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Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales. This article begins to fill that gap. We find that rural educational agencies employ the new teachers of lowest observed aptitude, implying that organizational outcomes associated with these districts may differ in systematic ways that reinforce longstanding gaps in quality. As such, human resources strategies for increasing the attractiveness of geographically and culturally isolated regions for high quality public service are needed. These strategies are likely to require different policy prescriptions than those utilized to enhance the attractiveness to employees in urban areas. Keywords personnel/human resource management, training and development, policy analysis, public management issues, education policyThe sheer scale of public primary and secondary education combined with its vital importance in American society make it worthy of public administration scholars' attention and effort. In 2009, employees of public elementary and secondary schools alone accounted for 36% of the total public workforce in the United States as well as 31% of the total payroll. In comparison, the federal civilian workforce accounted for 12% of total government employees and 17% of payroll (U.S. Census, 2012). In fiscal year 2010, state and local governments in the United States collectively spent approximately US$860 billion on education, accounting for 27.6% of total expenditures (by comparison, the next largest category-public welfare-accounted for only 14.7% (Barnett & Vidal, 2012)). The lion's share of this funding was directed to the over 13,000 public school districts, nearly 99,000 public schools, and ultimately, the more than 3.2 million teachers employed in public schools across the 50 states (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). Despite the magnitude of public schooling, Raffel (2007) laments the lack of attention by public administration scholars to this 504 American Review of Public Administration 44(5) segment of the public sector. This article addresses this void by examining a human resource issue-the hiring of new teachers-within a specific geographic region of the country.Of all the tasks delegated to human resource managers, effective recruitment and selection of new employees is one of the most critical. As Hays and Sowa (2005) state, "Recruitment and selection are the avenues by which bureaucracy acquires its most important raw materials, human resources" (p. 121). Perhaps nowhere is this axiom stronger than in the context of public education. Teachers are arguably the ultimate example of "street-level bureaucrats": the direct and sustained interaction that a teacher has with her clients-students-easily surpasses that of virtually all other bureaucrats employed for other f...

University ranking has high public visibility, the ranking business has flourished, and institutions of higher education have not been able to ignore it. This study of university ranking presents general considerations of ranking and institutional responses to it, particularly considering reactions to ranking, ranking as a self‐fulfilling prophecy, and ranking as a means of transforming qualities into quantities. The authors present a conceptual framework of university ranking based on three propositions and carry out a descriptive statistical analysis of U.S. and international ranking data to evaluate those propositions. The first proposition of university ranking is that ranking systems are demarcated by a high degree of stability, equilibrium, and path dependence. The second proposition links ranking to institutional identity. The third proposition posits that rankings function as a catalyst for institutional isomorphism. The conclusion reviews some important new developments in university ranking.

As local governments across the United States adapt to economic shifts, workforce reshaping, and continued demand for services, training to confront these challenges has become more important. However, training resources are limited, investment in these programs is not always prioritized, and evaluating outcomes is difficult. This study analyzes data from a local government leadership development program to examine training impacts over time. It focuses on leadership skills and the ways in which individual's self-assessments change over time. The findings indicate that although leadership training is an important factor in the development of both conceptual and interpersonal leadership skills, the long-term effects of training on these two types of skills vary significantly. Understanding the training effect decay associated with leadership skills development can help human resource managers and public organizations strategically plan, evaluate, and invest in these training activities to better prepare their workforce to meet future challenges.