Efforts to attract and retain effective educators in high poverty public schools have had limited success. Dallas ISD addressed this challenge by using information produced by its evaluation and compensation reforms as the basis for effectiveness-adjusted payments that provided large compensating differentials to attract and retain effective…

A fundamental question for education policy is whether outcomes-based accountability including comprehensive educator evaluations and a closer relationship between effectiveness and compensation improves the quality of instruction and raises achievement. We use synthetic control methods to study the comprehensive teacher and principal evaluation…

This paper draws on the matched panel data of the UTD Texas School Project to investigate how shifts in salary schedules affect the composition of teachers within a district. When trying to estimate the true relationship between teacher quality and salaries, four methodological problems typically intervene: measuring teacher quality;…

Increases in expenditures per student by 3.5% per year from 1890-1990 resulted from falling student-staff ratios, increased teacher wages, and rising expenditures outside the classroom. Most of the expenditure growth in the 1980s came from sources other than special education spending. Teacher salaries, especially for females, failed to keep up…

Experienced teachers are, on average, more effective at raising student performance than those in their early years of teaching. This gives rise to the concern that too many teachers leave the profession after less than a full career and that too many leave troubled inner-city schools for suburban ones. Until now, the roots of these problems have…

Research reveals that teachers' working conditions are more likely to determine whether they stay at a school--or even in the profession--than are their salaries. Results suggest that policymakers ought to consider selective pay increases, preferably keyed to quality, for work in inner-city schools, together with efforts to improve the working…

Many school districts experience difficulties attracting and retaining teachers, and schools in urban areas serving economically disadvantaged and minority students appear particularly vulnerable to these problems. This paper investigates factors that affect the probabilities that teachers will switch schools or exit the public schools entirely.…