Job satisfaction remains a constant topic of discussion in teacher workrooms and a popular area for research across the United States. In the United States, teachers are plagued with various issues that seem to desecrate their level of job satisfaction despite notable attempts to improve our educational system. The purpose of this study was to…

Teachers with less than 5 years of teaching experience in low socioeconomic status schools are more likely to leave education than those who have taught in a higher socioeconomic school, often leaving schools in low socioeconomic areas struggling to fill vacancies and to keep a full teaching staff. Many students are high-risk if they attend a…

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 purpose of this basic qualitative, interpretative study was to explore the relationships among blended learning classrooms, communities of inquiry, and student engagement in secondary grades in Tennessee. I conducted this study using the Communities of Inquiry framework to find a deeper understanding and gain insight into Tennessee public…

When employees expect evaluation and performance incentives will continue (or begin) in the future, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in relevant skills today. Because skills benefit job performance, the effects of evaluation can persist after the rewards end or even anticipate the start of rewards. I provide empirical…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to education, influencing both teachers and learners. As a result of the global health crisis, teachers adapted their teaching methods to accommodate their students. The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore the COVID-19 pandemic challenges on the K-12 education sector…

We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher…

The U.S. Supreme Court's 2018 decision in "Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees" (AFSCME) (referred to as "Janus" hereafter) prohibited state and local government worker unions from negotiating collective bargaining agreements with fair share fee arrangements. In this report, the authors…

Across the nation, teacher shortages are receiving broad attention. Teacher turnover can lead to negative outcomes for students through the replacement of effective teachers by inexperienced or unqualified teachers, increases in class sizes, or reductions in course offerings. For educators, frequent turnover upsets collaboration, stability,…

Like other public workers, teachers typically receive high and compressed ratings that do little to differentiate them based on performance. Motivated by empirical evidence of substantial variation in effectiveness among teachers, there has been a recent push to develop more informative evaluation systems with greater ratings dispersion. We study…

This quantitative study examined perceptions of K-12 public school principals toward the Tennessee teacher tenure law under Senate Bill 1528 and how principals perceived that the law has affected their ability to evaluate and retain effective teachers. The Tennessee Teacher Tenure Principal Perception Survey was adopted and slightly modified from…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the factors influencing school systems' decisions behind crafting, developing, and revising differentiated pay plans that require districts to abandon the practice of providing only across-the-board salary increases for experience and advanced degrees by adding at least one additional criterion for…

The school reopening debate has reached an inflection point as districts weigh both the safety and learning implications of returning to in-person education this fall. Challenges with transitioning to distance learning during the spring made it clear that teachers, parents and students needed more and different resources to make supportive,…

If a "curriculum" -- a set of instructional materials intended as a comprehensive course of study for a particular subject and grade level -- is well-aligned with state standards, it can help teachers deliver instruction that leads to students' mastery of those standards. However, most research suggests that curricula, in themselves, are…

Most public school teachers in the United States are enrolled in defined benefit (DB) pension plans. Using administrative microdata from four states, combined with national pension funding data, we show these plans have accumulated substantial unfunded liabilities--effectively debt--owing to previous plan operations. On average across 49 state…