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.

Effective teachers are demonstrably the most important resource schools have for improving the academic success of their students. Yet for many school leaders, recruiting and retaining talented and effective classroom teachers remains an uphill battle. Whether teacher salaries are sufficient to attract the best graduates into teaching remains an open question, but there is little doubt that the recent fiscal crisis in the states has reenergized the debate over teacher compensation. As this debate proceeds, sound evidence on the comparability of teacher pay is critical for maintaining and improving the quality of the teaching force in the United States. In this issue brief, the authors summarize the main findings of their 2004 and 2008 reports, and update key estimates of the teacher pay penalty through 2010. Using data aggregated over the 2006-10 period (to ensure a sufficient sample size in all 50 states and the District of Columbia), they computed the weekly wages of public school teachers relative to comparably educated workers. Some of their findings are the following: (1) Trends in weekly earnings show that public school teachers in 2010 earned about 12% less than comparable workers, a gap equivalent to that found in their 2004 study; (2) Analyzing the weekly earnings of occupations comparable to K-12 teachers confirms the substantial erosion of teacher pay relative to their peers through 2006; and (3) If the policy goal is to improve the quality of the entire teaching workforce, then raising the "level" of teacher compensation is critical to recruiting and retaining higher quality teachers. (Contains 2 tables.).

An effective teacher is the most important school-based determinant of education outcomes. Therefore it is crucial that school districts recruit and retain high-quality teachers. This is increasingly challenging given that the supply of teachers has been greatly affected by high early to mid-career turnover rates, annual retirements of longtime teachers, and a decline in students opting for a teaching career. At the same time, many factors are increasing the demand for teachers, including shrinking class sizes, the desire to improve diversity, and the need to meet high standards. In short, the demand for teachers is escalating, while simultaneously the supply of teachers is faltering. This report finds that the teacher pay penalty is bigger than ever. In 2015, public school teachers' weekly wages were 17.0 percent lower than those of comparable workers--compared with just 1.8 percent lower in 1994. This erosion of relative teacher wages has fallen more heavily on experienced teachers than on entry-level teachers. Importantly, collective bargaining can help to abate this teacher wage penalty. Some of the increase in the teacher wage penalty may be attributed to a trade-off between wages and benefits. Even so, teachers' compensation (wages plus benefits) was 11.1 percent lower than that of comparable workers in 2015. The following are appended: (1) Summary of the data used in this analysis; (2) A table with estimated public school teacher weekly wage penalty, 1979-2015; and (3) A table with public school teacher and non-teacher college graduate weekly wages, by state.

This Brief reviews the past, present, and future use of school corporal punishment in the United States, a practice that remains legal in 19 states as it is constitutionally permitted according to the U.S. Supreme Court. As a result of school corporal punishment, nearly 200,000 children are paddled in schools each year. Most Americans are unaware of this fact or the physical injuries sustained by countless school children who are hit with objects by school personnel in the name of discipline. Therefore, Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools begins by summarizing the legal basis for school corporal punishment and trends in Americans’ attitudes about it. It then presents trends in the use of school corporal punishment in the United States over time to establish its past and current prevalence. It then discusses what is known about the effects of school corporal punishment on children, though with so little research on this topic, much of the relevant literature is focused on parents’ use of corporal punishment with their children. It also provides results from a policy analysis that examines the effect of state-level school corporal punishment bans on trends in juvenile crime. It concludes by discussing potential legal, policy, and advocacy avenues for abolition of school corporal punishment at the state and federal levels as well as summarizing how school corporal punishment is being used and what its potential implications are for thousands of individual students and for the society at large. As school corporal punishment becomes more and more regulated at the state level, Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools serves an essential guide for policymakers and advocates across the country as well as for researchers, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students.

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)