Rewarding terrific teachers should include rewarding them if they're willing to take on additional students and serve the students well, which will benefit the students while boosting productivity.

I learned to appreciate the American free enterprise system by quitting a job in Spain.At age 19, I dropped out of school to pursue a career as a French horn player. After a few twists and turns, I wound up in the Barcelona Symphony, which was a Spanish...

Public school teacher compensation is roughly 50 percent above private sector levels. In addition to merit pay, fundamental reforms to help schools hire, promote and fire teachers according to the best interests of students is needed.

The number of schools ranked highly in guides such as Barron's Profiles of American Colleges is increasing, without any evidence that these schools' instructional quality is also increasing. Applicants and their families should be wary of letting these rankings serve as the main criteria in their college decisions.

Nationwide, as governors and legislators seek to rein in labor costs, public-employee unions are protesting that their members are actually underpaid. But a growing body of evidence strongly suggests that their protests have no basis in fact.

It is a view as ubiquitous as it is simplistic: To improve public education, pay teachers more—a lot more. Union officials, education reformers, scholars, laypeople, and politicians of all stripes endorse this principle in one form or another.

Plans to evaluate teachers based on student performance and offer merit pay for teachers have gained attention, but they don't go nearly far enough. Today's teaching profession is the product of a mid-20th-century labor model.

Several studies have shown that public-sector workers receive higher compensation than their counterparts in the private sector. Although, federal contractors have some of the advantages of private sector workers, in that poor performers can be dismissed and the composition of the contractor workforce altered, it is possible that they are overcompensated just as federal employees are right now.