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As a follow up to my post last September ( "Teacher Residency Requirements" ), there appears to be legislative movement in both Illinois and Wisconsin to eliminate such requirements in Chicago and Milwaukee, respectively. Both cities require teachers to be residents in order to be employed in the public schools. From District 299: The Chicago Schools Blog (Alexander Russo), 3/8/2010: It's an age-old question for Chicago, which is one of few big cities to require teachers to live inside the city limits. Teachers complain about it. Once in a while they get caught living outside the city and have to move or leave their jobs. The recession in making jobs scarcer and the city more expensive. And now State Sen. Steans has introduced language [Residency Bill SB 3522 (Amendment 1)] that, with the support of the CTU, would remove that requirement. From Wisconsin State Journal editorial , 3/10/2010: Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature and the state's big teachers ...

Apart from being marginally good local politics to require city employees (including teachers) to live within city boundaries, why would an urban district create barriers that make it more difficult to attract the highly effective teachers that it needs? Ask Chicago and Milwaukee . (Boston, too, has a residency requirement for city employees, but it excludes teachers.) Any others out there we should be aware of? From the Chicago Tribune (9/11/2009): The city, for its part, maintains that teachers should be contributing to the tax base that funds their schools, among other reasons. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (1/24/2008): The residency rule has been controversial for years. Some say it is unfair and MPS needs good teachers too much to restrict the pool of possible teachers. Others say it doesn't actually have much effect on who teaches overall and it's good for the city to have employees live within the city line. Efforts in the state Legislature to repeal the residen...

New research led by Tony Milanowski of the University of Wisconsin-Madison provides more evidence that increasing teacher pay may not be the best approach to attract new teachers to high-need, hard-to-staff urban schools. A key finding of the study -- published in the International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership -- which explored job factors important to pre-service educators was that " working conditions factors , especially principal support, had more influence on simulated job choice than pay level." 'Policy implications' include: "[M]oney might be better spent to attract, retain, or train better principals than to provide higher beginning salaries to teachers in schools with high-poverty or a high proportion of students of color." "[I]nduction programs and curricular flexibility are important to new teachers. The finding that induction programs are attractive, combined with evidence that such programs can be effective in reducing tea...