School districts consider many qualifications when deciding whether to hire an individual to teach its students. One qualification is the type of license the applicant holds. The strictness of the eligibility requirements vary across the license types (e.g., level of educational attainment, whether a student teaching experience was completed).…

Purpose: Research shows that school leadership and working conditions strongly predict teacher turnover, but less empirical work has explored how school leaders grapple with this aspect of their work. This paper investigates how school leaders across diverse geographic and institutional contexts understand human capital challenges and construct…

The consequence of a change in school leadership (e.g., principal turnover) on student achievement has important implications for education policy. The impact of such an event can be estimated via the popular Difference in Difference (DiD) estimator, where those schools with a turnover event are compared to a selected set of schools that did not…

This study explores the prevalence and characteristics of "counseling out" as a human resource management tool used by principals to address teacher quality. Recognizing that teachers significantly impact student achievement, the effective management of teacher quality is a critical responsibility for principals. However, formal…

The Learning While Leading (LWL) professional development program motivates and further prepares administratively certified educators to become principals or assistant principals and offers continuous support to new principals during induction. The LWL program addresses a clear need for transitional support to motivate, fully prepare, and support…

Retention of early career teachers is a critical issue in education, with burnout and self-efficacy serving as important precursors to teachers leaving the field. An integration of the PAX Good Behavior Game (GBG; Barrish et al., 1969) and MyTeachingPartner (MTP; Allen et al., 2015) was tested in a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to investigate…

We develop a conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then empirically examine how teacher shortages vary geographically and by subject using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee traditional public schools during Fall 2019. We find that teacher…

The leaders of child care centers shape the everyday experiences of child care teachers, who play a critical role in supporting young children. While research has linked leadership to policy-relevant outcomes such as teacher job satisfaction and turnover, little is known about specific leader characteristics linked to teacher job outcomes. In…

One feared consequence of how the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted public education is its potential negative impacts on teacher retention and mobility. Each spring, teachers decide whether and where to teach the following school year. Following the abrupt end to the 2019-20 school year in March 2020, there were increased concerns that teachers would…

Theories of market-based school reform suggest that teacher labor markets may be inefficient, and perhaps inequitable, because union contracts, tenure protections, and government regulation limit school autonomy over hiring, evaluation, compensation, and working conditions. In a less restrictive setting, schools could incentivize performance by…

Heightened concerns about the health of the teaching profession highlight the importance of studying the early teacher pipeline. This exploratory, descriptive article examines preservice teachers' expressed motivation for pursuing a teaching career. Using data from a large teacher education program in Texas, we use a natural language processing…

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised even greater concerns about a growing teacher shortage. In this study, we use administrative data on more than 140,000 Michigan traditional public and charter school teachers in an interrupted time series framework to understand how teacher attrition and supply may have shifted after the onset of the COVID-19…

In contrast to prior federally mandated school reforms, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allows states more discretion in reforming their lowest performing schools, removes requirements to disrupt the status quo, and does not allocate substantial additional funds. Using a regression discontinuity design, we evaluate a state turnaround…

Recruiting and retaining effective teachers is critical to school turnaround. However, research on how improving educator quality in low-performing schools contributes to school improvement is largely situated in urban settings. This study examines staffing practices through a descriptive analysis of the first cohort of Comprehensive Support and…

In 2013, the Chicago Board of Education closed 47 elementary schools, directly 16 affecting 13,000 students and 900 teachers. The closures created employment uncertainty for 17 closed-school teachers, and this paper investigates the labor market consequences for teachers. We employ a difference-in-differences approach that compares the exit rates…