Teacher attrition is a major challenge for public school districts across the country, especially in poor, urban and/or high needs schools. Sixty-one percent of school district superintendents identified teacher retention as a top concern. The majority of the teachers who leave are the new, well-prepared, successful teachers and the mid-career…

As state-funded Pre-K programs in elementary schools continue to grow, elementary principals are increasingly responsible for supporting, supervising, and leading these programs. Therefore, examining elementary principals' early childhood leadership competencies and the factors influencing them may help understand and improve their experiences as…

Science reforms in the United States' education systems have been ongoing for over the last 50 years. These reforms are continually revised in response to the demand to increase employment in STEM careers. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) released in 2013 are the most recent standards-based science reform effort created using years of…

Special education teachers are subject to difficult working conditions in their provision of quality special education services to their students. Despite the severe working conditions that special education teachers endure, little research has considered the presence and impact of vicarious trauma (VT) in this specific population. The nature of…

Structural equation modeling was used in this exploration of data from the 2018 Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), focusing on gender, the number of hours teachers worked in a typical week, the consequences of their workload, and job-related stress to identify the direct and indirect effects of these predictors on both job…

School climate is the perceptions and attitudes that are evoked by a school's environment and affects every aspect of the school surroundings. Therefore, it is essential that principals have the resources they need to positively affect the climate in their buildings. In fact, a positive school climate has been linked to not only the achievement of…

As school safety continues to be a growing issue in public schools, this study takes an exploratory approach to examine the impact vaping is having on public schools in Arkansas. Student vaping is rapidly becoming a common issue in schools. This study examined the response to vaping from administrators in Arkansas. The study surveyed 82 Arkansas…

This study aimed to identify the relationship among variables, as identified from the literature (stress, emotional exhaustion as a symptom of burnout, job satisfaction, and practices of self-care) that correlate with perceived work-life balance in public school building-level administrators in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Additionally, this…

California Bay Area school districts are experiencing a teacher shortage that threatens to further widen the opportunity gap for schools with the neediest student populations. Financial incentives, administrator support levels, appropriate and consistent professional development, and mentoring are often cited as areas that cause teachers to leave…

This study explores the relationship between emotional labor (EL), in the form of surface acting and deep acting, emotional intelligence (EI), and the degree of experienced burnout in school principals. School principals in one Pennsylvania County were surveyed using an electronic instrument. The survey consisted or: (a) demographic questions, (b)…

The purpose of this study was to explore the technology leadership behaviors of school principals. This mixed-method explanatory study investigated this essential role for 21st century school leaders, informed by the lenses of self-efficacy theory and transformational leadership theory. This study developed and validated the Education Leaders…

In the early 1990s, the educational system in the U.S. began to change with the advent of publicly-operated charter schools. In recent years, there has been a surge in parents opting for this type of alternative educational setting to meet the needs of their students. This increase in enrollment did not preclude students with disabilities. This…

This dissertation consists of three papers on education policy. In each paper, I use applied econometric methods and descriptive quantitative analysis to examine topics related to teacher labor markets and postsecondary attainment. The first paper leverages a rich student-teacher-day data set to study the relationship between daily teacher…

This study utilized a quantitative research approach with a survey design to determine whether a sample of K-8 principals in the state of Illinois, that rated teachers in a set of classroom instructional videos, exhibited inter-rater reliability since they all received the Illinois state-approved training and certification for teacher evaluators.…

Leadership for learning has emerged as a framework that subsumes the core characteristics of instructional, transformational, and distributed leadership. Establishing an empirical measurement model of leadership for learning that simultaneously incorporates the perspectives of individual teachers, collective faculty, and principals has been a…