Early retirement incentives (ERIs) are increasingly prevalent in education as districts seek to close budget gaps by replacing expensive experienced teachers with lower-cost newer teachers. Combined with the aging of the teacher workforce, these ERIs are likely to change the composition of teachers dramatically in the coming years. We use exogenous variation from an ERI program in Illinois in t...

The teachers and the school authorities often call the parents in connection with a child’s ‘performance’ in school. The children have to face the wrath of both the parents and the teachers. This tension slowly builds up and the child decides to quit the school forever. This paper analyzes the causes for dropouts and concentrates mainly on the tensions experienced by teachers, parents and the s...

This paper develops a public choice model of the bargaining power of teachers' unions. The model predicts that the power of the unions rises with the number of eligible voters in a district. As a bargaining outcome reflecting this power, we use the experience premium for teachers. The premium is defined as the difference in salary between experienced and inexperienced teachers. For a sample of ...

Two studies investigated teacher activities that may lead to the development of competence, if not expertise. In Study I, 136 teachers indicated in a questionnaire that evaluation and planning activities (informal and formal) best parallel deliberate practice activities that Ericsson and colleagues report as accounting for expertise in other domains. In Study II, log data and interviews from ei...

Competence in one's professional work role is important in the overall learning process. Ready (1967) described competence as a motivational factor that is responsible for individual achievement. However, results of numerous studies reveal that vocational agriculture teachers are experiencing difficulties in the performance of several professional activities. Parrington (1981) reported that act...

Students who teach less experienced students within the same educational program are known as near-peer teachers. A number of studies have shown that near-peers are effective teachers in preclinical courses such as anatomy and physical examination. We hypothesized that near-peers could also be effective teachers in a clinical clerkship. We report on a pilot study in which near-peers participate...

This study aims at investigating which cues teachers detect and process from their students during instruction. This information capturing process depends on teachers’ sensitivity, or awareness, to students’ needs, which has been recognized as crucial for classroom management. We recorded the gaze behaviors of two pre-service teachers and two experienced teachers during a whole math lesson in p...