James Shuls

Prior research has identified five in-school factors that impact teacher retention: positive school culture, supportive administration, strong professional development, mentoring programs, and classroom autonomy. While much of the national attention is focused on state or district-level policies to address the teacher retention crisis, this study focuses on how school leaders can improve teacher retention by addressing the five factors. Semi-structured interviews with school leaders were used to provide examples of how principles can improve school culture and increase teacher retention.

Missouri's current school funding formula was instituted in 2005. The foundation formula determines how much aid a school district will receive from the state by first determining how much aid the district should have to provide an adequate education, as determined by a formula, and then subtracting how much can be raised locally.

The current policy debate about teacher preparation tends to pit two ideas against each other: traditional, college-bound preparation vs. alternative routes. It seems that those of us interested in education policy must choose which strategy we prefer for all K-12 teacher preparation. In our view, however, the whole heated debate isn't particularly productive because teachers and the students they teach are too diverse for a single prescription. In this ongoing argument, some say it is silly that we send teachers into classrooms without the training and certification offered in traditional education schools. Others promote alternative preparation programs, such as Teach For America, in the hopes of attracting a more talented and diverse set of prospective teachers. The fiery rhetoric in this debate can be unproductive, with its actors characterized as either cranky public school critics attempting to deprofessionalize teaching and undermine its institutions, or staunch defenders of the status quo trying to maintain their monopoly on teacher training. We propose that we start with some simple and positive assumptions: Both sides want to recruit and prepare an excellent teaching workforce to serve students well, and both sides have the right strategies to achieve this goal. Traditional teacher preparation is the right strategy, and alternative teacher preparation is the right strategy. Instead of arguing about the superiority of one strategy over the other, consider the following compromise: Continue to support traditional programs as the primary strategy for preparing teachers of elementary students, and encourage alternative programs to develop more teachers of secondary school students. Two camps If possible, we'd do a rigorous study of teacher preparation programs, using random assignment and multiple measures of effectiveness, with the hope of identifying the best practices for training future teachers. Then we'd implement those practices nationwide, mandating that every preparation program do what's been identified as most effective. And, voila, we'd have an improved teacher labor force. That may be a very well-intentioned goal, but let's not hold our breath that it will happen. The recently concluded Measures of Effective Teaching Project (MET), a rigorous study that used random assignment and multiple measures of effectiveness, has taught us at least one thing: Identifying exactly what makes a teacher effective is difficult (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, 2013). Identifying exactly how to train the best teachers is equally opaque. Broadly speaking, policy makers and education leaders fall into two camps when debating and developing the best policies to attract and train our future teaching workforce. The first camp supports traditional teacher preparation in approved degree programs within colleges of education. In their course of study, teacher candidates learn educational theory, receive pedagogical training, and have practical classroom experience. Those in the traditional camp include other traditionally trained teachers, teacher unions, and professors in colleges of education, among others. The logic is that teaching is a craft that must be developed over time through practice, observation, and induction into the profession. Again speaking very generally, the other camp advocates for a more direct path to the classroom, with a focus on content knowledge. According to this strategy, teachers would typically have a degree in the subject they teach, but they have much less classroom experience. This group prefers alternative programs, such as Teach For America, which seeks highly talented individuals with strong content knowledge, provides a shortened training period, usually six weeks, and then places teachers in classrooms. Programs similar to TFA include the New York City Teaching Fellows Program and The New Teacher Project. …

ObjectiveMost public organizations use both materialistic and idealistic appeals to attract valued employees, with the latter being particularly important for difficult jobs. Teaching in high poverty communities is one such job, though none have studied whether successful high poverty schools such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools make relatively greater use of public service appeals in teacher recruitment. In education, we identify these materialistic and idealistic appeals as teacher‐centered and student‐centered incentives. Teacher‐centered incentives are those that appeal to a teacher's desire for higher compensation or advancement opportunities, whereas student‐centered appeals attempt to attract teachers with a public service mission.MethodWe compare the use of teacher‐centered and student‐centered appeals in teacher recruitment by the universe of KIPP networks (n = 33) and neighboring traditional public school districts (n = 34), each serving disadvantaged populations. Coders record personnel website use of four teacher‐centered appeals (including salary and benefits) and four student‐centered appeals.ResultsChi‐square tests show that KIPP schools make less use of teacher‐centered appeals, especially monetary compensation, and more use of student‐centered appeals in teacher recruitment.ConclusionSupplemented by fieldwork, findings suggest that appeals to mission may work better than merit pay in recruiting effective teachers for high poverty schools.

If a teacher teaches what seems to him a very thoughtful and careful lesson, but students don't learn the skills and/or knowledge intended, was it a good lesson? The answer, we believe, is obvious: If students aren't learning, then the teaching isn't effective. Plain and simple. Thus, teacher evaluation should absolutely be focused on student outcomes. If citizens and policy makers and educators have decided that the primary objective of schools is to foster student learning and if we have the tools to adequately measure student learning (we do), then it naturally follows that we should be assessing teacher effectiveness based in large part on the learning gains of students in the classroom. In this Phi Delta Kappan issue on teacher evaluation, there will be several arguments for alternatives to teacher evaluations based on student tests. In this essay, we'll take the contrarian view and argue that using student test scores as a foundation for teacher evaluations is a good (and obvious) idea. We'll make this case by outlining and defending the following four premises: * Student learning is the primary objective that schools and educators should pursue. * Current technology in testing and value-added data analysis allow for useful measurement of student learning connected to schools and classrooms. * Value-added measures that aim to connect gains in student learning to particular sets of teachers may be imperfect, but they're also the best (and most efficient) teacher evaluation option available. * New data supports the common intuition held by many of us: Deploying effective teachers clearly matters for the long-term life outcomes of students. #1. Student learning is the primary goal. Obviously, schools as social organizations have multiple aims and pursue varied goals. As such, teachers have numerous responsibilities and objectives, and some of these aims go beyond student learning. Teachers care about students' emotional well-being and their physical safety. Educators hope to create opportunities for students to engage in varied activities with diverse peers. Finally, teachers also care about being responsible members of the school's professional staff, volunteering to serve on committees and chaperone student groups. While these and other goals are meaningful, they're subordinate to the primary goal of educators--nurturing student learning. If student learning is the fundamental goal of educators, then any evaluation or rating of teachers should be based, in large part, on student learning. In fact, the public debate around strategies for teacher evaluation has revealed that most stakeholders agree that effective instruction is of paramount importance. That is, nearly all of the "line items" on proposed teacher evaluation checklists are related to effective teaching. Some participants in this debate want to give teachers credit for participating in the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards certification program or other types of professional development. Others suggest teachers should be evaluated on the practices they exhibit during instruction, as measured by classroom observations and rubric-based ratings of instructional skill. Still others prefer the status quo, in which teacher ratings are based on the standard perfunctory evaluations by the principal each year. Most of these strategies are being proposed as components of teacher evaluation systems because each is thought to be connected to effective teaching. That is, policy makers are willing to pay National Board Certified Teachers a bit more because they're thought to be better at engaging and instructing students. Similarly, teachers who exhibit certain teaching strategies during classroom observations are believed to be better at fostering student learning and academic growth. In each case, the mediating variable is valuable because we hope that it will lead to more effective instruction. …

Sixty-four percent (64%) of respondents indicated they preferred the five-day school week, while just 24% preferred the four-day school week. • Thirty percent (30%) of respondents indicated they could not provide reliable childcare if their school used a four-day week. These individuals voiced the strongest support for the five-day model, with 84% saying they preferred five days and just 6% choosing four days. • A majority of respondents indicated that they supported expanding educational options for students in four-day school districts. Sixty-nine percent (69%) supported interdistrict choice for students in four-day school districts. Meanwhile, 59% supported offering private school vouchers to students in four-day school districts.

This policy primer explains how state education finance policies provide funding protections for school districts. These are generally thought of as "hold harmless" and "declining enrollment" provisions. The primer provides an assessment of the relative trade-offs of these policies.

Following the Great Recession, public schools in the United States experienced significant financial pressures. Due to budgetary pressures, school districts had to make difficult decisions in regards to teaching positions and wages. In this paper, we use individual teacher data from Missouri to assess the impact of the great recession on teacher salaries. Adjusting for inflation, we compare two cohorts of teachers over a period of nine years before and after the recession. Our results indicate wages for teachers post-recession are lower than they were for teachers working pre-recession. The difference is greatest when we examine total teacher salary which includes extra duty pay, such as stipends.

Since the first modern school choice laws were passed in the early 1990s, access to educational options has grown tremendously. Today, more than 6,900 charter schools exist in the 44 states and the District of Columbia which have charter school laws. These schools enroll more than 3.1 million children. During the same time period, prevalence of private school choice programs has grown dramatically with nearly 50 different programs in existence. Many have sought to examine the impacts of school choice programs on students. Indeed, there is a vigorous debate in the literature on this matter. This paper explores this issue from a different angle—school finance. The design of school choice programs, specifically how they are funded, has important implications for the legality of a program and with issues related to equity. These matters are incredibly important as states continually grapple with questions related to adequacy and equity in school finance. As school choice programs continue to expand, they offer an opportunity not just to expand educational options, as proponents suggest, but to improve how we fund education for all students. This paper explores the issues related to school finance and school choice litigation, then offers a school choice model that might be used to increase equity in finance and in educational options.

Critics of school choice claim support for educational options was an outgrowth of racist, segregationist views following the U.S. Supreme Court’s Ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In this paper, I examine these claims by analyzing the development of the public school system in the United States and the historical records from Citizens for Educational Freedom. Founded in 1959 in St. Louis, Missouri by Martin and Mae Duggan, CEF was a grassroots school choice organization. The records contain newsletters, text from speeches and national conventions, and personal correspondence, among other relevant materials. The records help us understand the motives and mind-set of the early school choice movement.

In this brief, we examine an important but obscure form of state spending on K–12 education—state subsidies of school district pension costs. In 2018, this exceeded $19 billion across 23 states. To put that amount into perspective, 2018 federal spending on Title I programs was $15.8 billion. This revenue stream is often ignored in analyses of state aid for K–12 and its distribution across districts. Until recently, accounting standards did not require pension plans to report these implicit subsidies to the school districts, so they did not typically know the size of their subsidy. In some important cases, it was missing from state totals for education aid. In the first comprehensive tabulation of these data, we show that this subsidy can be as much as $2,400 per pupil, as it is in Connecticut. In Illinois, it comprises an additional 56% of state spending on K–12 on top of all formula and categorical aid.

The debate over evolution has been raging in America\u27s public schools for the past century. This has led to numerous court cases that moved our teachers from teaching creationism in classrooms to today\u27s curriculum of evolution only. Scientists hold evolution as an overarching theory that ties together many different principles. However, some feel evolution reaches too far and into the beliefs and worldviews of students. The research sought to understand the debate over evolution and find out what implications an evolution-only curriculum had on student\u27s values. A descriptive study was conducted utilizing a research-constructed survey. The findings revealed there was not a significant correlation between the students\u27 worldview and what they reported being taught to them in high school. However, there was a significant correlation between what students were taught and their believe in or acceptance of evolution. Similarly, there was a significant correlation between what the students believed about evolution and their worldview

Salary spiking is the practice of boosting one's wages in the period just before retirement in order to reap larger retirement benefits. This may happen in Defined Benefit pension plans because they often do not base benefits on contributions, but on a formula, which takes into account a short window of time. Using two sources of data, school district salary schedules and actual teacher salaries for Missouri teachers, we estimate the prevalence of salary spiking. We do this by using seven years of actual salary data to forecast a worker's final three years then compare this forecast to the individual's actual wages. While we find evidence of salary spiking in all our samples and models, our estimates of spiking vary considerably across years. This suggests that some macro factors in the economy, possibly the lingering impacts of the great recession, may affect estimates of salary spiking.

Historically, the government has sought to improve the quality of the teacher workforce by requiring certification. Teachers are among the most licensed public personnel employees in the United States. Traditionally, an education degree with a student teaching experience and passage of licensure exams were necessary for licensure. In the 1980s, alternative paths to certification developed. In this article, we evaluated the impact of licensure screens and licensure routes on student achievement. Our findings from an analysis of Arkansas data suggest that there is little difference in terms of quality between traditionally and alternatively certified teachers. However, licensure exams do have some predictive power.

Using a unique dataset, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between observable teacher characteristics and teacher effectiveness. Effectiveness is measured as a teacher’s ability to improve student achievement on a standardized test. This analysis focuses on teachers of math and science at the elementary and middle school levels, as well as teachers of algebra, geometry, and 11 th grade English language arts. The sample is drawn from Arkansas, a state that has a much more rural population than other states and cities where this type of analysis has been conducted in the past. For the analysis I am unable to link teachers directly to students, but I can match teachers and students to a course within a school. Thus, I generate a value added score at the school-course level and attribute that score to each teacher in that school, who teaches that course. I then regress observable teacher characteristics on the school-course value-added measure. In this way, I analyze the relati...

If a teacher teaches what seems to him a very thoughtful and careful lesson, but students don't learn the skills and/or knowledge intended, was it a good lesson? The answer, we believe, is obvious: If students aren't learning, then the teaching isn't effective. Plain and simple. Thus, teacher evaluation should absolutely be focused on student outcomes. If citizens and policy makers and educators have decided that the primary objective of schools is to foster student learning and if we have the tools to adequately measure student learning (we do), then it naturally follows that we should be assessing teacher effectiveness based in large part on the learning gains of students in the classroom. In this Phi Delta Kappan issue on teacher evaluation, there will be several arguments for alternatives to teacher evaluations based on student tests. In this essay, we'll take the contrarian view and argue that using student test scores as a foundation for teacher evaluations is ...

In June of 2013, the Missouri Supreme Court upheld a state law that allowed students in unaccredited school districts to transfer to nearby accredited districts. The student’s home district would be responsible for making tuition payments and providing transportation. Using data, firsthand accounts, and structured interviews with school district superintendents, this paper examines what happened in response to the transfer program. Specifically, it examines how the districts responded. In all, more than 2,000 students transferred from the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens school districts, roughly a quarter of the total student population. These students transferred to two dozen area school districts. Except in isolated cases, evidence suggests that these students were largely absorbed into receiving school districts without causing much disruption. For the unaccredited school districts, however, the transfer program had a profound impact on school finances. April 2015

Rural schools, particularly high poverty rural schools, often have difficulty hiring and retaining qualified teachers. Here, we discuss three programs the Arkansas Department of Education has used to attract teachers to teacher Geographic Shortage Districts (GSDs) through material incentives. Unfortunately, none of the programs have had much success, perhaps in part since the funding offered was inadequate to attract new teachers to isolated communities. Additionally, we analyze the use of materialistic and non-materialistic incentives on the websites of all school districts designated as GSDs by the Arkansas Department of Education. Few GSDs display non-materialistic appeals that might entice individuals to seek out employment in the district, with the notable exception of KIPP Delta, the only charter school on the list, which has much more success recruiting teachers. We end with suggestions for policymakers and school district officials seeking to attract teachers to geographic s...

When policy advocates debate how best to ensure equity in public education funding, the topic of teacher pension reform rarely comes up. But, in fact, pensions represent a very large and fast-growing source of education spending, much of it distributed in ways that are, in a number of states, anything but equitable. When states subsidize teacher pensions directly, rather than expecting local school systems to fund those pensions themselves, affluent districts tend to benefit the most.

When pension benefits are not directly tied to contributions, some individuals may earn disproportionate returns on their retirement contributions. For instance, individuals who receive relatively larger late-career raises will receive disproportionately greater returns. For teachers, whose salaries are determined by salary schedules set by districts, these differences may be nonrandom, with larger raises accruing to teachers in more advantaged school districts. Using salary schedules from 490 school districts, the authors estimate the rate of return on contributions for each district. They then analyze the relationship between district characteristics and the rate of return. They find that the rate of return varies markedly among school districts, with larger and generally more affluent school districts benefiting. These findings demonstrate how salary structures and current pension design lead to cross-subsidization of pension benefits among school districts.

State policy makers are constantly looking for ways to improve teacher quality. An oft tried method is to increase the rigor of licensure exams. This study utilizes state administrative data from Arkansas to determine whether raising the cut-scores on licensure exams would improve the quality of the teacher workforce. In addition, the study explores the trade-offs of such a policy decision. It is concluded that raising the required passing score on the Praxis II would increase the quality of the teacher workforce, as measured by value-added student achievement. This change, however, would be accompanied with an important trade-off as it would reduce the number of minority teachers and potentially lead to negative outcomes in disadvantaged schools.

Abstract If developed thoughtfully and implemented carefully, value-added models can serve as key components in improved teacher evaluation systems by providing important information on the extent to which classroom teachers have fostered learning gains in math, language, reading, and other tested subjects. For many teachers, particularly those in English language arts and math, most (but not all) of their annual evaluations should be based on value-added measures of student learning gains.

Teacher attrition is a considerable burden for students and school leaders. Therefore, it is important for administrators to develop policies which increase retention rates. The purpose of this study is to explore teacher retention policies utilized by highly effective school districts. Through the use of semi-structured interviews with three key central office figures who oversee personnel, we explore each district's strategies for increasing teacher retention. Interestingly, our findings suggest that successful schools did not have explicit teacher retention policies. Rather, they have policies which promote teacher voice, supported teacher induction and development.

Salary spiking is the practice of boosting one's wages in the period just before retirement in order to reap larger retirement benefits. This may happen in Defined Benefit pension plans because they often do not base benefits on contributions, but on a formula, which takes into account a short window of time. Using two sources of data, school district salary schedules and actual teacher salaries for Missouri teachers, we estimate the prevalence of salary spiking. We do this by using seven years of actual salary data to forecast a worker's final three years then compare this forecast to the individual's actual wages. While we find evidence of salary spiking in all our samples and models, our estimates of spiking vary considerably across years. This suggests that some macro factors in the economy, possibly the lingering impacts of the great recession, may affect estimates of salary spiking.

Since the first modern school choice laws were passed in the early 1990s,
access to educational options has grown tremendously. Today, more than
6,900 charter schools exist in the 44 states and the District of Columbia which
have charter school laws. These schools enroll more than 3.1 million children.
During the same time period, prevalence of private school choice programs
has grown dramatically with nearly 50 different programs in existence. Many
have sought to examine the impacts of school choice programs on students.
Indeed, there is a vigorous debate in the literature on this matter. This paper
explores this issue from a different angle—school finance. The design of
school choice programs, specifically how they are funded, has important
implications for the legality of a program and with issues related to equity.
These matters are incredibly important as states continually grapple with
questions related to adequacy and equity in school finance. As school choice
programs continue to expand, they offer an opportunity not just to expand
educational options, as proponents suggest, but to improve how we fund
education for all students. This paper explores the issues related to school
finance and school choice litigation, then offers a school choice model that
might be used to increase equity in finance and in educational options.

State policy makers are constantly looking for ways to improve teacher quality. An oft tried method is to increase the rigor of licensure exams. This study utilizes state administrative data from Arkansas to determine whether raising the cut-scores on licensure exams would improve the quality of the teacher workforce. In addition, the study explores the trade-offs of such a policy decision. It is concluded that raising the required passing score on the Praxis II would increase the quality of the teacher workforce, as measured by value-added student achievement. This change, however, would be accompanied with an important trade-off as it would reduce the number of minority teachers and potentially lead to negative outcomes in disadvantaged schools. In every profession, the difference between an effective employee and an ineffective one can be substantial. This is especially true in education, where the quality of a teacher can have a significant impact on a child's life. In fact,