Public Employee Quality in a Geographic Context

Abstract

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...

Globally Connected

“…In rural Appalachia Kentucky, teacher quality is particularly problematic. Most of the teachers in the area were born and raised in the rural Appalachia community and earned their baccalaureate degree from an Appalachia institution (Fowles, Butler, Cowen, Streams, & Toma, 2014). Students in grades K-12 have a long-standing achievement gap compared to those in urban and less isolated areas of the region.…”

Satisfacción Del Profesorado De La Escuela Rural De La Provincia De Granada (España) Respecto a La Organización Escolar

“…En el terreno internacional, la curiosidad por la educación rural, aunque también es bastan te escasa, se circunscribe, sobre todo y, por ra zones obvias, a países en vías de desarrollo como los africanos y latinoamericanos, si bien las principales líneas de trabajo no parecen orientarse tanto hacia las condiciones de las propias escuelas como a la formación de su profesorado (Ramírez, 2015; Badilla y Parra, 2014; Brumat y Coca, 2015), algo que se repi te mucho menos en España (Berlanga, 2003;Raso, 2015) y que preocupa hasta en Estados Unidos (Fowles, Butler, Cowen, Streams, y Toma, 2014), en donde están haciendo espe cial hincapié en analizar las condiciones labo rales de sus maestros rurales, de ahí que mu chos de estos resultados tengan poca o ninguna capacidad de transferencia a nuestro contexto de aplicación.…”

Análisis De La Satisfacción Del Profesorado De La Escuela Rural En La Provincia De Granada (España) RespectoASu Relación PersonalYProfesional Con La Comunidad Educativa

“…En el terreno internacional, la curiosidad por la educación rural, aunque también es bastante escasa, se circunscribe, sobre todo y, por razones obvias, a países en vías de desarrollo como los africanos y latinoamericanos (Raso, 2015(Raso, , 2012, si bien las principales líneas de trabajo no parecen orientarse tanto hacia las relaciones interpersonales en el seno de las propias escuelas como a la formación de su profesorado (Ramírez, 2015;Badilla & Parra, 2014;Brumat & Coca, 2015), algo que se repite mucho menos en España (Berlanga, 2003) y Andalucía (Raso, 2015(Raso, , 2012, y que preocupa hasta en Estados Unidos (Fowles et al, 2014, Raso, 2015, en donde están haciendo especial hincapié en analizar las condiciones laborales de sus maestros rurales, por lo que no resulta de extrañar que muchos de estos resultados tengan poca o ninguna capacidad de transferencia a nuestro contexto de aplicación.…”