Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state's public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all.…

Background: Teachers are an important resource for implementing education interventions and appropriately valuing their time is essential to developing a valid estimate of an intervention's cost. Economic evaluation standards call for valuing teacher time using a market price equal to their compensation, inclusive of their wages and benefits…

In light of growing difficulties for schools to attract teachers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and the continued discussions surrounding the unionization of education, this paper examines the effect of collective bargaining (CB) laws on the salary of teachers with a STEM degree. To isolate the effect of…

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…

Tom Wilson, the chair of the executive committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published an op-ed titled "Save Capitalism by Paying People More." Wilson acknowledges in blunt terms that ordinary working Americans are not flourishing economically. This year's annual "The State of Working Pennsylvania" documents the accuracy of…

Public teacher compensation is largely determined by fixed salary schedules that were designed to avoid payment inequalities based on demographic characteristics. Yet, recent research shows female teachers earn less than their male peers after controlling for experience, education, and school characteristics. Building on this literature, this…

This fact sheet shares 2023 survey and focus group findings from early educators eligible for from the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund in the District of Columbia. Findings describe the perceived of the payments on the child care field. Early educators share that the Pay Equity Fund helps advance fair pay that reflects their credentials…

This study explores ways in which salary can be structured to reduce leadership shortages by investigating how comparative wage dispersion and position alter the relationship of salary to principal turnover. Using a seventeen-year longitudinal dataset covering over sixteen thousand principals in Texas, discrete-time hazard models demonstrate that…

The quality of the early environment children experience influences their human capital development. We investigate retention and compensation in the Early Care and Education workforce by merging datasets from three different government agencies in Texas. We employ non-structural methods to compare turnover and pay in Early Care and Education with…

In 2021, the DC Council established the Early Childhood Educator Pay Equity Fund ("Pay Equity Fund") to improve compensation for early educators in licensed child development centers and homes. The fund leverages a tax on individuals earning more than $250,000 a year to sustainably fund supplemental payments to early educators in efforts…

This paper explores the movement of the New York City Interborough Association of Women Teachers (IAWT) for "equal pay for equal work" in teaching salaries, which it won in 1911. The IAWT's success sheds light on the possibilities and limits of women teachers advocating for change within a feminized profession. Leading the movement were…

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…

Offering competitive teacher compensation is an important part of the solution to recruit and retain a strong and diverse teacher workforce. The maps and associated tables that follow show three teacher wage indicators for the nation and each state: (1) average annual starting salary for public school teachers; (2) average annual starting salary…

We study the equity-efficiency implication of giving school districts control over teacher pay using an equilibrium model of the market for public-school teachers. Teachers differ in their comparative advantages in teaching low- or high-achieving students. School districts, which serve different student bodies, use both wage and hiring strategies…

Attracting and retaining high-quality teachers in the profession is a matter of significant policy concern. Increasing teacher salaries and creating more attractive compensation packages are often proposed to achieve this goal. However, average real teacher salaries have remained stagnant over the past decade and have not fully recovered from the…