Jacob Fowles

Public Employee Quality in a Geographic Context: A Study of Rural Teachers

Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lowest observed aptitude, implying that organizational outcomes associated with these districts may differ in systematic ways that reinforce longstanding gaps in quality. As such, human resources strategies for increasing the attractiveness of geographically and culturally isolated regions for high quality public service are needed. These strategies are likely to require different policy prescriptions than those utilized to enhance the attractiveness to employees in urban areas.

School Finance Reform: Do Equalized Expenditures Imply Equalized Teacher Salaries?

Kentucky is a poor, relatively rural state that contrasts greatly with the relatively urban and wealthy states typically the subject of education studies employing large-scale administrative data. For this reason, Kentuckys experience of major school finance and curricular reform is highly salient for understanding teacher labor market dynamics. This study examines the time path of teacher salaries in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Kentucky using a novel teacher-level administrative data set. Our results suggest that the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) provided a salary boost for all Appalachian teachers, resulting in a wage premium for teachers of low and medium experience and equalizing pay across Appalachian and non-Appalachian districts for teachers of high experience. However, we find that Appalachian salaries fell back to the level of non-Appalachian teachers roughly a decade following reform, at which point the pre-KERA remuneration patterns re-emerge.

Considering the Effects of Time on Leadership Development A Local Government Training Evaluation

As local governments across the United States adapt to economic shifts, workforce reshaping, and continued demand for services, training to confront these challenges has become more important. However, training resources are limited, investment in these programs is not always prioritized, and evaluating outcomes is difficult. This study analyzes data from a local government leadership development program to examine training impacts over time. It focuses on leadership skills and the ways in which individual’s self-assessments change over time. The findings indicate that although leadership training is an important factor in the development of both conceptual and interpersonal leadership skills, the long-term effects of training on these two types of skills vary significantly. Understanding the training effect decay associated with leadership skills development can help human resource managers and public organizations strategically plan, evaluate, and invest in these training activities to better prepare their workforce to meet future challenges.

In the Union Now Understanding Public Sector Union Membership

Despite periodic consideration of public sector unions in the public management and administration literature, empirical evidence on the union membership decisions of public employees remains scant. In this article, we begin to address this issue by considering unique data on union membership drawn from a local educational agency in a midsize American city. We find union membership rates to be highest in schools that are hardest to staff and where working conditions may be most difficult. We consider this evidence in light of recent efforts to reform public sector unions in general and teacher unions in particular.

Borrowing for College: A Comparison of Long-Term Debt Financing between Public and Private, Nonprofit Institutions of Higher Education†

Institutions of higher education provide an excellent opportunity to compare long‐term debt financing in the nonprofit and public sectors. The proposed models explain the long‐term debt per student at public and private‐nonprofit research universities. Student enrollment, enrollment growth, total assets, and revenue variables as a group all influence debt levels. The strongest predictors of debt balances are the fixed characteristics of the universities themselves. Empirical evidence from the university sector also suggests the absence of a powerful arbitrage incentive to issue debt.

Salaries in Space

This article, drawing on a rich panel of administrative data comprising all public school teachers employed in Kentucky from 1997 to 2005, utilizes methods developed in spatial econometrics to test for spatial interdependence in the teacher remuneration policies utilized by public school districts. The results of the best fitting model suggest that a 1 percentage point increase in the salary generosity of a particular district’s distance-weighted neighbors yields a 0.57 percentage point increase in the generosity of salaries within that district, even after controlling for relevant district characteristics and including time and district fixed effects. The results are discussed within the context of state education finance reforms, the school choice movement as well as the continued national focus on improving teacher quality as a primary mechanism to increase student achievement.

Forecast Bias and Fiscal Slack Accumulation in School Districts

The years during and after the Great Recession constrained revenue across all levels of government. Revenue shortfalls in states decreased intergovernmental transfers, which compounded the plight of local governments already facing large declines in own-source property taxes. Among the many casualties of this economic downturn were school districts, which responded by implementing a variety of financial management strategies to continue providing educational service provision to more than 50 million students across the United States. One strategy school districts continue to utilize is countercyclical stabilization of expenditures with fiscal slack, which raises an important—and, to date, largely unanswered—question of how school districts manage to accumulate fiscal slack, given both volatility and decreases in revenues in the years following the Great Recession. One approach is to use implicit slack from biased forecasts to generate explicit fiscal slack in the unassigned fund balance. This article provides evidence for this strategy by empirically testing it with data from Kentucky school districts from school years 2001-2002 to 2013-2014. The findings indicate that school districts are engaged in strategic planning with implicit fiscal slack, which allows them to accumulate explicit fiscal slack, a cornerstone of prudent financial management that can provide budgetary flexibility during financial uncertainty. The relationship between implicit and explicit fiscal slack is heterogeneous over the business cycle, providing further evidence of strategic planning. Practitioners can also use the findings of this article to support the strategic use of forecasts to help accumulate unassigned fund balance, particularly in the years after the Great Recession.

The Governor and the State Higher Education Executive Officer: How the Relationship Shapes State Financial Support for Higher Education

ABSTRACT Researchers have shown renewed interest during the past decade in the relationships among politics, policy, finance, and governance of higher education at the state level. Little attention, however, has been paid to state higher education executive officers (SHEEOs), the individuals responsible for leading the agencies that oversee higher education in the 50 states. Of noteworthy interest is the fact that the states vary in regard to the nature of the institutional relationship between the SHEEO and the governor, who has been shown in the literature to exert a strong influence over state higher education policy and finance. To explore the relationship, we developed measures that capture relevant dimensions of the relationship between the 2 actors and tested the impact of these measures on state spending for higher education using a unique panel of state-level data spanning more than 2 decades. We found that the institutional relationship between the SHEEO and the governor has a significant impact on state support for higher education.

U.S. state higher education appropriations: assessing the relationships between agency politicization, centralization, and volatility

Abstract Research into state appropriations across the United States frequently examines the influence of socio-demographic characteristics and political characteristics on particular levels of funding. We extend this literature to examine the year-to-year volatility of funding in order to test hypotheses surrounding the interlocks among multiple actors in the political stage. Our findings suggest that, when state higher education leaders are politically close to governors and have no formal budgetary power they capture more revenue volatility.

State Higher Education Spending: A Spatial Econometric Perspective:

This article uses spatial econometric modeling to estimate the extent to which state higher education spending in three categories (need-based aid spending, non-need-based aid spending, and appropriations to public universities) is affected by the spending decisions of neighboring states. Drawing on the relevant empirical and theoretical literature in public finance and economics, it evaluates three theoretically justified alternatives for defining the connectivity between states: physical proximity, relative population migration flows between states, and common state membership in regional interstate higher education compacts. Our empirical results find statistically significant geographical spatial interdependence in spending for need-based aid and higher education appropriations, but no equivalent effects for non-need-based aid. We discuss our results in the context of the continually evolving role of higher education in state budgets.