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Journal Issue: Excellence in the Classroom Volume 17 Number 1 Spring 2007

Pay, Working Conditions, and Teacher Quality
Authors: Eric A. Hanushek Steven G. Rivkin

Endnotes

  1. The description of working conditions follows closely the work of Susanna Loeb and Linda Darling- Hammond, “How Teaching Conditions Predict Teacher Turnover in California Schools,” Peabody Journal of Education 80, no. 3 (2005): 44–70.
  2. Note that salaries for teachers include all earnings, regardless of source. Thus, any summer or school year earnings outside of teaching are included. No adjustments are made, however, for any differences in the length of the school day or in number of days worked during the year. Nor is any calculation of employerpaid fringe benefits made. A clear discussion of the importance of each of these, along with interpretation of the overall salary differences, can be found in Michael Podgursky, “Fringe Benefits,” Education Next 3, no. 3 (2003). For the time-series comparisons, these omitted elements of compensation are most relevant if there have been relative changes in their importance between teachers and nonteachers over time. We currently have few data on any such changes.
  3. Fredrick Flyer and Sherwin Rosen, “The New Economics of Teachers and Education,” Journal of Labor Economics 15, no. 1, pt. 2 (1997), describe a more formal model of changing female opportunities and their impact on the teaching profession. Darius Lakdawalla, “The Economics of Teacher Quality,” Journal of Law and Economics 94, no. 1 (2006): 285–329, and Darius Lakdawalla, “Quantity over Quality,” Education Next 2, no. 3 (2002), extend this to concentrate on the role of productivity changes in competing industries.
  4. Marigee P. Bacolod, “Do Alternative Opportunities Matter? The Role of Female Labor Markets in the Decline of Teacher Quality” (University of California, Irvine, Department of Economics, 2005).
  5. National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, 2001 (U.S. Department of Education, 2002).
  6. Todd R. Stinebrickner, “An Analysis of Occupational Change and Departure from the Labor Force,” Journal of Human Resources 37, no. 1 (2002), provides comparisons across occupations and finds that teacher job and occupational changes are below those elsewhere in the economy, but that teachers are much more likely to exit entirely from the labor force.
  7. Because women teachers are more likely to be married or have children than men of the same age, the smaller gains of women may reflect the fact that more transitions are precipitated by family considerations. However, we have no explicit information on reason for moving or family status. In our analysis we also provide “adjusted” salary measures that allow for features of the schools.
  8. We present the analysis in terms of teacher experience, but tenure within the district may also have separate implications for salary and other factors that affect satisfaction and mobility.
  9. Eric A. Hanushek, John F. Kain, and Steven G. Rivkin, “Why Public Schools Lose Teachers,” Journal of Human Resources 39, no. 2 (2004).
  10. Don Boyd and others, “The Draw of Home: How Teachers’ Preferences for Proximity Disadvantage Urban Schools,” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 24, no. 1 (2005).
  11. Podgursky, “Fringe Benefits” (see note 2).
  12. Loeb and Darling-Hammond, “How Teaching Conditions Predict Teacher Turnover in California Schools” (see note 1).
  13. See the review and evidence in Richard M. Ingersoll, “Teacher Turnover and Teacher Shortages: An Organizational Analysis,” American Educational Research Journal 38, no.3 (2001): 499–534.
  14. See, for example, Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd, and Jacob L. Vigdor, “Who Teaches Whom? Race and the Distribution of Novice Teachers,” Economics of Education Review 24, no. 4 (2005): 377–92.
  15. The central compensation component of most teacher contracts is a matrix that indicates the salary for a teacher based on years of experience and amount of education. This salary schedule seldom varies by other, apparently natural, factors such as field of teaching or demonstrated results in the classroom.
  16. See Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky, “Returns to Seniority among Public School Teachers,” Journal of Human Resources 37, no. 4 (2002): 892–912. They provide comparisons showing that teacher wage growth, at least over the first fifteen years of a career, is comparable to that in other white collar professions. Podgursky, “Fringe Benefits” (see note 2), does provide evidence that salaries in private schools tend to rise faster earlier in the career than do those in public schools.
  17. James S. Coleman and others, Equality of Educational Opportunity (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966).
  18. The various criticisms of the Coleman Report centered largely on the statistical methodology and the biases introduced by the analytical approach. They did not, however, provide an alternative view of what factors were important in determining student achievement. See, for example, Samuel Bowles and Henry M. Levin, “The Determinants of Scholastic Achievement—An Appraisal of Some Recent Evidence,” Journal of Human Resources 3, no. 1 (1968); Glen G. Cain and Harold W. Watts, “Problems in Making Policy Inferences from the Coleman Report,” American Sociological Review 35, no. 2 (1970); and Eric A. Hanushek and John F. Kain, “On the Value of ‘Equality of Educational Opportunity’ as a Guide to Public Policy,” in On Equality of Educational Opportunity, edited by Frederick Mosteller and Daniel P. Moynihan (New York: Random House, 1972).
  19. Summaries of research related to teacher education and to other measures of teacher characteristics can be found in Eric A. Hanushek, “The Failure of Input-Based Schooling Policies,” Economic Journal 113, no. 485 (2003); and Eric A. Hanushek and Steven G. Rivkin, “How to Improve the Supply of High Quality Teachers,” Brookings Papers on Education Policy 2004.
  20. The impact of teacher experience on teacher mobility and school choices was first noted by David Greenberg and John McCall, “Teacher Mobility and Allocation,” Journal of Human Resources 9, no. 4 (1974); and Richard J. Murnane, “Teacher Mobility Revisited,” Journal of Human Resources 16, no. 1 (1981).
  21. See Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin, “Why Public Schools Lose Teachers” (see note 9).
  22. The source of this experience effect is important to understand. The simplest explanation is that the teacher learns classroom management, solidifies subject matter knowledge, and develops pedagogical skills during the first year or two on the job. Another interpretation of teacher experience is that it is not really that teaching skills improve over time but that teacher experience merely indicates something about those who elect to stay in teaching. Direct investigation of this question finds that both learning and selection are relevant, though in the first two years, the dominant effect is learning to teach better. Two early investigations of experience effects and their interpretation are Richard J. Murnane and Barbara Phillips, “What Do Effective Teachers of Inner-City Children Have in Common?” Social Science Research 10, no. 1 (1981); and Richard J. Murnane and Barbara R. Phillips, “Learning by Doing, Vintage, and Selection: Three Pieces of the Puzzle Relating Teaching Experience and Teaching Performance,” Economics of Education Review 1, no. 4 (1981). More recent analyses finding that any experience effects are concentrated in the early years include Jonah E. Rockoff, “The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement: Evidence from Panel Data,” American Economic Review 94, no. 2 (2004); Steven G. Rivkin, Eric A. Hanushek, and John F. Kain, “Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement,” Econometrica 73, no. 2 (2005); Eric A. Hanushek and others, “The Market for Teacher Quality,” Working Paper 11154 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005); Don Boyd and others, “How Changes in Entry Requirements Alter the Teacher Workforce and Affect Student Achievement,” Working Paper 11844 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2005); and Thomas J. Kane, Jonah E. Rockoff, and Douglas O. Staiger, “What Does Certification Tell Us about Teacher Effectiveness? Evidence from New York City” Working Paper 12155 (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2006).
  23. Susanna Loeb and Marianne E. Page, “Examining the Link between Teacher Wages and Student Outcomes: The Importance of Alternative Labor Market Opportunities and Non-Pecuniary Variation,” Review of Economics and Statistics 82, no.3 (2000): 393–408.
  24. One justification for reducing class size even if class size has no direct impact on teachers is that teachers like smaller classes and therefore would have to be paid less to work with them, thus offsetting the costs of class size reduction. But little evidence supports this hypothesis; see Eric A. Hanushek and Javier A. Luque, “Smaller Classes, Lower Salaries? The Effects of Class Size on Teacher Labor Markets,” in Using What We Know: A Review of the Research on Implementing Class-Size Reduction Initiatives for State and Local Policymakers, edited by Sabrina W. M. Laine and James G. Ward (Oak Brook, Ill.: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, 2000), pp. 35–51.
  25. Loeb and Page, “Examining the Link” (see note 23).
  26. Hanushek and others, “The Market for Teacher Quality” (see note 22). A growing number of researchers have investigated whether some teachers tend to get larger achievement gains than others. These analyses invariably show very large differences in the achievement associated with individual teachers. The historical development of this body of work can be traced from Eric A. Hanushek, “Teacher Characteristics and Gains in Student Achievement: Estimation Using Micro Data,” American Economic Review 60, no. 2 (1971); Eric A. Hanushek, “The Trade-Off between Child Quantity and Quality,” Journal of Political Economy 100, no. 1 (1992); Richard J. Murnane, Impact of School Resources on the Learning of Inner City Children (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1975), David J. Armor and others, Analysis of the School Preferred Reading Program in Selected Los Angeles Minority Schools (Santa Monica, Calif.: Rand Corp., 1976); and Murnane and Phillips, “What Do Effective Teachers of Inner-City Children Have in Common?” (see note 22); through Daniel Aaronson, Lisa Barrow, and William Sander, “Teachers and Student Achievement in the Chicago Public High Schools” (Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 2003); Rockoff, “The Impact of Individual Teachers on Student Achievement” (see note 22); and Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain, “Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement” (see note 22).
  27. An early statement of this is found in Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21st Century (New York, 1986). This proposal became the foundation of the pay and contract changes of the “Rochester plan,” whose unfortunate demise was chronicled in Ray Marshall and Marc Tucker, Thinking for a Living: Education and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
  28. See Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky, Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality (Kalamazoo, Mich.: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1997), on this point.
  29. Richard J. Murnane and others, Who Will Teach? Policies That Matter (Harvard University Press, 1991); Peter J. Dolton and Wilbert van der Klaauw, “Leaving Teaching in the U.K.: A Duration Analysis,” Economic Journal 105 (1995); Peter J. Dolton and Wilbert van der Klaauw, “The Turnover of Teachers: A Competing Risks Explanation,” Review of Economics and Statistics 81, no. 3 (1999).
  30. Dale Ballou, “Do Public Schools Hire the Best Applicants?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 111, no. 1 (1996); Ballou and Podgursky, Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality (see note 28); Hanushek and others, “The Market for Teacher Quality” (see note 22).
  31. See Armor and others, Analysis of the School Preferred Reading Program (see note 26), and Murnane, Impact of School Resources on the Learning of Inner City Children (see note 22), who identify total teacher effects as discussed above and relate them to principals’ evaluations. A recent analysis goes further, to survey teachers on their evaluations; Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren, “Principals as Agents: Subjective Performance Measurement in Education,” mimeo (John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2005); Brian A. Jacob and Lars Lefgren, “When Principals Rate Teachers,” Education Next 6, no. 2 (2006).
  32. Note that the issues of hiring and retaining district administrators are very similar to those for teachers. While less studied, there is little evidence that current requirements for certification are closely related to the effectiveness of administrators. One relevant study is Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Randy A. Ehrenberg, and Richard P. Chaykowski, “Are School Superintendents Rewarded for ‘Performance’?” in Microlevel School Finance: Issues and Implications for Policy, edited by David H. Monk and Julie Underwood (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger, 1988). A recent policy statement, Broad Foundation and Thomas B. Fordham Institute, “Better Leaders for America’s Schools: A Manifesto” (Washington, 2003), also makes policy recommendations on administrators that parallel the thoughts about teachers presented here. Such proposals are also similar to those developed in more detail in Marci Kanstoroom and Chester E. Finn Jr., eds., Better Teachers, Better Schools (Washington: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, 1999). In addition, they encapsulate the current experiments being fostered in the Teacher Advanced Program; see Lowell Milken, “Growth of the Teacher Advancement Program: Teaching as the Opportunity 2002” (Santa Monica, Calif.: Milken Family Foundation, 2002).
  33. See the article by Victor Lavy in this volume. See also David K. Cohen and Richard J. Murnane, “Merit Pay and the Evaluation Problem: Understanding Why Most Merit Pay Plans Fail and a Few Survive,” Harvard Educational Review 56, no. 1 (1986).
  34. For consideration of the available evidence on teacher merit pay, see Elizabeth Lueder Karnes and Donald D. Black, Teacher Evaluation and Merit Pay: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Cohen and Murnane, “Merit Pay and the Evaluation Problem” (see note 33); David K. Cohen and Richard J. Murnane, “The Merits of Merit Pay,” Public Interest 80 (1985); Ballou and Podgursky, Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality (see note 28); Dale Ballou and Michael Podgursky, “Teachers’ Attitudes toward Merit Pay: Examining Conventional Wisdom,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 47, no. 1 (1993); Elchanan Cohn, “Methods of Teacher Remuneration: Merit Pay and Career Ladders,” in Assessing Educational Practices: The Contribution of Economics, edited by William E. Becker and William J. Baumol (MIT Press, 1996); and James A. Brickley and Jerold L. Zimmerman, “Changing Incentives in a Multitask Environment: Evidence from a Top-Tier Business School,” Journal of Corporate Finance 7 (2001).
  35. If the teacher movements do not reflect a correlation with working conditions, the observed movements would suggest that racial preferences per se have a big influence on teachers. The policy implications of such a perspective would obviously be much more complicated.