Funding Disparities and the Inequitable Distribution of Teachers: Evaluating Sources and Solutions.

By F. Adamson, Linda Darling-Hammond. 2012

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The inequitable distribution of well-qualified teachers to students in the United States is a longstanding issue. Despite federal mandates under the No Child Left Behind Act and the use of a range of incentives to attract teachers to high-need schools, the problem remains acute in many states. This study examines how and why teacher quality is inequitably distributed, by reviewing research and examining data on school funding, salaries, and teacher qualifications from California and New York—two large states that face similar demographic diversity and educational challenges. Using wage adjustments to control for cost of living differentials, we find that both overall school funding and teacher salary levels are highly inequitable both across and within states - generally exhibiting a ratio of 3 to 1 between high- and low-spending jurisdictions. Furthermore, low-salary districts serve students with higher needs, offer poorer working conditions, and hire teachers with significantly lower qualifications, who typically exhibit higher turnover. We find that districts serving the highest proportions of minority and low-income students have about twice as many uncredentialed and inexperienced teachers as do those serving the fewest. In an elasticity analysis, we find that increases in teacher salaries are associated with noticeable decreases in the proportions of teachers who are newly hired, uncredentialed, or less well educated. These teacher qualifications, in turn, are associated with student achievement, holding student characteristics constant. We review research on strategies that have been largely unsuccessful at addressing this problem, such as

Subfields: Education

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Handbook of Human and Social Conditions in Assessment (2016, background): “…these policies with teacher turnover given many other confounding variables, there is a large body of literature that correlates teacher turnover to the undesirable working conditions often prevalent within low SES schools (Adamson & Darling-Hammond, 2012; Loeb, Darling-Hammond, & Luczak, 2005).”