It has been ingrained into the American consciousness that our public schools are failing and our students are underachieving. This is something we all know. What is less clear is why American schools are failing. Time and time again, we come back to teachers, who have been identified as the single greatest factor in determining the success of the student. Teachers can make the difference in the lives of students and help secure our economic future. Teachers unions speak for these teachers, thus, in our search for a scapegoat, teachers unions often rank at the top. Right or wrong, it is a serious accusation to say that teachers unions are responsible for the failure of the American education system. Teachers, and consequently teachers unions, have the power to greatly impact education reform. After assessing the state of education in the United States and establishing teachers unions’ role in the bigger picture of education, I will first explore the source of teachers unions political power: their large membership and their money. Teachers unions are among the largest unions in the country and the NEA (National Education Association), specifically, is the highest political contributor of all public sector unions. To assess their political influence, I will show where and how they use their money with the intention of evaluating whether or not they overstep their boundaries as a typical labor union. The next important variable to consider when evaluating the impact of teachers unions is their classification as a public sector union. Private and public sector unions operate under different sets of laws and thus have different rules and strategies for collective bargaining. I will examine how their public sector status impacts their influence on hotly contested education reform issues, such as teacher performance pay, teacher evaluations based on student achievement, school vouchers, and charter schools. What makes teachers unions different from other labor unions? And do these differences give teachers unions a detrimental amount of control over education reform?

According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standard of communication, ??Instructional programs from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 should enable all students to...communicate their mathematical thinking coherently and clearly to peers, teachers, and others?? and students need to learn ??what is acceptable as evidence in mathematics?? (NCTM, 2000, p. 60). But do teachers have a clear understanding of what is acceptable or do they believe that the only acceptable explanations are the ones that they themselves gave to the students? Can teachers accept alternative forms of explanation and methods of solution as mathematically accurate or do they want students to simply restate the teachers?? understandings of mathematics and the problem? The focus of this dissertation is the authoritative discourse practices of classroom teachers as they relate to individual students and large and small groups of students. In this case study, I examine the interactions in one eighth-grade mathematics classroom and the possible sharing of mathematical authority and development of mathematical agency that take place via the teacher??s uses of authoritative discourse. A guiding objective of this research was to examine the ways a teacher??s discursive practices were aligned with her pedagogical intentions. The teacher for this study was an experienced eighth-grade mathematics teacher at a rural Central Texas middle school. The teacher was a participant in the Middle School Mathematics Project at Texas A&M University. Results of an analysis of the discourse of six selected classes were combined with interview and observation data and curriculum materials to inform the research questions. I found that through the teacher??s regular use of authoritative discursive devices, mathematical authority was infrequently shared. Also the teacher??s uses of authoritative discourse helped create an environment where mathematical agency was not encouraged or supported. The teacher??s use of various discursive devices helped establish and maintain a hierarchy of mathematical authority with students at the lowest level reliant on others for various mathematical decisions.

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Chapter 1 begins with the motivation of my study in teachers' labor market. I employ a monopolistic screening model to show that there exist multiple equilibria in the educational system; a pooling equilibrium and a separating equilibrium. The model predicts that the pooling equilibrium is optimal only when the average quality of teacher applicants is high. Using data from the OECD, I examine the relation between teachers' earnings and teacher quality of the U.S. and Korea. Chapter 2 focuses on teachers and their career dynamics, and the data is at teacher level. Using the Current Population Survey for 2001-2010, I show that public school teachers are paid less compared to other comparable college graduates in non-teaching sectors. By studying the change in earnings after career changes, I find the evidence of positive selection when teachers move into the non-teaching sectors and of negative selection when non-teachers move into the teaching sector, which results in the decrease in the average teacher quality. Chapter 3 looks at both teachers and school districts, and I use district-teacher matched dataset, based on the School and Staffing Survey (SASS) for 2007-2008. I employ a multilevel model and a propensity score matching to identify union effects in states with different legal environments for collective bargaining of teachers. I find that collective bargaining is neither necessary nor sufficient for unions to affect teachers' well-being. I show that meet-and-confer is a popular alternative to collective bargaining and that it is an important mechanism for unions to influence teachers' non-wage benefits. Chapter 4 concerns school districts, and I use SASS district level data. I reevaluate the role of teachers unions on pay structure and districts' financial status. In contrasts to previous findings, I find that the variance of teachers' earnings is higher in more unionized settings. Moreover, I show that the financial status of districts with teachers unions is stronger than that of districts without the unions. I confirm that unionism is associated with less usage of performance pay system. / Economics

Teacher compensation reforms have been on the rise in recent years, yet research has yet to fully demonstrate how teachers interpret these policies and how they may influence their instructional practices and professional decisions. This qualitative study of a performance pay program in an urban district in Texas drew on cognitive approaches to policy implementation and theories of sensemaking to examine and explicate these issues. Teachers’ experiences in two schools were examined through interviews, focus groups, and document analysis. The experiences of school principals and district policymakers acting as sensegivers to teachers about the program’s goals, purposes, and theory of action were also examined. District policymakers’ understandings of the program varied, and were informed by their positions in the system and their own interests in the program. These differences resulted in a complex program with an array of objectives for teachers to implement in schools and classrooms, as well as varying expectations for teachers’ work, which were not always understood by teachers. With few clear and consistent messages from policymakers, teachers and principals interpreted the program according to their own ideas about important outcomes, and then shaped it to fit their situations. Although accepting of the program, teachers and principals were not always able to focus on it in ways expected by policymakers given other demands on them, particularly those emanating from the accountability system. Some evidence of goal distortion in terms of teachers’ attention to student assignments and mobility was also found. These findings hold implications for cognitive theories of policy implementation, suggesting that teachers’ responses to policies are influenced by the amount of attention they are able to give them, as well as direct sensegiving about policy goals and expectations on the part of policymakers. The findings also suggest that performance pay programs can be expected to be adapted, co-opted, and selectively attended to in order to fit within the contexts in which they are implemented. Thus, policymakers should consider other demands in the policy environment that may compete with performance incentives, as well as the organizational contexts of schools in which they will be implemented. / text

The role of the evaluation for Official Development Assistance (ODA) enterprises including educational development has become critical after increasing “aid fatigue” experienced by the international community in the 1990s. To date, however, monitoring and evaluating outcomes of the projects has been limited to the project life. Consequently these have been mainly through the international aid agencies. Furthermore, the monitoring and evaluation led by international aid agencies have paid little attention to aspects of the sustainability of technical cooperation in educational development. To sustain the impact of technical cooperation, the reinforcement of evaluation has drawn increasing attention in light of the emerging modalities in international development. Therefore this research was inspired to investigate alternative evaluation frameworks for an educational reform project for teacher quality improvement that may increase possibilities for long term sustainability. Importantly, the new modalities in international development and educational issues provide new options. In addition, the research reviewed theoretical and practical issues surrounding evaluation in general, and highlighted the evaluation of education reform projects. The research reported explored via case studies, the evaluation processes employed by the Egyptian education reform projects implemented by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). The case studies used three data sources (archival and relevant documents, a survey questionnaire and interviews) to illuminate the contextually-embedded evaluation processes. The research found that process evaluation is a potential alternative method since it is likely to be locally institutionalised, which may yield long-term sustainability of the projects.

The purpose of this study was to examine the backgrounds and experiences of middle school mathematics teachers that often distinguish "quality" teachers, including certification, experience, degree type, and degree level and how those demographics and others vary for different types of schools. The emphasis was on profiling teachers in a large urban district by describing their basic features and distributions, as well as how middle school mathematics teachers, according to those differences, relate to student mathematics achievement, teacher attrition and teacher mobility. Student achievement was measured by test results from the Norm Reference Test-Normal Curve Equivalent (NRT-NCE) mathematics portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) for two school years (2003-04 and 2004-05). A variety of analytic approaches and methods were used to examine how different teacher characteristics relate to teacher employment patterns and student achievement, including chi-square, Kruskal-Wallace, Mann-Whitney U, ANOVA, and t tests, together with simple descriptives and graphical analysis. Standard multiple regression was used to evaluate whether students' previous test scores and teacher- and school-level predictors could affect the results of students' mathematics achievement. A short survey was administered, which provided some insight to ascertain whether and why teachers choose among schools when seeking employment. A total of 282 teachers and 24,766 students were included for the final analysis. This research revealed high rates of teacher turnover and deficient numbers of well qualified mathematics teachers for this particular demographic. For example, one in three middle school mathematics teachers was in their first year, and over half (55%) had less than three years seniority. It was also apparent that, because of a shortage of well-qualified mathematics teachers, many new teachers were being hired out-of-field--of those first-year teachers, only about half had certification in their content area and most (67%) did not have a degree in mathematics or mathematics education. Middle schools in this district had lost 29% of the mathematics teacher workforce employed the previous year due to mathematics teacher attrition. Of those many resigned, some came back to teach another subject at the same or different middle school, and others transferred to high schools. An additional 5% transferred to other middle schools within the same district bringing the total turnover to 34%. Findings revealed no significant differences in turnover rates in high-poverty versus low-poverty schools, but there were significant differences in the proportions of movers, leavers, and stayers in schools according to whether or not a school was achieving high-standards in mathematics. Although inequities did exist in favor of schools with less at-risk students, in this district--for the most part--teachers were fairly distributed according to the "quality" of their backgrounds and experiences. The only significant gap was in that students in wealthier schools were more likely to have a mathematics teacher with a higher degree. This study also offers results that further understanding on the debate about which attributes of teachers are most likely to translate into effective-classroom performance. When analysis was performed at the student level, the findings revealed that students of middle school mathematics teachers with higher seniority, advanced degrees, or certification in the content area that they taught, performed significantly higher than students in other classrooms. Yet the magnitude of those differences was either modest or very small. When controlling for students' socio-economics status at the classroom level, differences were not significant for seniority or advanced degrees but the results were significant for certification.

O objetivo dessa dissertação de mestrado é realizar uma análise sobre como o mecanismo de certificação profissional /de competências, originário de práticas gerenciais do setor produtivo, penetrou no universo educacional por meio da certificação de professores. Esse mecanismo tem sido utilizado tanto como uma forma de avaliação da qualidade do trabalho docente, constituindo-se como um mecanismo que favorece o pagamento de bônus por desempenho, quanto tem se estabelecido como uma forma de recrutamento e seleção de profissionais de diversas áreas para atuação como professores. / The objective of this masters dissertation is to analyze the professional skills certification mechanisms, originating from the management practices of the productive sector, has penetrated into the education universe by means of teachers certification. This mechanism has being used both as an effective way for the facultys quality evaluation, constituting itself as a mechanism that favors performance bonus payment, such as an way for recruitment of professionals from several areas to work as professors as well.

This dissertation investigated and examined disparities among selected variables between high- performing and low-performing high schools in Virginia. Overall, student academic performance is the major difference between the two categories of schools, but there may be other differences within the school dynamic that can rationalize the categorization of schools. These potential differences demonstrate the need to examine other variables and the disparities within these certain variables. Seven possible variables that may have such an influence are: the student achievement scores, teacher quality, racial composition, socioeconomic status, student attendance, financial commitment, and condition of the building. Understanding these differences can provide valuable insight into the various factors that contribute to the academic success or failure of a school. Data from the study indicated that for the most part, the variables selected for comparison did indicate a significant difference in the variables. The only exception was in Teacher Quality. Since Student Achievement, Student Attendance, and Teacher Quality pertained directly to the student, and Racial Composition and Socioeconomic Status, pertained to the student body, meaning the enrollment of these three variables were demographically controlled, this indicated to this researcher that financial commitment data and building conditions data were the most important variables to this study. The basis for this is that Racial Composition, SES, Student Attendance, and Teacher Quality influenced one variable and that is Student Achievement. This reduced the importance of Teacher Quality because not all low and high-performing schools will have the same quality of teachers in the classroom. If this was the case, every student would perform equally. This, of course, was not true. Therefore, other variables played an especially important part in the disparities between the two categories of schools. This rationale would give credence to the importance of Financial Commitment and School Building Conditions. These latter two variables then influenced the educational process of students and are things the School Board can control or at least have control over. / Doctor of Education / This dissertation investigated and examined disparities in selected variables between high- performing and low-performing high schools in Virginia. Overall, student academic performance is the major difference between the two categories of schools, but there may be other differences within the school dynamic that can rationalize the categorization of schools. These potential differences demonstrate the need to examine other variables and the disparities within these certain variables. Seven possible variables that may have such an influence are: student achievement scores, teacher quality, racial composition, socioeconomic status, student attendance, financial commitment, and condition of the building. Understanding these differences can provide valuable insight into the various factors that contribute to the academic success or failure of a school. Data from the study indicated that for the most part the variables selected for comparison did indicate a significant difference in the variables. The only exception was in Teacher Quality. Since Student Achievement, Student Attendance, and Teacher Quality pertained directly to the student, and Racial Composition and Socioeconomic Status, pertained to the student body, meaning the enrollment of these three variables were demographically controlled, this indicated to this researcher that financial commitment data and building conditions data were the most important variables to this study. The basis for this is that Racial Composition, SES, Student Attendance, and Teacher Quality influenced one variable and that is Student Achievement. This reduced the importance of Teacher Quality because not all low and high-performing schools will have the same quality of teachers in the classroom. If this was the case, every student would perform equally. This, of course, was not true. Therefore, other variables played an especially important part in the disparities between the two categories of schools. This rationale would give credence to the importance of Financial Commitment and School Building Conditions. These latter two variables then influenced the educational process of students and are things the School Board can control or at least have control over.

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