Low and stagnant teacher pay has been a perennial issue in the United States public school system since the early decades of the nineteenth century. Women teachers, then as now, confronted the issue head-on by organizing together. For example, women primary school teachers in Boston, Massachusetts successfully petitioned for more pay in 1835, but…

In 2018, a wave of educator strikes called Red for Ed swept through several states. Educators in Arizona won additional funding from the state legislature, supposedly for teacher salaries, which school boards could spend as they chose. This article quantitatively examines the participation and results of the 2018 Arizona educator strike, using…

The Biden administration is pursuing two higher education policies through a series of rulemaking processes that aim to make higher education more affordable and less risky for students. One policy focuses on the system's back end by helping students repay their loans, and the other focuses on the front end by cutting off access to federal aid for…

An all too common complaint in the early childhood field is that low salaries for preschool teachers and lack of pay parity with K-12 teachers in the public schools creates serious problems. These include low morale and difficulty recruiting and retaining strong preschool teachers. State policies can contribute to or resolve these problems in…

Data showing what students earn after attending higher education institutions have become increasingly available, bolstering calls from policymakers and advocates that government financial aid programs should be tied to those outcomes. Often overlooked, however, is that these data and policies usually reflect the earnings of only students who…

One of the goals of pre-K programs funded by states is to support the learning and development of young children. Research finds that only high-quality programs can achieve positive, long-term outcomes in areas such as student achievement, educational attainment, personal and social behavior (e.g., reductions in crime), and adult health and…

The teacher shortage is a critical issue in many rural areas around the world. This paper presents the findings of two studies that investigated the impact of financial incentives on teacher attraction and retention in rural schools in Western China. Using the theory of compensating wage differentials and a mixed-method approach, we found that…

This article is a part of an on going ethnography project that run over six years in an Upper Secondary School in the south of Sweden. In this particular article we shed light over the implementation, enactment and reactions from the staff of one of the latest of a series of reforms that has been launched into the Swedish educational system: The…

Little empirical literature assessing the impact of Erasmus study program on graduate career prospects exists. All too often, the empirical evidence available is either bias or indirect. Furthermore, the existing differences among study mobility participants and non-participant peers in terms of ability, socioeconomic background or field of study…

This brief contains findings from a recent study exploring direct support professionals (DSPs) providing support to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges of finding and keeping quality DSPs in a field that has experienced high turnover for decades. This problem is exacerbated…

To date, 29 public pre-K programs in 23 states and one U.S. territory have established salary or compensation parity policies to address low and disparate levels of workforce compensation in the early care and education (ECE) field (Friedman-Krauss & Kasmin, 2018). These policies aim to raise the pay or compensation of ECE teachers to the…

This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the college degree completion, graduate degree completion,…

This paper estimates private and social returns to investment in education in Azerbaijan, using the 2015 Azerbaijan Monitoring Survey for Social Welfare. The private rate of return to education is 6 percent; this is the first estimate of returns to schooling in Azerbaijan since 1995. The returns to schooling are 6 percent for men and 8 percent for…

This paper examines three interrelated factors outside of formal provision of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) in sub-Saharan Africa that have undermined TVET systems. The first is the process, pace, and levels of industrialisation, which has had a direct effect on TVET provision: low numbers of well-paying jobs requiring…

Prior research substantially overstates the cost of retention under test-based promotion policies to both taxpayers and students who delay labor market entry because it omits two important factors. First, there is a delay between the intervention and the taxpayer's expenditure. Second, on average, the treatment leads to less than a full year of…