What Do AEFA Members Say? Summary of Results of an Education Finance and Policy Survey

In the spring of 2008 the authors surveyed members of the American Education Finance Association (AEFA) to gain insight into their views on education policy issues. The results summarize opinions of this broad group of education researchers and practitioners, providing AEFA members and education leaders with access to views that may be helpful as they consider policies to analyze or pursue. This article reports the results in six areas of current policy interest. How should education aid be distributed? Is school choice a good thing? Does school finance reform work? What has accountability wrought? Can school policies close the black-white achievement gap? And how should teachers be compensated? Our findings identify areas of substantial agreement as well as areas where there is disagreement. For example, there is considerable agreement that state and federal governments should provide additional funding for disadvantaged students but disagreement on how to measure school finance adequacy.

(Mis-)Measuring the Relative Pay of Public School Teachers

Statistics on the relative pay of public school teachers are routinely cited by plaintiffs in school finance (“adequacy”) lawsuits. However, comparisons of pay and benefits for public school teachers to those of professional employees in other sectors are complicated by the fact that most teachers work under contracts that are nine or ten months in length rather than a full year. The authors show that this makes household survey data on weekly earnings in the widely used Current Population Survey (CPS-ORG) unreliable. In general, employer-reported data on salaries and benefits such as the National Compensation Survey (NCS) or state administrative data are preferred for this type of comparison. NCS data on weekly earnings in metropolitan labormarkets suggest that pay of public school teachers compares much more favorably to that of nonteachers than CPS-ORG data suggest.