Teacher vacancies have been a long-standing issue in U.S. public schools, only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vacancies tend to be concentrated in high-poverty, high-minority schools and hard-to-staff subjects like special education and STEM. States have implemented various policies to decrease turnover, including offering teachers bonuses…

Addressing teacher turnover is critical to stemming the country's continuing teacher shortages. It is also important for school effectiveness, as the academic and financial costs of teacher turnover to student learning and district budgets are significant. Using the most recent nationally representative data from the National Center for Education…

Research has shown that Title I's "comparability" provision causes gaps in noncategorical per pupil teacher funding. Using a unique dataset that merges 2009-2010 New York City (NYC) Department of Education value-added scores, school finance data, and school demographic data, this study not only confirms that NYC Title I elementary…

This case study examines how magnet school and school turnaround processes can work together to promote desegregation and improvement. Based on cross-case analysis of three magnet schools undergoing turnarounds, this study draws on data from the 2010 federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program grant and qualitative fieldwork through observations,…

California recently overhauled its K-12 public education finance system. Enacted in 2013, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) replaced California's 40-year-old funding formula. The LCFF increases district officials' fiscal flexibility; provides more resources to districts serving larger proportions of low-income, English learner (EL), and…

This essay examines the "Armed Forces Recruiter Access to Students and Student Recruiting Information" (Section 9528) provision of the No Child Left Behind Act and its influence on the success of intervention programming for college and career readiness in Title I high schools. Using critical policy analysis, I show how Federal and State…

How working conditions, personal characteristics, and school factors influence teacher recruitment and retention is an oft-studied topic in the field of education finance and policy. Through decades of research, it has become increasingly clear that teachers respond to a set of monetary and non-monetary factors when making decisions in the teacher…

This article employs narrative analysis to examine how the media in 12 different countries characterize the "Teach for All" (TFA) teacher. Examining mass media narratives in these 12 countries illustrates that there are some remarkable commonalities in the narratives and character portraits co-constructed and propagated by the media. At…

Historically power to govern public schools has been delegated to local school boards. However, this arrangement of power has been shifting over the past half century and increasingly, local school boards are targeted as ineffective and antiquated. Teach For America (TFA), typically examined for its placement of teachers, also seeks to develop…

Incentive pay programs have become panacea for a multitude of educational challenges. When aimed at teachers the assumption is that rewards entice them to work in particular ways or particular schools. However, the assumption is based on an economic formula that does not take into consideration the gendered nature of policy processes. This study…

Public schools in some areas of the U.S. are as segregated as they were prior to court-ordered busing, in part due to school choice policies that appear to exacerbate extant segregation. In particular, Latina/o students are increasingly isolated in schools characterized as being in cycles of decline. Our case study of one such school is based on a…

This study examines the allocation of novice primary teachers in Chilean schools, looking at their characteristics and at the attributes of the schools at which they are hired after having completed their initial teacher training. The study reveals that in Chile, more qualified novice teachers are more prone to get jobs in socio-economically…

As Argentina presents problems of malnutrition, the federal in-school feeding program has become a key policy because it provides an important nutritional intervention during a relevant growth period. This paper estimates the effect of the program on academic performance--measured by standardized test scores--with a difference in difference model,…

Accountability in education has prompted policy makers and practitioners to focus on data use for instructional and organizational decision-making. The popular media have seized on Value Added (VA) measures as a key type of data use for reforming U.S. schools. Among education researchers, however, there are both critics and proponents. We examined…

This article describes the design and implementation of external support to low-performing schools using data from Chicago and California. Using the literature on external support, instructional capacity, and policy strength, the study gathered data from interviews, observations, document review, and surveys. The findings suggest that the model of…