending to examine the capacity and actual effort of counties to support public schools. The Local School Finance Study focuses not only on the amount that counties spend on schools,…

In 2013 California adopted a new watershed state finance policy, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) to drive more resources to students with higher needs, create more spending flexibility, and let districts decide how to spend substantial new dollars. Our analysis examines financial data from nearly all California school systems to clarify…

Of all the rules that the U.S. Department of Education will have to formulate for the Every Student Succeeds Act, the proposed regulations to monitor that states and districts spend comparable amounts for schools eligible and not eligible to use Title I funds are attracting the most attention. Currently, districts can show comparability based on…

Education policy in England has explicitly aimed to remodel state schools in the image of independent, private, schools. However, the body of research evidence on the operation of private schools is very small. Critics have frequently argued that, in contrast to state schools, private schools use resources efficiently because their autonomy gives…

This report provides a comparison of Austin Independent School District (AISD) teacher salaries and bilingual stipends to those in other Texas districts and analyzes the 2011-2012 school year bilingual stipend distribution within AISD.

While the United States was recovering from the recent economic stress caused by the Great Recession, individual state economies were improving at a slow pace. In 2012, state education budgets came to a crossroads, as most states had exhausted their allocations of federal stimulus dollars. Prior editions of this report noted how many states used…

California's school funding system has changed in several very significant ways since the original "District Dollars" report (Loeb, Grissom, and Strunk 2007), so the purpose of this report is to update that analysis and to track the evolution of district finances over the intervening 12 years, as well as to consider a few other issues…

As the state of Georgia considers revising its K-12 funding formula, Education Resource Strategies (ERS) recommends the state implement a weighted student-funding formula (WSF) system in order to create resource use flexibility for districts and to remove the marginal inequity found in its current funding system. Additionally, such a change would…

With the global expansion of higher education in the last two decades, the maintenance of academic quality to meet requirements for international competitiveness has become a critical issue for policymakers and universities. In addition, the neoliberal emphasis on the market has increased the competition for global university rankings, and this…

Students of color in low-income schools are 3 to 10 times more likely to have unqualified teachers than students in predominantly White schools. These disparities in teacher distribution matter greatly: Research consistently shows that teacher quality is one of the most important variables for student success and that teachers with stronger…