Are School Superintendents Rewarded for “Performance”?

[Excerpt] This chapter presents analyses of the compensation and mobility of school superintendents in New York State during the 1978-79 to 1982-83 period. The focus is on school superintendents because they are the chief operating officers of school districts, their salaries are determined through individual negotiations with school boards, and their salary data were made available to us. In contrast, school principals\u27 salary data were not available to us. Especially in large districts, principals tend to be members of a union and their salary increases negotiated collectively, which limits the likelihood of observing individual principals\u27 salaries being related to measures of their school\u27s performance

Merit Pay for School Superintendents?

Given the important role that school district administrators play in the educational process, one might expect their "performance" to be of fundamental importance in determining both how much students learn and the cost of public education to taxpayers. Yet, while public debate has considered the issue of merit pay plans for teachers, virtually no attention has been directed to the methods by which school administrators are compensated. This paper provides evidence on whether school superintendents are explicitly or implicitly rewarded for their "performance" by higher compensation and/or greater opportunities for mobility. We analyze panel data from over 700 school 'districts in New Ycrk State during the 1978-79 to 1982-83 period. Measures of performance are defined and then entered into salary level, salary change, and mobility equations. While evidence is provided that school superintendents are rewarded for "performance", the magnitude of the rewards appear to be quite small.

On Estimating the Effects of Increased Aid to Education

[Excerpt] The 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, of the National Commission on Excellence in Education decried the state of public education in the United States and suggested a number of reforms. Among their recommendations was increased federal aid for education. The view was that this would lead to desirable outcomes such as reduced class sizes and higher teacher salaries, with the latter aiding in the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. Somewhat surprisingly, previous research on the economics of education provides us with very few insights about what the effects of such proposals might be. For example, while there is an extensive literature on the determinants of cross-section variations in teachers\u27 salaries and teacher/student ratios, virtually nothing has been written on how changes in aid levels influence changes in salaries, teacher/student ratios, other expenditure levels, and local tax rates. Similarly, while there are many studies of how grants-in-aid affect overall expenditure levels and some studies of the determinants of cross-section variations in the share of expenditures spent on various categories (e.g., instructional and administrative), virtually nothing has been written on how changes in aid affect the various expenditure shares. To provide answers to some of these questions, our paper examines data from a panel of approximately 700 school districts in New York State over a five-year period (1978-79 to 1982-83) and tries to infer how school districts will respond to future changes in aid from how they responded to changes in state aid during the period. We focus on how past aid changes have influenced teacher salaries, tax rates, teacher/student ratios, and other staff/student ratios. The analyses exploit the fact that although school aid formulas change frequently in New York State, each district is usually guaranteed at least the same aid level as the previous year ( save harmless provisions). As a result, over any given two-year period, the percentage increase in aid varies widely across districts. This provides a convenient form of natural experiment

PhD Attainment of Graduates of Selective Private Academic Institutions

[Excerpt] It is therefore important to understand the forces that have caused a decline in the PhD attainment rate of American college graduates. The fraction of bachelor\u27s recipients who go on to receive PhDs nationwide is influenced by many factors, including high school graduation rates, college enrollment rates of high school graduates, college graduation rates for college enrollees, the distribution of undergraduate majors, and the academic backgrounds of college students. PhD attainment also depends upon changes in the economic rewards to pursuing PhD study relative to entering the workforce or pursuing study for other professional occupations, such as law, medicine, and business. In this article we focus on a homogeneous set of thirty-one highly selective private colleges and universities. The academic aptitudes and preparations of students attending these institutions are among the highest in the nation, and historically students from these institutions have been much more likely to go on to PhD study than the average college graduate nationwide; therefore, the behavior of students from these institutions is of special interest

Declining PhD Attainment of Graduates of Selective Private Academic Institutions

[Excerpt] On average, the typical American citizen who received a PhD during the last 40 years did so approximately 9 years after she received her bachelor’s degree. Thus, if we divide the number of American citizens receiving PhDs in a year by the number of American citizens receiving bachelor’s degrees 9 years earlier, we obtain an estimate of the fraction of American citizen college graduates in the earlier year who ultimately receive PhDs. This fraction rose from .042 for 1954 bachelor’s recipients (1963 PhDs) to about .07 for 1962 bachelor’s recipients (1971 PhDs). The fraction then plummeted over the next decade falling to .026 for 1973 bachelor’s recipients (1982 PhDs) and has been relatively stable, fluctuating between .025 and .028, since then. Of course changes in the probability that bachelor’s recipients go on to receive PhDs nationwide are influenced by many changing demographic trends including changes in high school graduation rates, changes in college enrollment rates of high school graduates, changes in college graduation rates for college enrollees, changes in the distribution of undergraduate majors, and changes in the academic backgrounds of college students. In this paper we focus on a more homogenous set of 31 highly selective private colleges and universities. The academic aptitudes and preparations of students attending these institutions are among the highest in the nation and make this group’s students’ behavior of special interest

Determinants of the Compensation and Mobility of School Superintendents

Analyzing 197-83 panel data from more than 700 New York State school districts, the authors find evidence that school superintendents were rewarded, both by higher salary increases and by enhanced opportunities to move to belter-paying jobs, for having low school tax rates and high educational achievement within their districts, relative to the values of those variables in comparable school districts in the state. The rewards were, however, quite small. The analysis also suggests that the superintendents themselves did not significantly influence either school tax rates or educational test scores in their districts

Efforts to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: potential entry points for neglected tropical diseases

BACKGROUND: The damage inflicted by the coronavirus diseases 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic upon humanity is and will continue to be considerable. Unprecedented progress made in global health over the past 20 years has reverted and economic growth has already evaporated, giving rise to a global recession, the likes of which we may not have experienced since the Second World War. Our aim is to draw the attention of the neglected tropical disease (NTD) community towards some of the major emerging economic opportunities which are quickly appearing on the horizon as a result of COVID-19. MAIN TEXT: This scoping review relied on a literature search comprised of a sample of articles, statements, and press releases on initiatives aimed at mitigating the impact of COVID-19, while supporting economic recovery. Of note, the donor scenario and economic development agendas are highly dynamic and expected to change rapidly as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, as are donor and lender priorities. CONCLUSIONS: The NTD community, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), will need to work quickly, diligently, and in close collaboration with decision-makers and key stakeholders, across sectors at national and international level to secure its position. Doing so might enhance the odds of grasping potential opportunities to access some of the massive resources that are now available in the form of contributions from corporate foundations, trust funds, loans, debt relieve schemes, and other financial mechanisms, as part of the ongoing and future economic development agendas and public health priorities driven by the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper should serve as a starting point for the NTD community to seek much needed financial support in order to sustain and revitalize control and elimination efforts pertaining to NTDs in LMICs

Thermodynamic Modeling of Variations in the Rate of RNA Chain Elongation of E. coli rrn Operons

AbstractPrevious electron-microscopic imaging has shown high RNA polymerase occupation densities in the 16S and 23S encoding regions and low occupation densities in the noncoding leader, spacer, and trailer regions of the rRNA (rrn) operons in E. coli. This indicates slower transcript elongation within the coding regions and faster elongation within the noncoding regions of the operon. Inactivation of four of the seven rrn operons increases the transcript initiation frequency at the promoters of the three intact operons and reduces the time for RNA polymerase to traverse the operon. We have used the DNA sequence-dependent standard free energy variation of the transcription complex to model the experimentally observed changes in the elongation rate along the rrnB operon. We also model the stimulation of the average transcription rate over the whole operon by increasing rate of transcript initiation. Monte Carlo simulations, taking into account initiation of transcription, translocation, and backward and forward tracking of RNA polymerase, partially reproduce the observed transcript elongation rate variations along the rrn operon and fully account for the increased average rate in response to increased frequency of transcript initiation

Merit Pay for School Superintendents?

Given the important role that school district administrators play in the educational process, one might expect their \u27performance to be of fundamental importance in determining both how much students learn and the cost of public education to taxpayers. Yet, while public debate has considered the issue of merit pay plans for teachers, virtually no attention has been directed to the methods by which school administrators are compensated. This paper provides evidence on whether school superintendents are explicitly or implicitly rewarded for their performance by higher compensation and/or greater opportunities for mobility. We analyze panel data from over 700 school districts in New York State during the 1978-79 to 1982-83 period. Measures of performance are defined and then entered into salary level, salary change, and mobility equations. While evidence is provided that school superintendents are rewarded for performance , the magnitude of the rewards appear to be quite small

Collective Bargaining in American Higher Education

[Excerpt] No discussion of governance in higher education would be complete without a consideration of the role of collective bargaining. Historically, most researchers interested in the subject have directed their attention to the unionization of faculty members. Given several recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that leave open the possibility that unionization of faculty in private colleges and universities may increase in the future, we discuss collective bargaining for faculty in the first section (Leatherman 2000, A16). Recently, however, attention has been also directed at the unionization of two other groups in the higher education workforce. Activists on a number of campuses have pressed for academic institutions to pay their low-wage employees a living wage, and this has brought attention to the role of staff collective bargaining in academia. In the second section, we present the first empirical estimates of the impact of staff bargaining on staff salaries in higher education. Finally, the number of public universities in which teaching assistants, and in some cases research assistants, have won the right to bargain collectively began to expand rapidly at the turn of the twenty-first century. A NLRB ruling in 2001 that permitted collective bargaining for teaching assistants at New York University (NYU), led the university in the following year to become the first private one to sign a contract with a union representing teaching assistants. Building on this ruling, graduate assistant organizing campaigns are underway at a number of prestigious private universities. In the third section we address why graduate assistants are increasingly interested in organizing and then present evidence on the effects of graduate student unions on a number of economic variables