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...

Most public elementary and high school teachers are covered by health insurance provided by their employer while they are employed. In most cases, these health plans are managed at the state level. At retirement, teachers with sufficient years of service are allowed to remain in the health plan....

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....

Because of the rigid salary structure in the public teacher labor market, principals may have the incentive to align classes favorably for high-quality teachers as a form of nonmonetary compensation. This article tests whether higher-quality teachers, holding other characteristics constant, tend...

Reorganizing primary school grade spans is a tractable and relatively inexpensive school reform. However, assessing the effects of reorganization requires also examining other organizational changes that may accompany grade span reforms. Using data on New York City public schools from 1996 to...

This article seeks to move the adequacy issue forward by demonstrating that under a certain set of assumptions, it is possible to provide a set of programmatic offerings that corresponds well with what we consider to be an emerging, research-based consensus about what constitutes best practices....

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...

This study examines how aspects of a district's institutional and policy environment influence the distribution of teacher salary increases. The primary hypothesis tested is that statewide performance-based accountability policies influence the extent to which districts backload teacher salary...

Like most other state and local government employees, teachers participate primarily in defined benefit pension plans whose benefits are largely based on final average salaries and length of service. Such pensions have been replaced in many private sector firms by defined contribution pensions....

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...