How Teachers' Choices Affect What a Dollar Can Buy: Wages and Quality in K-12 Schooling

This paper examines the distribution of teachers across schools and districts and the distribution of teacher salaries across districts both in New York State and nationally. It finds that much of the variation in teacher qualifications across schools is within districts. Salary schedules do not vary within districts. Thus, current salary differences are neither driving nor alleviating many of the disparities in teacher qualifications across schools. These disparities appear to be driven primarily by teacher preferences for high-achieving, high-socioeconomic-status students or for the working conditions in the schools these students attend. Targeted salary increases and/or targeted improvements in working conditions are needed to draw high-quality teachers to low-performing schools and to alleviate the inequities we see in the quality of the teaching force across the state and across the country. Paper prepared for the Education Finance Research Consortium