The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

Understanding how the District of Columbia (DC) funds District of Columbia Public School (DCPS) students and DC public charter school students is essential to ensuring all students receive the support they need as COVID-19 pandemic-era federal funds expire. The recent rise in the Uniform Per Student Funding Formula (UPSFF) and the boost in the…

Recruiting racially minoritized principals is one suggested strategy to increase the racial diversity of teachers, who would then better match their increasingly racially diverse students. However, focusing solely on race ignores the salience of race-gender intersectionality in principal-teacher relations. Using three waves of nationally…

The majority of teacher contracts in the State of Ohio are based on the traditional pay scale, rewarding teachers for educational level attained and years of experience. Performance-based pay is an emerging trend with 11 school districts in Ohio identified as having a performance-pay system in their negotiated agreement. This study utilizes Ohio's…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of a career teacher's benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "Redistribution, Return, and Risk." First, some…

Teacher quality is the most important school-related factor influencing student achievement, and closing the growing pay gap between teachers and other college graduate professionals is critical to public education. This report provides an update to a series that has tracked public school teacher wages and compensation over the last two decades.…

This report explores the dramatic increase in Head Start teacher turnover during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the Head Start Program Information Report (PIR) from 2010 to 2022, the study investigates trends in teacher turnover across all Head Start program types and examines the reasons behind teacher departures. The report finds that…

We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic, grade level, and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on teaching vacancies in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher…

Charter schools and inter-district public school choice are a growing part of the public school system. Theoretically, competition for students might lead to competition for effective and diverse teaching faculties. This study assesses how competition from school choice relates to the distribution of teacher characteristics across school contexts,…

Do Americans hold a consistent set of opinions about their public schools and how to improve them? From 2013 to 2018, over 5,000 unique respondents participated in more than one consecutive iteration of the annual, nationally representative "Education Next" poll, offering an opportunity to examine individual-level attitude stability on…

Abstract The academic profession is internally divided as never before. This cross-national comparative analysis of stratification in Higher Education is based on a sample of European academic scientists (N = 8,466) from universities in 11 countries. The analysis identifies three types of stratification: academic performance stratification,…

This article reports on a case study that explores the views of four EFL program administrators of a university located in central China about the hiring and workplace situations of foreign English teachers. It was found that the administrators as a whole buy into the conventional pro-nativeness ideology with regard to hiring foreign English…

Full-time teaching-focused faculty at research universities may hold alternative titles such as Assistant Teaching Professor, Instructor, or Lecturer. We manipulated the title of a fictitious faculty target to investigate how such titles are perceived. Student and lay respondents (N = 317) respected and liked all targets, and their ratings did not…

Schools often struggle to attract and retain high-performing teachers and to develop or remove low-performing ones. In this study, the researchers considered whether this is true in New Orleans where almost all schools are charters with flexibility over personnel policies and practices, and where schools compete against one another and face…