Do charter schools draw good teachers from traditional, mainstream public schools? Using a thirteen-year panel of North Carolina public schoolteachers, I find that less qualified and less effective teachers move to charter schools, particularly if they move to urban schools, low-performing schools, or schools with higher shares of nonwhite…

The literature on effective schools emphasizes the importance of a quality teaching force in improving educational outcomes for students. In this article we use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school's effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development, and retention of its teachers. Our results reveal four key…

Michigan radically altered its school finance system in 1994. The new plan, called Proposal A, significantly increased state aid to the lowest-spending school districts and limited future increases in spending in the highest-spending ones, abolishing local discretion over school spending. I investigate the impact of Proposal A on the distribution…

This study examines responses to state capitation policies for special education finance between 1991-92 and 2003-4. Capitation refers to distributing funds based on the entire student enrollment. We find that disability rates tended to fall following capitation reforms, primarily in subjectively diagnosed categories and in early and late grades.…

How useful are "corporate brands" in markets? In theory, brands convey reliable information, providing consumers with shortcuts to time-consuming provider searches. We examine the usefulness of a corporate brand when parental school choice is expanded through K-12 tuition scholarships. Specifically, we evaluate whether Catholic schools carry an…

Previous research debates whether public school choice improves students' academic outcomes, but there is little examination of its effects on their nonacademic outcomes. We use data from a nationally representative sample of high school students, a previously developed Tiebout choice measure, and metropolitan-level data on teenage arrest rates to…

In the spring of 2008 the authors surveyed members of the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) to gain insight into their views on education policy issues. The results summarize opinions of this broad group of education researchers and practitioners, providing AEFA members and education leaders with access to views that may be helpful as…

"Rose v. Council for Better Education" (1989) is often considered a transition point in education finance litigation, heralding an era of increasing concern for measurable adequacy of education across a broad spectrum of student needs. Prior research suggests that post-Rose lawsuits had less effect on the distribution of school spending than older…

A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the "biological clocks" of adolescents. In this article I study whether doing so improves academic performance. I first focus on the Twin Cities metropolitan area, where Minneapolis and several suburban…

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, Kentucky's experience of major school finance and curricular reform is highly salient for understanding teacher labor market dynamics.…

One distinction between the markets for corporate and municipal bonds involves institutional constraints that apply to some municipal bond issues. This research focuses on how public finance institutions, in particular explicit debt limits and referenda requirements, affect the borrowing cost of individual school district bond issues. The…

Gifted and talented education programs provide children who have been identified as having high ability in some intellectual or creative characteristic with a supplemental curriculum to their traditional coursework. Despite the popularity of these programs, the literature lacks a comprehensive review of gifted education in the United States. This…

Recent research attributes the lack of merit pay in teaching to the resistance of teachers. This article examines whether the structure of merit pay affects the types of teachers who support it. We develop a model of the relative utility teachers receive from merit pay versus the current fixed schedule of raises. We show that if teachers are risk…

Outside the United States, very little is known about long-run trends in school productivity. We present new evidence using two data series from Australia, where comparable tests are available back to the 1960s. For young teenagers (aged 13-14), we find a small but statistically significant fall in numeracy over the period 1964-2003 and in both…

By estimating differences in long-run education and labor market outcomes for cohorts of students exposed to differing state-level primary school retention rates, this article estimates the effects of retention on all students in a cohort, retained and promoted. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in early grade retention is associated…