This article explores the effects of a 2010 reform in Illinois that substantially increased the difficulty of passing a required basic skills test for all Illinois college students seeking a teaching certification. The policy led to a 33 percent decrease in education program enrollments and a 27...

Empirical research bears out the conventional wisdom that teacher quality is the key schooling resource influencing student achievement, so it is not surprising that policy makers attempt to influence it by regulating admission into the teacher labor market through licensure systems. Most of...

The demand in the workplace is rapidly changing brought about by the educational reforms and the emergence of disruptive technology. The changes increase the importance of employability skills and literacy that would ensure career success and degree program relevance. On this premise, a study...

Wisconsin's Act 10 in 2011 gutted collective bargaining rights for public school teachers and mandated benefits cuts for most districts. We use various cross-state methods on school-district data from school years 2002-03 to 2015-16 to examine the act's immediate and medium-run net impacts on...

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies a 2011 reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. I show that, following the reform, some districts switched to flexible compensation and...