Hamilton Lankford

The Influence of School Administrators on Teacher Retention Decisions

This article explores the relationship between school contextual factors and teacher retention decisions in New York City. The methodological approach separates the effects of teacher characteristics from school characteristics by modeling the relationship between the assessments of school contextual factors by one set of teachers and the turnover decisions by other teachers in the same school. We find that teachers’ perceptions of the school administration has by far the greatest influence on teacher retention decisions. This effect of administration is consistent for first-year teachers and the full sample of teachers and is confirmed by a survey of teachers who have recently left teaching.

Primary and Secondary School Choice among Public and Religious Alternatives.

Abstract In this paper we develop a conceptual framework for analyzing school choice decisions, evaluate past empirical research, and estimate an individual level model of choice using a unique data set. Previous empirical work modeling households decisions to send their children to public or private schools frequently employed incomplete or aggregate data that precluded firm policy conclusions. The data employed here merges 1980 individual level census data with information about schools in New York. The results suggest that parents are sensitive to the relative quality of school offerings, the tuition of religious schools, characteristics of other students in each alternative, and socioeconomic characteristics of the family. The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the existing school choice structure and provide insights concerning new school choice proposals.

The changing structure of teacher compensation, 1970-1994

Abstract This paper considers how the structures of teacher salaries in public school districts have changed over the last quarter century and whether salary increases have been allocated so as to achieve the greatest gain in educational quality. Using New York state data for the 1970–1994 period, we find that even though some districts appear to behave in ways consistent with the often expressed goal of recruiting and retaining the most able college graduates, most districts do not. The vast majority of districts have inefficiently allocated a disproportionately large share of resources to veteran teachers for whom job tenure is only marginally affected. This finding has important implications for the policy debate regarding whether increased spending on education will, or could, improve educational performance as well as the design of alternative compensation schemes.