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When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered his first State of the City address in 2002, to a wounded city still shaken by the death and destruction of a terrorist attack, he vowed to rebuild Lower Manhattan, but he also trained his focus on the city's much-maligned school system. "We must strengthen teacher evaluation and training," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We must improve teacher retention by focusing compensation on those educators just starting their careers." Ten years later, having wrested control of the sprawling system and transformed it into a national laboratory for reform, Mr. Bloomberg devoted most of his penultimate State of the City speech on Thursday to education, which he hopes will form the cornerstone of his legacy.

Earlier this month, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal unveiled a broad series of education proposals, which included an expansion of private school vouchers in his state and overhauling how teachers are evaluated and compensated. "This is a bold plan and a signal to teachers-at all career stages-that help is on the way," the Republican said. Leaders of the state's teachers' unions, however, don't see it that way.

We examine earnings records for more than 130,000 classroom teachers employed by Florida public schools between the 2001-02 and 2006-07 school years, roughly 35,000 of whom left the classroom during that time.  A majority of those leaving the classroom remained employed by public school districts.  Among teachers in grades 4-8 leaving for other industries, a 1 standard deviation increase in estimated value-added to student math and reading achievement is associated with 6-8 percent higher earnings outside of teaching.  The relationship between effectiveness and earnings is stronger in other industries than it is for the same groups of teachers while in the classroom, suggesting that current compensation systems do not fully account for the higher opportunity wages of effective teachers. 

City principals are increasingly unhappy with their jobs, according to the union that represents them. In the latest newsletter from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, President Ernest Logan reported that 73 percent of union members are not happy with their workload, compensation, and job security. That's up from 68 percent the last time the union surveyed its members, in 2009.

It's not often that you hear teachers should be paid less. In fact, it's almost always the exact opposite. From teachers unions to education reformers to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the refrain that teachers are underpaid is a constant. So, when conservative thinkers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation issued a paper on Tuesday arguing not only that teachers are overpaid, but when you factor in pensions, health care and other benefits, that total compensation for teachers is 52% higher than fair market value, it was bound to be controversial.

American public school teachers are paid far more than their smarts are worth. That's the provocative conclusion of a new study from two high-profile conservative think tanks. Researchers from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute found that public school teachers take home total compensation that's 52% higher than "fair market levels" for professionals with similar cognitive abilities. Unsurprisingly, their findings have riled the education world. "No, we do not agree that teachers are overpaid," public school reform advocate Michelle Rhee told Politico. "Under the status quo in most school districts, good classroom teachers are not only undervalued in pay, but as professionals generally." Of course, this isn't the final word on teacher pay. It's just the latest word. Big sweeping statements about teachers being overpaid or underpaid are perennial in the think tank world. Here are four of the biggest.

What the articles fail to document, however, are the contributions made by members of K12's board of directors. K12's chairman until very recently was Andrew Tisch, of the famous New York Tisch family. Reports are that Tisch just stepped down as chairman just a few weeks ago, but still appears to still serve on the board. He also appears to have been very well-compensated for his position, receiving both stock and options grants from the company. Why does this matter? Because Andrew Tisch and his family are Newark Mayor Cory Booker's biggest financial supporters.

"The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional human resource-management tasks, namely, hiring, firing, and compensation. By contrast, very little is known about how the availability of new information, or the experience of being evaluated, might change teacher effort and effectiveness. In the research reported here, we study one approach to teacher evaluation: practice-based assessment that relies on multiple, highly structured classroom observations conducted by experienced peer teachers and administrators. While this approach contrasts starkly with status quo "principal walk-through" styles of class observation, its use is on the rise in new and proposed evaluation systems in which rigorous classroom observation is often combined with other measures, such as teacher value-added based on student test scores."

"There continues to be much bluster out there in ed reformy land that money really isn't all that important - especially for traditional public school districts. That local public schools and districts already have way too much money but use it so inefficiently that any additional dollar would necessarily be wasted. An extension of this line of reasoning is that therefore differences in spending across districts are also inconsequential. It really doesn't matter - the reformy line of thinking goes - if the suburbs around Philly, Chicago or New York dramatically outspend them, as long as some a-contextual, poorly documented and often flat out wrong, blustery statement can be made about a seemingly large aggregate or per pupil spending figure that the average person on the street should simply find offensive. Much of this bluster about the irrelevance of funding is strangely juxtaposed with arguments that inequity of teacher quality and the adequacy of the quality of the teacher workforce are the major threats to our education system. But of course, these threats have little or nothing to do with money? Right? As I've explained previously - equitable distribution of quality teaching requires equitable (not necessarily equal) distribution of resources. Districts serving more needy student populations require smaller classes and more intensive supports if their students are expected to close the gap with their more advantaged peers - or strive for common outcome goals. Even recruiting similarly qualified teachers in higher need settings requires higher, not the same or lower compensation. Districts serving high need populations require a) more staff - more specialized, more diverse and even more of the same (core classroom teacher) staff, of b) at least equal qualifications. That means they need more money (than their more advantaged neighbors) to get the job done. If they so happen to have substantially less money, it's not a matter of simply tradin

"In American public opinion it almost goes without saying that teachers should be paid more. The public is especially supportive of increasing compensation for accomplished teachers, teachers dedicated to working in hard to staff subjects, and teachers committed to closing the achievement gap."

"The Los Angeles Unified School District squanders more than $500 million a year on an academic-improvement strategy that has consistently proven to be ineffective, researchers concluded in a report released Tuesday. The nation's second-largest school system spends 25% of its teacher payroll ($519 million a year) to compensate teachers for completing graduate coursework. These courses are a primary means by which teachers earn credits that translate to raises. Yet such training has shown no overall benefit in improving student performance, said Kate Walsh, president of the Washington-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which conducted the research."

"For all the efforts to improve education that are made in classrooms, school board meetings, research institutions, congressional chambers and elsewhere, one factor has in many ways eclipsed them all: an intense focus on standardized testing. High-stakes tests-flaws and all-seem to be driving everything from what subjects are taught, to how they are taught, to whether schools are closed, to how teachers are evaluated and compensated. Schools have even experimented with paying kids for higher test scores. Sadly, the pressure to measure has even diverted schools from implementing strategies known to improve student outcomes. "

As a growing number of states move toward legislation that would institute teacher merit pay, the debate around whether and how to use student test scores in high-stakes staffing decisions has become even more hotly contested. The majority of merit pay initiatives, such as those recently proposed in Ohio and Florida, rely to some extent on value-added estimation, the method of measuring a teacher's impact by tracking student growth on test scores from year to year. We recently exchanged e-mails with Steven Glazerman, a Senior Fellow at the policy research group Mathematica. Glazerman specializes in teacher recruitment, performance management, professional development, and compensation. According to Glazerman, a strong understanding of the constructive uses and limitations of value-added data can prove beneficial for district-level human resources practitioners.

The foundation of a good school is a faculty of talented teachers. But how do schools attract, support, and retain well-qualified teachers? Policymakers have increasingly turned to programs that use compensation reform and career ladders to complement more traditional approaches like mentoring and professional development.

One of the central policy ideas of market-based education reform is to increase both the risk and rewards of the teaching profession. The basic idea is to offer teachers additional compensation (increased rewards), but, in exchange, make employment and pay more contingent upon performance by implementing merit pay and weakening job protections such as tenure (increased risk). This trade-off, according to advocates, will not only force out low performers by paying them less and making them easier to fire, but it will also attract a "different type" of candidate to teaching - high-achievers who thrive in a high-stakes, high-reward system.

Florida's largest teachers' union is suing to block a new state law that eliminates tenure for new hires and links educators' compensation to student achievement.

Two competing pressures-decreased finances and rising policy interest-have left the future of performance-based teacher compensation uncertain.

Reform advocates and policymakers concerned about the quality and distribution of teachers support proposals of alternative compensation for teachers in hard-to-hire subject areas, hard-to-staff schools, and with special knowledge and skills. The successful implementation of such proposals depends in large part on teacher attitudes. The current body of research on teacher attitudes toward compensation reform paints an inconsistent picture of teachers views, largely ignoring the influence of individual and workplace characteristics on teacher attitudes. Results from a 2006 survey of teachers in Washington State linked to school and district data confirm earlier findings that teacher opinion about pay reform is not uniform, and further illustrates teacher preferences for different pay structures vary substantially by individual and workplace characteristics. Nearly three quarters of teachers favored higher pay for hard to-staff schools. In contrast, only 17% favored merit pay. Teachers with a high

"In this brief I consider the stability of value-added measures, the factors that are associated with the degree of stability and the resulting implications for future research and policy."