School finance reform in Michigan involved centralization (at the state level) of spending decisions about schools, a large tax shift (mostly from property to sales), and a small tax cut. The changes came about after two decades of failed attempts to reduce property taxes in the state, and were the immediate result of an unlikely piece of legislation that abolished all funding for public schools. Unlike most centralized systems, foundation grants in Michigan differ by district. Distributionally, the reforms favor residents of small, rural districts (whose spending was increased sharply). Residents of poorer urban areas, including Detroit, lost net income as a result of the reforms, as did residents of some of the richest suburbs in the state. Michigan permits a number of districts to supplement their foundation grants by limited amounts, a strategy that we argue may be a promising way of combining the efficiency benefit of local control with the equity benefit of foundation grant systems.

A number of studies have found that teachers are prone to leave schools serving high proportions of low-achieving, low-income, and minority students for more economically and educationally advantaged schools. In schools with very high turnover rates, this can pose a number of challenges, including lack of continuity in instruction, lack of adequate teaching expertise for making curriculum decisions and providing support and mentoring, and lost time and resources for replacement and training. If high rates of turnover are caused largely by student characteristics, then policy strategies to correct the problem are limited. However, due to data constraints, little research has sought to disentangle the effects of student demographic factors from occupational factors such as salaries and working conditions that may also influence turnover and are amenable to policy interventions. Using California teacher survey data linked to district data on salaries and staffing patterns, this study examines a range of school conditions as well as demographic factors and finds that high levels of school turnover are strongly affected by poor working conditions and low salaries, as well as by student characteristics. Although schools' racial compositions and proportions of low-income students predict teacher turnover, salaries and working conditions-including large class sizes, facilities problems, multitrack schools, and lack of textbooks-are strong and significant factors in predicting high rates of turnover. Furthermore, when these conditions are taken into account, the influence of student characteristics on turnover is substantially reduced.

Researchers using cross-sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes. These studies generally do not account for non-pecuniary job attributes and alternative wage opportunities, which affect the opportunity cost of choosing to teach. When we employ the methodology used in previous studies we replicate their results. However, once we adjust for labor market factors, we estimate that raising teacher wages by ten percent reduces high school dropout rates by three to four percent. Our findings suggest that previous studies have failed to produce robust estimates because they lack adequate controls for non-wage aspects of teaching and market differences in alternative occupational opportunities.

Professional development and teacher education policies have the potential to greatly affect teachers' abilities to teach and, as a result, students' abilities to learn. States can play varied roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development. This policy brief summarizes states' policy approaches to teacher professional development and education throughout teachers' careers. It explores what states are currently doing in the realms of pre-service education, induction and mentoring, ongoing professional development, and teacher evaluation, as well as the existing evidence regarding the effectiveness of such policies. We find that states play disparate roles in the provision of teacher education and professional development that fall along the regulatory spectrum from highly prescriptive to rather laissez-faire. Research on the effects of such policies is still in the early stages, and more attention is needed to determine the effectiveness of states' professional development policies.

This article uses data on every teacher in New York State public elementary schools from 1994-1995 through 2001-2002 to examine the response of teachers to the implementation of state-mandated testing. The authors ask whether the introduction of testing in the fourth grade has increased the turnover of fourth-grade teachers, whether testing differentially affected the decisions of teachers with particular attributes, and whether the characteristics of teachers entering the fourth grade changed with the introduction of testing. The authors find that the turnover rate of fourth-grade teachers decreased relative to teachers in other elementary grades since testing began. In addition, entering fourth-grade teachers are less likely to be inexperienced teachers than those moving into other elementary school grades.

In this article, the authors describe the state of teacher education in and around the large and diverse school district of New York City. Using multiple data sources, including program documents, interviews, and surveys of teachers, this study attempts to explore the characteristics of programs that prepare elementary teachers of New York City public schools, including the kinds of programs that exist, who enters these different programs, who teaches in the programs, and what characterizes the core curriculum. A central question concerns the amount of variation that exists in the preparation of elementary teachers for a single, large school district. Despite the number and variety of programs that exist to prepare elementary teachers, the authors found the overall curriculum and structure of teacher education to be more similar than different. To understand this lack of variation, the authors draw on organizational theory, particularly, the concept of institutional isomorphism, to examine the case of teacher education. The authors conclude with recommendations for what it might take to change the landscape of teacher education in the context of a large urban district.

New York City represents a microcosm of the changes that are shaking the very foundations of teacher education in this country. In their efforts to find teachers for hard-to-staff schools by creating multiple pathways into teaching, districts from New York City to Los Angeles are in the midst of what amounts to a national experiment in how best to recruit, prepare, and retain teachers. This article provides an overview of a research project that examines features of these different pathways into teaching in New York City schools and the impact of these features on where teachers teach, how long they remain in the classroom, and student achievement in reading and math as measured by value-added analyses. The article provides both a conceptual framework for the study and a discussion of some of the methodological challenges involved in such research, including problems of selection bias, difficulties in documenting programmatic features, and challenges of estimating teacher effects on student achievement.

There are fierce debates over the best way to prepare teachers. Some argue that easing entry into teaching is necessary to attract strong candidates, whereas others argue that investing in high quality teacher preparation is the most promising approach. Most agree, however, that we lack a strong research basis for understanding how to prepare teachers. This article is one of the first to estimate the effects of features of teachers' preparation on teachers' value added to student test score performance. Our results indicate variation across preparation programs in the average effectiveness of the teachers they are supplying to New York City schools. In particular, preparation directly linked to practice appears to benefit teachers in their 1st year.

This study uses rich empirical data from Brazil to assess how a government program (PDE) that decentralizes school management decisions changes what goes on in schools and how these changes affect student outcomes. It appears that the PDE resulted in some improvements in management and learning materials, but little change in other areas including evaluation and community relations. However, we find no evidence that schools' participation in the PDE improved student achievement. The results for grade passing are stronger. Students in PDE schools saw greater increases in grade passing rates than students in non-PDE schools during the period of our study. We also estimate a positive relationship between PDE spending and student gains for those schools in the program, especially for spending on teaching and learning materials and furniture. We find no benefit of electronics spending or spending on teacher training, two of the three largest areas of school investment.

Policy makers have long been concerned with K–12 teachers' compensation. Not only might increased teacher compensation purchase more skilled teachers, it might also influence how long teachers stay at their schools and in the teaching profession. Similarly, changes in the structure of teacher salary schedules may change the appeal of teaching even if average salaries remain the same. Much of the extant research on K–12 teacher salaries shows, to no great surprise, that teachers respond to salary changes (for examples, see Baugh and Stone 1982 and Murnane and Olsen 1989, 1990). Teachers' salaries are just one component of teachers' overall compensation, however. States and school districts also provide other incentives—both monetary and nonmonetary— aimed at attracting and retaining teachers. These incentives often target certain types of teachers in certain types of positions. In addition, teachers receive health and welfare and retirement benefit that add to their total compensation packages.