The Teacher Workforce: Management and Policy

EDU A035 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This course is about the challenges of managing human resources, with a focus on teachers and the education sector. The course is motivated by practical questions: whom to hire, fire, or promote, when to provide on-the-job training, how to evaluate job performance, whether to tie pay to performance, how to design jobs, how to structure retirement benefits, and others. We will examine these questions using tools from economics, especially labor and personnel economics. Underlying these questions are several essential economic concepts that this course will introduce: opportunity costs, asymmetric information, decisions under uncertainty, investments in human capital, principal-agent problem, and incentives, among others. To illustrate these questions and concepts we will use examples drawn from recent empirical research on teachers. As those examples will demonstrate, the topics of this course are directly relevant to several current education policy debates that we will discuss in class: for example, tenure rules, accountability and evaluation, pay for performance or credentials.