Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality

(The first chapter of this book is available in PDF format.)  

"This might be the most discouraging book ever written about the education crisis in America."Public Productivity and Management Review

To answer these questions, Ballou and Podgursky review data on the characteristics of newly recruited teachers. They also show how key structural features of the labor market for teachers systematically undermine efforts to improve teacher quality. Finally, the authors undertake a comparison of personnel policies and staffing patterns in public and private schools, and comment on the impact of regulatory constraints currently imposed on public school administrators.

"Many believe that teachers are the key to educational reform and school improvement, but the policy implications frequently are taken to be a single imperative: "Pay teachers more." Ballou and Podgursky, building upon careful analytical work, show that the emperor really has no clothes. In their clear and concise walk through the evidence, they demonstrate that continuing on a path of just increased teacher pay is unlikely to be more successful in the future than it has been in the past.

"This book will be useful to a broad audience. The conclusions about teacher supply and quality flow directly from well-structured empirical analysis. But Ballou and Podgursky make sure that the implications are not couched in jargon or buried within dense statistical modeling. Instead they present the case in clear and compelling terms that will appeal to analysts and policy makers alike. [It] should be read by anybody who wishes to discuss school reform." Prof. Eric Hanushek, Director, W. Allen Wallace Institute of Political Economy, University of Rochester

"Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality is an important book that should be read by everyone interested in the future of our public schools and the future of the American economy. The authors show that dramatic increases in the salaries of teachers over the last 20 years have done nothing to improve the quality of American public school teachers. They document the reasons that this is true. What emerges is a serious criticism of how our public schools select, compensate, and motivate teachers.

"The book is based on several years of detailed empirical analyses of both public and private school teachers conducted using a number of national data bases. These analyses are summarized in a readable nontechnical manner and thus the book is accessible to a wide audience." Prof. Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Irving M. Ives Professor of Industry, Labor & Economics, Cornell University

"In my opinion Teacher Pay and Teacher Quality is a clearly outstanding book. I believe this book is one of the very few that deserve to be in the 'must read' category by educational policymakers at all levels." Dr. Myron Lieberman, Chairman, Education Policy Institute

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