Attracting Well-Qualified Teachers to Struggling Schools

The belief that schools are going to educate every child is so widely accepted now that it is easy to forget that schools were not always expected to bring every child to high standards of performance. Until fairly recently it was permissible practice to reserve the most qualified teachers for those schools serving high-achieving, affluent, college-bound students who were believed to hold the greatest promise of success.

But holding school systems accountable for improving the performance of all schools and all students might well require that resources—both human and financial—be allocated according to greatest need. This notion presents a challenge to public education. Can school superintendents and union representatives work together to design fair, effective strategies to ensure that the students with the greatest needs are assigned especially well-qualified teachers?

This article analyzes the enormous complexity of this issue, including the impact of teacher quality on student achievement, the evidence that teachers regularly migrate out of low-performing schools, and the potential solution that lies in offering incentives to well-qualified teachers who commit to work in struggling schools.

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Ample evidence confirms that our poorest children face the greatest educational challenges. Students who attend schools with concentrated poverty have vastly unequal opportunities to develop literacy and other academic skills.¹ High-poverty schools suffer from fewer resources, greater teacher and administrator shortages, fewer applications for vacancies, higher absenteeism among teachers and staff, and higher rates of teacher and administrator turnover. Problems related to working conditions and the organization of the schools are compounded by social problems related to poverty in the larger community: hunger, homelessness, crime, substance abuse, chronic health problems, parental unemployment, and low levels of parental education, literacy, and job skills. These problems, in turn, contribute to higher rates of student absenteeism and mobility, higher dropout rates, and lower levels of academic achievement.

For example, the likelihood is greater that children will have difficulty learning to read if they are poor, non-white, or non-native speakers of English.² In 2000, only 16 percent of Hispanic fourth-graders and only 12 percent of blacks scored at or above proficient levels of achievement in reading, compared to 40 percent of whites.³ Similar disparities occurred between poor and non-poor students: only 14 percent of low-income fourth-graders achieved reading proficiency, compared to 41 percent of those who were not poor. At the end of a decade of unprecedented efforts nationwide to improve public schools, roughly six out of every 10 poor and minority students still failed to reach even the basic level in reading achievement.

A seemingly endless list of strategies has been proposed to close this achievement gap: smaller classes, smaller schools, standards-based reform, whole-school reform, lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, before- and after-school programs, charter schools, and parental involvement. The most drastic strategies include privatization of public school systems, mayoral and state takeovers, and school reconstitution.

However, none of these strategies is likely to work in the absence of highly qualified teachers and strong, supportive principals who can create good working conditions that will attract and retain them. A different kind of strategy to close the achievement gap, and one that has received far too little attention, is to create incentives that spur well-qualified teachers to select and remain in the schools that serve students with the greatest needs. Recently, 11 states have passed legislation to increase teacher pay,⁴ and many states and districts are offering various monetary incentives to lure more teachers to their ranks and keep the ones they already have—all reasonable steps at a time when there is a shortage of qualified teachers. But relatively few incentives are expressly designed to attract and retain teachers in the struggling schools where they are needed the most.⁵

Depressing Disparities

The effects of teacher quality on student achievement are well-documented. Although researchers disagree on the best measure of teacher quality (e.g., experience, test scores, advanced degrees, state certification, etc.), remarkably consistent patterns suggest that teachers are not equitably distributed across schools by any of these measures. The more impoverished and racially isolated the school, the greater the likelihood that students in the school will be taught by inexperienced teachers, uncertified teachers, and out-of-field teachers, as shown in the following examples.

• Experience: Darling-Hammond (1995) observes that studies of teacher efficacy consistently show that experienced teachers are more effective than beginners at resolving a number of instructional and managerial problems, such as maintaining discipline, motivating students, and adapting instruction for students with diverse learning needs.⁶

Yet novice teachers with three years of classroom experience or less are twice as likely to be assigned to high-minority, high-poverty schools.⁷ In four of the five largest school districts in Maryland, for example, schools with the highest average percentage of novice teachers (46 percent) were compared to schools with the lowest average percentage of novice teachers (11 percent).⁸ Schools with the largest proportions of novice teachers had more than twice as many minority students, almost three times as many poor students, and less than half as many students achieving at satisfactory levels on state achievement tests.

• Preparation, knowledge, and skills: Research by Guyton and Farokhi (1987) indicates that teachers' subject-matter knowledge and knowledge about teaching and learning are strongly associated with ratings of teacher effectiveness in the classroom.⁹ Yet poor and minority students are disproportionately found in classrooms of teachers with weak preparation and training.

In a study of teacher migration in New York State public schools between 1993 and 1998, Lankford, Loeb, and Wyckoff (2002), found that teachers who changed districts were half as likely to have failed either the general knowledge portion of the National Teachers Examination or the New York State Liberal Arts and Science certification exam and 35 percent more likely to hold bachelor's degrees from highly or most competitive colleges. Schools that had weak teachers as measured by one attribute were more likely to have weak teachers on other measures, and lower-performing students were more likely to be in schools with these less-qualified teachers.¹⁰

Ingersoll (2002) found that 34 percent of the classes offered in high-poverty schools and 29 percent offered in predominantly minority schools in 2000 were taught by teachers with less than a college minor in the subject they were assigned to teach.¹¹ In contrast, only 19 to 21 percent of the classes offered in schools with low percentages of poor and minority students were taught by out-of-field teachers.

In California, more than 40,000 classroom teachers were teaching on emergency permits or waivers in school year 1999-2000. Most were concentrated in urban school districts with the highest proportions of the state's poor and minority students. Low-achieving schools were nearly five times as likely as high-achieving schools to employ these teachers; high-minority schools were nearly seven times as likely as low-minority schools to employ them.¹²

• Turnover: High rates of teacher migration are disruptive and can adversely affect morale, community relationships, and school performance. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, teachers in schools with minority enrollments of 50 percent or more migrate at twice the rate of teachers in schools with few minority students.¹³

In Philadelphia, for example, one-third of the jobs held by teachers in the public schools turned over between 1996 and 1999.¹⁴ Teachers who moved didn't necessarily leave Philadelphia; migration to other schools within the district accounted for nearly half of all job changes. But when teachers did move, they tended to move to "more desirable" schools within the city (those with higher test scores, lower poverty rates, and fewer minority students).

Similar patterns were documented by Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (2001) in their three-year study of teacher mobility in Texas.¹⁵ On average, teachers who switched districts moved to districts where student achievement was 3 percentile points higher and the proportions of black, Hispanic, and poor students were lower, by 2.5 percent, 5 percent, and 6.6 percent, respectively. Even when teachers switched schools within urban districts, they tended to seek out schools with higher student achievement, fewer black and Hispanic students, and fewer students eligible for subsidized lunches. According to the researchers, "these patterns are consistent with the frequently hypothesized placement of new teachers in the most difficult teaching situations within urban districts coupled with an ability to change locations as they move up the experience ranks."¹⁶ The only teachers who broke with this pattern were black teachers, who were more likely to move to schools with higher enrollments of black students than their originating schools.

Importantly, Hanushek et al. note that the data do not indicate whether the characteristics of the students themselves directly affected teachers' decisions to migrate, or served as proxies for other factors such as less attractive working conditions in the schools or travel time to work. Either way, the effect was the same: Experienced teachers tended to shift to schools serving fewer poor, minority, and low-achieving students.

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These patterns strongly suggest that without intervention, schools that serve students most in need of experienced, well-prepared teachers will continue to face recurring staff vacancies. To fill these vacancies, school districts will continue to assign inexperienced teachers who lack the seniority to request transfers, or they will resort to filling vacancies with uncertified teachers who hold emergency permits or waivers, interns, long-term substitutes, or teachers who do not hold degrees in the subjects they are assigned to teach.

Large numbers of experienced teachers will not choose to teach in these schools under current circumstances. Indeed, 69 percent of teachers in North Carolina, 53 percent of administrators, and 57 percent of teacher assistants polled in March 2000 said that if given the opportunity, they would not volunteer to work in a low-performing school.¹⁷

One Source of the Disparities: Equal Pay for Unequal Work

Given the current compensation structure—in which all teachers in a district are working their way up the same ladder—why would a teacher choose to work in a low-performing school? It is a clear example of equal pay for unequal work if one set of teachers enjoys schools in safe neighborhoods, prepared students, well-qualified colleagues, and adequate materials in the classroom while another set of teachers faces quite the opposite. To keep well-qualified teachers in low-performing schools for more than a couple of years, this imbalance must be addressed. Incentives—monetary and non-monetary—are necessary because these schools continue to be the most difficult to staff, and "the difficulty of these jobs is rarely reflected in the salaries offered to teachers who fill them."¹⁸

The problem with the traditional single-salary schedule, economists contend, is that if all teachers in a district are compensated at the same level without regard to differences in amenities or the difficulty of the task, they will naturally tend to gravitate to jobs with less stress, fewer demands, and more desirable working conditions. In other areas of the economy, wages adjust to compensate for differences that make some jobs relatively more attractive than others. If wages are not allowed to adjust, high-poverty, low-performing schools will have much greater difficulty competing for experienced, qualified teachers. Economist Michael Podgursky argues that the

single-salary schedule yields perverse, unintended consequences. Rather than allowing wages to adjust to compensate for differing working conditions, teachers must adjust instead. Special education teachers "burn out" and leave the profession, or transfer over to assignments outside of special education. Troubled schools in urban districts end up with the least experienced teachers as more experienced teachers use their seniority to transfer to favored schools. Teachers move but pay doesn't.

If schools differ in terms of nonpecuniary conditions (e.g., safety, student rowdiness), then equalizing teacher pay will disequalize teacher quality. On the other hand, if districts wish to equalize quality they will need to disequalize pay.¹⁹

Today, both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association favor offering locally developed financial incentives to qualified teachers who choose to work in hard-to-staff schools. The AFT first endorsed this position in the mid-1980s. It reaffirmed this position in February 2001, by adopting a resolution on professional compensation for teachers that asserted "increased compensation is necessary to attract teachers to difficult assignments and shortage areas if we are to have qualified teachers in every classroom."²⁰

In fact, higher pay in low-performing or hard-to-staff schools has wide appeal among teachers. In an April 2000 Public Agenda survey of teachers with five years of experience or less, the overwhelming majority (84 percent) favored paying higher salaries to teachers "who agree to work in difficult schools with hard-to-educate children."²¹

Monetary Incentives, Along with Improved Conditions, Can Help

Because most incentive programs are fairly new, this strategy is largely untested, and policymakers are proceeding cautiously because they are not sure how effective differentiated-pay systems will be.²² Moreover, some argue, it is not clear whether teachers will respond in predictable ways to monetary incentives because good teachers are drawn to the profession by teaching's intrinsic rewards—in other words, "the best teachers aren't in it for the money."²³

But money does matter, and how it matters becomes quite clear if salary is viewed as just one of many factors that employees weigh when assessing the relative attractiveness of any particular job, such as opportunities for advancement, difficulty of the job, length of commute, and flexibility of working hours. Salary matters less when other characteristics of the workplace are personally or professionally satisfying. When they are not, or if the work itself is significantly more demanding, salary matters more and can be the tipping point that determines whether teachers stay or leave. Adjusting salaries upward can compensate for less appealing aspects of jobs; conversely, improving the relative attractiveness of jobs can compensate for lower salaries.

Evidence that money matters more when the job is more challenging comes from studies of staffing patterns in California and Texas school districts. Nearly half of California teachers surveyed in 2001 named pay scale and benefits as the most, second most, or third most important reason they chose the district where they work. Teachers in high-poverty, high-minority districts named pay and benefits as an important reason more often than others.²⁴ In Texas, Kirby, Naftel, and Berends (1999) found that increases in teacher pay significantly lower teacher attrition, particularly in high-poverty school districts. In high-poverty districts, a $1,000 increase in beginning teacher salaries would reduce teacher attrition by an estimated 6.2 percent, compared to 1.6 percent in medium-poverty districts, and 1 percent in low-poverty districts.²⁵

Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (2001) conclude that higher salaries could overcome teacher reluctance to work in hard-to-staff schools, but to be effective the increases would have to be substantial. They found that targeted pay raises of 20, 30, or even 50 percent may be needed to offset the disadvantages that some schools face in the teacher labor market.²⁶ The amount of additional compensation required to attract and retain teachers need not be as daunting, of course, if schools can improve the relative attractiveness of these jobs in other ways.

In fact, few teachers will be swayed by financial incentives if they suspect that they are purely compensatory measures to make up for bad working conditions, lack of resources, and poor leadership, rather than part of a larger plan to make teaching in hard-to-staff schools personally and professionally rewarding.²⁷ As Harvard education professor Richard Murnane points out, "Paying people extra money to do an impossible job doesn't work, and you need to make the jobs doable such that at the end of the day, people feel glad that they're there."²⁸

Clearly, any serious effort to attract well-qualified teachers to the schools that serve students with the greatest needs will require attention to a whole range of factors that make the job more doable, including improving school leadership, reducing class size, and clamping down on student discipline problems. But the fact remains: "Hard-to-staff schools serve children with more special needs and fewer social advantages and teachers are not compensated for gaining the special skills necessary to meet these students' greater needs."²⁹ All indicators suggest that paying teachers more money to take on tougher assignments is an essential part of the solution—and districts cannot afford this without help from states and the federal government.

Mandates Are Not Likely To Solve the Problem

To supply struggling schools with high-quality teachers, some districts may be tempted to simply mandate that teachers transfer. But this is not a feasible option. New York City is a case in point. In August 2000, State Commissioner of Education Richard Mills sued the New York City Board of Education for hiring nearly 600 uncertified teachers to staff the city's 99 lowest-performing schools, in violation of Board of Regents' policies.³⁰ Mills ordered then-Chancellor Harold Levy to replace the uncertified teachers in these schools and to fill new vacancies with certified teachers.

One response developed by Levy was an incentive plan to help fill vacancies by dramatically increasing the starting salaries of experienced private and parochial school teachers who agreed to transfer into the city's lowest-performing schools.³¹ A spokesman for Mills praised the incentive plan, but suggested that Levy transfer teachers from other city schools as well, even if they did not want to go.

Mr. Levy expressed reluctance, noting that "historically the board has lost certified teachers to the suburbs when it has attempted involuntarily to require new teachers to teach in undesirable locations. I view this road as folly."³² Mr. Levy estimated that more than 2,000 certified teachers turned down job offers in 2001 because they did not want to be assigned to one of the city's 99 lowest-performing schools.33 Because the board of education was under court order to staff these schools with certified teachers first, recruiters actually turned away certified teachers from schools with vacancies because they were not considered failing schools. One exasperated teacher who said that she would never work in a failing school argued

You have to be a combination of a social worker and Mother Teresa to work in those schools. Those kids deserve a decent education, but we as teachers deserve a decent work atmosphere. We deserve to be safe. I worked so hard to get my license, I did all this schooling, and the last thing I heard, America was a country of free choice.³⁴

Pressure from the New York City teachers' union added to Levy's reluctance. Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, vowed to fight involuntary transfers of experienced teachers in court. She cautioned that "at a time when the city is begging for teachers, you will lose people when you mandate where they work."³⁵ Moreover, she warned that "forcing teachers to transfer to troubled schools would ‘outrage' parents and compel the teachers to abandon New York City schools altogether."³⁶

The Incentives Must Be Carefully Designed

One of the strongest advocates for incentives turns out to be New York City's United Federation of Teachers. Though they adamantly oppose any plan to transfer teachers involuntarily to low-performing schools, the union favors monetary incentives to attract teachers to these schools voluntarily. Working together, the union and the district developed a program in 1999 called Extended Time Schools in which certified teachers who chose to transfer into one of 39 low-performing schools received a 15 percent pay raise in exchange for working 40 extra minutes per day and participating in an extra week of training at the beginning of the school year. The incentive prompted about 600 teachers to apply for positions in these schools, which, in turn, contributed to gains in student achievement. (Read more about this initiative in the following article by Julia Koppich.) The success of New York City's initiative inspired Baltimore's superintendent, Carmen Russo, to create a similar program in 2001. Teachers in selected low-performing schools work an extra 55 minutes a day and receive an 11 percent increase in salary.

Growing numbers of states and districts (and in some cases, corporations and the federal government) are experimenting with incentives to increase teacher supply.³⁷ However, only two states, California and New York, have developed comprehensive systems of targeted incentives that are focused and powerful enough to increase the supply of teachers for hard-to-staff schools. In California, benefits for teachers who take on the toughest assignments include:

• Loan forgiveness: Assumes up to $19,000 in student loan payments if teacher candidates agree to teach in a subject-shortage area in low-performing schools for at least four years.

• Housing incentives: Allows the use of tax credits or mortgage revenue bonds for teachers who commit to serve at least five years in a low-performing school.

• Additional bonuses for National Board Certified Teachers: Awards a supplemental $20,000 bonus to National Board Certified Teachers who serve in low-performing schools for four years, in addition to the one-time $10,000 bonus for all National Board Certified Teachers.

However, the budget crisis in California has led state policymakers to discontinue some incentives offered previously, such as a fellowship program for teacher candidates who committed to teach in a low-performing school.

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To be successful, incentive plans must be carefully designed, but some have led to unintended consequences. In Hartford, for example, the district brought in new teachers in hard-to-staff subject areas at higher steps on the salary schedule.³⁸ But the change angered many longtime district employees when some newly hired teachers were offered higher salaries than experienced veterans teaching in the same hard-to-staff areas. This occurred because incumbent teachers were forced to forego step increases during three salary freezes and, unlike the new hires, did not receive salary credit for student teaching. The Hartford Federation of Teachers estimates that this unusual pay disparity could affect 30 to 40 percent of the city's teachers, and it has filed a grievance. Former union president Edwin Vargas warned of additional costs if veteran Hartford teachers rectify the pay disparity by switching districts: "If Hartford loses teachers to the suburbs, they're going to lose experienced people, and they'll hire inexperienced people at a higher salary.... If they're going to be competitive with the new, they can't mistreat the old."³⁹

Much can also be learned about well-structured incentive plans from the private sector, where pay has long been differentiated according to the difficulty of an assignment or the specialized training required. As Podgursky (2001) notes:

Differential pay by field within professions is pervasive. Cardiologists on average earn much more than general practitioners; corporate lawyers earn more than public-interest lawyers; and intensive-care nurses earn more than school nurses.... Economists see these types of pay differentials as central to the efficient operation of markets. Professional fields that require greater training or draw on relatively specialized skills typically command higher earnings. Alternatively, some tasks involve greater stress and less pleasant working conditions. Other things being equal, these too will command higher earnings. Even the U.S. military recognizes the principle of compensating differentials with overseas and hazardous duty pay.⁴⁰

Finding the right balance of monetary and non-monetary incentives will, no doubt, be difficult. To ensure that the balance of incentives will work as intended and will appeal to teachers in different areas, it will be important to allow teachers a say in developing local compensation policies.

But if solutions are not developed quickly, poor students will continue to be underserved and critics of public education will continue to press for alternatives, such as privatization and vouchers, to solve the persistent problem of staffing low-performing schools. The Bush Administration, for example, has proposed spending $3.7 billion over five years on a federal income tax credit to enable parents to withdraw their children from low-performing public schools.⁴¹ Rather than using the money to improve these schools by increasing teacher compensation and improving working conditions so that teachers will not want to leave, the proposal will allow parents to claim up to $2,500 per year toward the costs of tuition, fees, and transportation so that they can remove their children from public schools identified as failing under new federal guidelines.

It is increasingly clear that school system leaders and teachers' unions must come to terms with what it will take to attract and retain qualified teachers in the most challenging schools. When weighed against the costs of lost educational opportunities, federal sanctions, and the hefty price of teacher attrition, financial incentives to attract and retain teachers in the nation's most challenging classrooms are an option well worth pursuing. For tens of thousands of students in hard-to-staff schools, a highly qualified teacher can be a life-altering investment. The question is not whether we can afford to pay the price. The question is whether we can afford not to.

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Cynthia D. Prince is issues analysis director at the American Association of School Administrators. This article is based on papers she previously authored for AASA, The Challenge of Attracting Good Teachers and Principals to Struggling Schools (January 2002) and Higher Pay in Hard-to-Staff Schools: The Case for Financial Incentives (June 2002). The complete papers are available online at AASA's Web site (www.aasa. org/issues_and_insights/issues_dept/index.htm).

Endnotes

1. Orfield, G. (2001, July). Schools more separate: Consequences of a decade of resegregation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, The Civil Rights Project.

2. Snow, C.E., Burns, M.S., & Griffin, P. (Eds.) (1998). Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

3. Donahue, P.L., Finnegan, R.J., Lutkus, A.D., Allen, N.L., & Campbell, J.R. (2001). The Nation's Report Card: Fourth-Grade Reading 2000, NCES 2001-499. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

4. Hirsch, E. (2001, February). Teacher recruitment: Staffing classrooms with quality teachers. Denver, CO: State Higher Education Executive Officers. www.sheeo.org/quality/mobility/recruitment.PDF.

5. Olson, L., "Sweetening the pot." In Education Week (2000). "Quality Counts 2000: Who should teach?" www.edweek.org/sreports/qc00/templates/article.cfm?slug=recruit.htm.

6. Darling-Hammond, L. (1995). Inequality and access to knowledge. In J.A. Banks & C.A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education, p. 465-483. New York: Simon & Schuster Macmillan. Cited in Dezmon, B. (Ed.). (2001, January). Minority Achievement in Maryland at the Millennium. Baltimore: Maryland State Department of Education.

7. Bolich, A.M. (2000). Reduce your losses: Help new teachers become veteran teachers. Atlanta, GA: Southern Regional Education Board.

8. Maryland State Education That Is Multicultural Advisory Council. (1998, September). Minority achievement in Maryland: The state of the state. Baltimore: Maryland State Department of Education.

9. Guyton, E., & Farokhi, E. (1987, September-October). Relationships among academic performance, basic skills, subject matter knowledge, and teaching skills of teacher education graduates. Journal of Teacher Education 38(5), p. 37-42. Cited in Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Solving the dilemmas of teacher supply, demand, and standards: How we can ensure a competent, caring, and qualified teacher for every child. New York, NY: National Commission on Teaching & America's Future.

10. Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (2002, Spring). Teacher sorting and the plight of urban schools: A descriptive analysis. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, (24)1, p. 37-62.

11. Ingersoll, R. (2002). Tabulations of data from the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey prepared for the Education Trust. In Jerald, C. (2002, August). All talk, no action: Putting an end to out-of-field teaching. Washington, DC: Education Trust.

12. The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning (2000). The status of the teaching profession, 2000: An update to the Teaching and California's Future Task Force. Santa Cruz, CA: Author.

13. National Center for Education Statistics (1998). The condition of education. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Cited in Haycock, K. (2000, Spring). No more settling for less. Thinking K-16, 4(1), p. 3-12. Washington, DC: The Education Trust.

14. Viadero, D. "Philadelphia study: Teacher transfers add to educational inequities." Education Week, April 18, 2001.

15. Hanushek, E.A., Kain, J.F., & Rivkin, S.G. (2001, November). Why public schools lose teachers. Working paper 8599. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. www.nber.org/ papers/w8599.

16. Ibid, p. 13.

17. North Carolina Association of Educators (2000, July). Getting it Right: Improving the ABC's of North Carolina. ABC Survey Result Summary, July 2000. www.ncae.org/news/abcsurvey/ abcsurvey.shtml.

18. Shields, P.M., Esch, C.E., Humphrey, D.C., Young, V.M., Gaston, M., & Hunt, H. (1999). The status of the teaching profession: Research findings and policy recommendations. A report to the Teaching and California's Future Task Force. Santa Cruz, CA: The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. www.cftl.org/publications.html.

19. Podgursky, M. (2001). "Regulation versus markets: The case for greater flexibility in the market for public school teachers," p. 137-138. In Wang, M.C., & Walberg, H.J. (Eds.), Tomorrow's Teachers, p. 117-148. Richmond, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation.

20. Archer, J. "AFT to urge locals to consider new pay strategies." Education Week, February 21, 2001. www.edweek.org/ew/ew_printstory.cfm?slug=23aft.h20;

American Federation of Teachers. AFT on the issues: Merit pay, "pay-for-performance," and professional teacher compensation. www.aft.org/issues/meritpay/ meritpay.html.

21. Farkas, S., Johnson, J., & Foleno, T., with Duffett, A., & Foley, P. (2000). A sense of calling: Who teaches and why. New York, NY: Public Agenda. Summary available online. www.publicagenda.org/specials/teachers/teachers.htm.

22. Blair, J. "Lawmakers plunge into teacher pay." Education Week, February 21, 2001. www.edweek.org/ew/ew_printstory.cfm?slug= 23salary.h20.

23. Mathews, J. "The smart money: In an effort to improve struggling schools officials increasingly use financial bonuses to lure good teachers." Washington Post, April 10, 2001, p. A12.

24. Shields, P.M., Esch, C.E., Humphrey, D.C., Young, V.M., Gaston, M., & Hunt, H. (1999). The status of the teaching profession: Research findings and policy recommendations. A report to the Teaching and California's Future Task Force, Santa Cruz, CA: The Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning.

25. Kirby, S.N., Naftel, S., & Berends, M. (1999). Staffing at-risk school districts in Texas: Problems and prospects. Santa Monica, CA: RAND. www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1083/.

26. Hanushek, E.A., Kain, J.F., & Rivkin, S.G. (2001, November). Why public schools lose teachers. Working Paper 8599. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. www.nber.org/papers/ w8599.

27. Claycomb, C. (2000, Winter). "High-quality urban school teachers: What they need to enter and to remain in hard-to-staff schools." The State Education Standard, p. 17-20. www.nasbe.org/ Educational_Issues/Articles/1_Winter2000/Claycomb%20article.pdf.

28. Viadero, D. "Study: Teachers seek better working conditions." Education Week, January 9, 2002. www.edweek.org/ew/ newstory.cfm?slug=16pay.h21.

29. Southeast Center for Teaching Quality. (2002, January). Recruiting teachers for hard-to-staff schools: Solutions for the southeast & the nation, p. 5. Chapel Hill: Author. www.teachingquality.org/ resources/pdfs/hard_to_staff_schools_regional_brief.pdf.

30. Goodnough, A. "Political memo: Levy is sparring with an old ally over direction of the City schools." New York Times, August 10, 2000.

31. Goodnough, A. "Levy offers higher salaries to staff the worst schools." New York Times, August 2, 2000.

32. Goodnough, A. "Political memo: Levy is sparring with an old ally over direction of the City schools." New York Times, August 10, 2000.

33. Grace, M. "Teachers ducking certificates: Fear being assigned to bad schools." New York Daily News, April 24, 2001; Gittrich, G. "The certification disincentive: ‘Reward' is often job at bad school." New York Daily News, April 24, 2001.

34. Goodnough, A. & Kelley, T. "Newly certified teachers, looking for a job, find a paradox." New York Times, September 1, 2000.

35. Ibid.

36. Goodnough, A. "Levy offers higher salaries to staff the worst schools." New York Times, August 2, 2000.

37. Prince, C. (2002, June). Higher pay in hard-to-staff schools: The case for financial incentives. Arlington, VA: American Association of School Administrators. www.aasa.org/issues_and_insights/issues_dept/higher_pay.pdf.

38. Gottlieb, R. "For city teachers, time doesn't pay: New salary rules favor newcomers, union says." Hartford Courant, May 28, 2001, p. A1; National School Boards Association. "In Hartford, new teachers paid more than veterans." School Board News, July 17, 2001. www.nsba.org/sbn/01-jul/071701-2.htm.

39. Gottlieb, R. "For city teachers, times doesn't pay: New salary rules favor newcomer, union says." Hartford Courant, May 28, 2001, p. A1.

40. Podgursky, M. (2001). "Regulation versus markets: The case for greater flexibility in the market for public school teachers," p. 137. In Wang, M.C., & Walberg, H.J. (Eds.), Tomorrow's Teachers, p. 117-148. Richmond, CA: McCutchan Publishing Corporation.

41. Robelen, E.W. & Walsh, M. "Bush proposal: Give tax credit for K-12 tuition." Education Week, February 13, 2002. www.edweek.org/ew/newstory.cfm?slug=22choice.h21.