Michael Podgursky

Job displacement and earnings loss: Evidence from the Displaced Worker Survey

Using data from the Displaced Worker Survey, a special supplement to the January 1984 Current Population Survey, the authors estimate a model of reemployment earnings for workers displaced from full-time nonagricultural jobs between January 1979 and January 1984. Median losses for workers reemployed full-time were not large, but a sizable minority of that group—mostly workers with substantial specific human capital investments—experienced large and enduring earnings losses.

Recruiting Smarter Teachers

In recent years many states have raised teacher salaries to attract more capable teachers. Since teacher labor markets are typically in a state of excess supply, success of such policies is contingent on containing perverse feedbacks which arise among exit decisions, vacancy rates, and the willingness of prospective teachers to invest in occupation-specific human capital. Using SAT scores as a measure of ability, we find that an across-the-board raise produces modest improvements in the work force at best. Indeed, under plausible parameter values, it is possible for mean ability to decline.

Teacher recruitment and retention in public and private schools

Private school salaries are substantially below those in public school systems. Nonetheless, private school heads are as satisfied as public school principals with the quality of their new teachers and substantially more satisfied with their experienced instructors. This difference remains after controlling for school and community characteristics and for the principals tenure and educational priorities. In addition, appraisals of experienced and new teachers suggest that private schools are more successful in retaining the best of their new teachers and in developing the teaching skills of their faculties. Apparent reasons include greater flexibility in structuring pay, more supervision and mentoring of new teachers, and freedom to dismiss teachers for poor performance. These findings suggest that improvement in the quality of public school performance will require the use of accountability tools such as pay-for-performance and dismissal.

Unions, Establishment Size, and Intra-Industry Threat Effects

Using a sample of data on private-sector production workers from a May–June 1979 matched Current Population Survey, this study finds that whether a worker is covered by a union contract, and the proportion of an industrys production workers covered by union contracts, have significantly different effects on worker earnings across establishments of different size. The pattern of findings suggests that large nonunion employers tend to match the union wage scale at all levels of unionism in their industry; medium-size nonunion employers match the union scale only as the union presence in their industry looms large; and small nonunion employers maintain wages below the union rate at all levels of union organization of their industry.

Teachers' attitudes toward merit pay: Examining conventional wisdom

This examination of data from the 1987–88 Schools and Staffing Survey challenges the common supposition that most teachers oppose merit pay. The authors find that teachers in districts that use merit pay do not seem demoralized by the system or hostile toward it, and teachers of disadvantaged and low-achieving students are generally supportive of merit pay. Private school teachers favor merit pay more than do public school teachers, a difference that may reflect differences in management in the two sectors and a more entrepreneurial spirit among staff in private schools.

PEAKS, CLIFFS, AND VALLEYS: THE PECULIAR INCENTIVES IN TEACHER RETIREMENT SYSTEMS AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES FOR SCHOOL STAFFING

This article examines the pattern of incentives for work versus retirement in six state teacher pension systems. We do this by examining the annual accrual of pension wealth from an additional year of work over a teachers career. Accrual of wealth is highly nonlinear and heavily loaded at arbitrary years that would normally be considered mid-career. One typical pattern exhibits low accrual in early years, accelerating in the mid- to late fifties, followed by dramatic decline or even negative returns in years that are relatively young for retirement. Key factors in the defined benefit formulas that drive such patterns are identified along with likely consequences for employee behavior. The authors examine efficiency and equity consequences of these systems as well as options for reform.

Returns to Seniority among Public School Teachers.

Returns to seniority account for a substantial share of public K-12 expenditures. Over the first ten to 15 years of a career, public school teachers enjoy average wage growth at least equivalent to that of other white-collar workers. Explanations for this structure in terms of human capital or costly monitoring lack theoretical and empirical support. A steeper wage-tenure profile reduces turnover, but it is doubtful that the costs of turnover are high enough to make this an optimal use of school resources. We conclude that the structure of teacher pay in public education is more consistent with rent-seeking than efficient contracting.

TEACHER PREPARATION PROGRAMS AND TEACHER QUALITY: ARE THERE REAL DIFFERENCES ACROSS PROGRAMS?

We compare teacher preparation programs in Missouri based on the effectiveness of their graduates in the classroom. The differences in effectiveness between teachers from different preparation programs are much smaller than has been suggested in previous work. In fact, virtually all of the variation in teacher effectiveness comes from within-program differences between teachers. Prior research has overstated differences in teacher performance across preparation programs by failing to properly account for teacher sampling.

What makes a good principal? How teachers assess the performance of principals

Abstract This paper examines the performance of public school principals as rated by teachers they supervise. Work experience outside of education does not raise performance ratings, nor does administrative experience at the current or previous schools. The only experience which is associated with higher performance ratings is teaching experience. Graduate training, even in school administration, is generally associated with lower performance ratings, a finding which raises questions about the licensing requirements for principals in most states. Finally, teachers tend to rate a principal of their own race or sex higher, an effect most pronounced for women, who consistently give male principals lower evaluations. [JEL I21]

Distribution of Benefits in Teacher Retirement Systems and Their Implications for Mobility

While it is generally understood that defined benefit pension systems concentrate benefits on career teachers and impose costs on mobile teachers, there has been very little analysis of the magnitude of these effects. The authors develop a measure of implicit redistribution of pension wealth among teachers at varying ages of separation. Compared with a neutral system, we find that often about half of an entering cohorts net pension wealth is redistributed to teachers who separate in their fifties from those who separate earlier, and we also identify some variation across six state systems. This implies large costs for interstate mobility. We estimate that teachers who split a thirty-year career between two pension plans often lose over half their net pension wealth compared with teachers who complete a career in a single system. Plan options that permit purchases of service years mitigate few or none of these losses. It is difficult to explain these patterns of costs and benefits on efficiency grounds. More likely explanations include the relative influence of senior versus junior educators in interest group politics and a coordination problem between states.