This examination of data from the 1987–88 Schools and Staffing Survey challenges the common supposition that most teachers oppose merit pay. The authors find that teachers in districts that use merit pay do not seem demoralized by the system or hostile toward it, and teachers of...

In recent years many states have raised teacher salaries to attract more capable teachers. Since teacher labor markets are typically in a state of excess supply, success of such policies is contingent on containing perverse feedbacks which arise among exit decisions, vacancy rates, and the...

Returns to seniority account for a substantial share of public K-12 expenditures. Over the first ten to 15 years of a career, public school teachers enjoy average wage growth at least equivalent to that of other white-collar workers. Explanations for this structure in terms of human capital or...

Conventional value-added assessment requires that achievement be reported on an interval scale. While many metrics do not have this property, application of item response theory (IRT) is said to produce interval scales. However, it is difficult to confirm that the requisite conditions are met....

Despite a surplus of candidates for most teaching jobs, a strong academic record does little for an applicant's job prospects. This does not appear to result from lukewarm interest on the part of such applicants or choosiness about the positions they accept. Administrators' lack of interest in...

The Project on Incentives in Teaching (POINT) was a three-year study testing the hypothesis that rewarding teachers for improved student scores on standardized tests would cause scores to rise. Results, as described in Springer et al. (2010b), did not confirm this hypothesis. In this article we...

This article presents findings from the first independent, third-party appraisal of the impact of the Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) on student test score gains in mathematics. TAP is a comprehensive school reform model designed to attract highly effective teachers, improve instructional...

Statistics on the relative pay of public school teachers are routinely cited by plaintiffs in school finance (“adequacy”) lawsuits. However, comparisons of pay and benefits for public school teachers to those of professional employees in other sectors are complicated by the fact that most...