The concept of pay for performance for public school teachers is growing in popularity and use, and it has resurged to once again occupy a central role in education policy. Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education offers the most up-to-date and complete analysis of this promising—yet still controversial—policy innovation. Performance Incentives brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts, providing an unprecedented discussion and analysis of the pay-for-performance debate by • Identifying the potential strengths and weaknesses of tying pay to student outcomes; • Comparing different strategies for measuring teacher accomplishments; • Addressing key conceptual and implemen - tation issues; • Describing what teachers themselves think of merit pay; • Examining recent examples in Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas; • Studying the overall impact on student achievement.

Unlike the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom have developed (3z (Bvalue-added (3y (B immigration policies designed to boost GDP and per-capita incomes. These countries accept the proposition that markets are valuable institutions. But they also recognize that in highly competitive globalized economies, markets untempered by moderating policies and institutions will produce declining real incomes for many or most workers and unsustainable inequalities in income and wealth. In Value-Added Immigration Ray Marshall details how these three major U.S. trading partners developed their immigration policies, how these policies work, and what specific features can be adapted for the creation of a high-value-added U.S. immigration policy. Marshall, professor emeritus at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, served as secretary of labor in the Carter administration.

Since its initial publication and multiple reprints in hardcover in 2005, Teachers Have It Easy has attracted the attention of teachers nationwide, appearing on the New York Times extended bestseller list, C-SPAN, and NPR's Marketplace, in additio...

Is your school system considering teacher merit pay? Now is the time to understand the potential benefits and pitfalls of performance-based teacher pay, as well as how today's most successful programs were developed. Drawing on substantial research with school districts, Gary Ritter and Joshua Barnett provide a step-by-step approach to setting up a merit pay system in your school district. Readers will find, An overview of existing merit pay programs and their strengths and weaknesses, A review of the 12 most common myths about merit pay and how school leaders can respond, Six guiding principles for designing a merit pay program, along with how-to's and timelines for every phase, Guidance on creating balanced assessments based on multiple measures of teacher effectiveness, developed in collaboration with teachers, Ensure that-your district's merit pay program supports teachers' professional growth, schoolwide progress, and student achievement. Book jacket.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools. “[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.

This book asks whether higher salaries have improved the quality of newly recruited teachers. It reviews data on the characteristics of beginning teachers and shows how important features of the labor market for teachers systematically undermine efforts to improve teacher quality. The text also offers a comparison of personnel policies and staffing patterns in public and private schools, focusing on national trends in teacher recruitment. It discusses ways to measure teacher quality, examines several indicators of quality, such as student achievement and principals' ratings of their staffs, and then uses these findings to assess the evidence on salary growth and teacher recruitment. It looks at what has gone wrong with teacher recruitment and offers an analysis of the operation of the teacher labor market so as to interpret findings. These results are used to review the implications for teacher recruitment of various other reforms of current interest. The text also describes the prospects for reform by examining salary differentiation and rising standards and assesses personnel policies in the private sector to see whether private schools offer a model for reforming public education. This section details teacher quality, working conditions, and compensation policies. The book concludes with a summation of its major points. (Contains an index, approximately 315 references, 12 data tables and 17 figures.) (RJM)