Money matters: teachers in the public and private sectors

Abstract

The public personnel system, particularly the compensation system, has long faced many criticisms such as inflexibility and un-competitiveness when compared to other sectors. This is especially true for compensation systems for K-12 teachers, who also care about public service values, even if they work in the non-public sectors. We examine wage competition for teachers between the three K-12 sectors within metropolitan market areas, even with controls for many other variables. While the public sector is clearly the dominant (but not monopsonist) buyer, it also responds to wage competitions from the other two sectors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2022.2055120.

Notes

1. We are not the first to do this. See Zveglich, Jr., Rodgers, and Laviña (2019), who estimate potential experience by years in school, age and sex.

2. Winsorizing data replaces extreme values (in our case, the top 1% and the bottom 1%) with the means of each extreme. It reduces the influence of outliers without changing the N, lessening the influence of possibly misleading influential outliers, and increasing the robustness of reported results.

3. The overwhelming majority of charter schools are non-profit organizations. Some states allow for-profit organizations to manage charter schools, but that accounts for only 12% of charter schools across the country. Regardless, all charter schools are ‘free’ for each student to attend. https://www.publiccharters.org/about-charter-schools/charter-school-faq#:~:text=Are%20charter%20schools%20nonprofit%3F,schools%20are%20free%20to%20attend.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Langbein

Laura Langbein is a Professor of Policy Analysis in the School of Public Affairs at American University. Her research includes bureaucratic discretion, pay-for-performance, intrinsic motivation, and corruption, with applications in environment and education policy, and a textbook, Program Evaluation: A Statistical Guide (2^nd ed.), 2012.

Fei Roberts

Fei Roberts is a PhD student in the School of Public Affairs at American University. Her research interests include public-private comparisons, employee work motivation, government contracting, and democratic governance.