Is Teacher Pay Adequate?

Michael Podgursky ()
Additional contact information
Michael Podgursky: Department of Economics, University of Missouri-Columbia

No 601, Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri

Abstract: In school finance lawsuits plaintiffs often claim that pay levels are not sufficient to recruit teachers who can deliver constitutionally-mandated levels of educational services. In this paper I consider several ways in which one might bring economic theory and data to bear on that question. I conclude that at present, and at least for the near term, education research cannot prescribe an adequate level of school spending on teachers, whether in the form of pay, benefits, or professional training, that can reliability predict a target level of student performance. If courts are predisposed to intervene in this matter, a more reasonable standard for adequacy is whether available revenues, when spent in an efficient manner, are sufficient to staff classrooms with appropriately-certified teachers in a flexible licensing regime that satisfies both state and federal teacher quality standards.

Keywords: Teacher compensation; School finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
Date: Written 2006-02-03
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.missouri.edu/people/podgursky.shtml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Department of Economics, University of Missouri
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Mark Stratton ().