There is a teacher shortage in Oklahoma. To address this teacher shortage, the Oklahoma Department of Education has eased restrictions by providing an alternative pathway into the classroom called emergency-certification. The lack of traditionally prepared teachers entering the profession, coupled with untrained emergency-certified teachers…

When there are teacher shortages, emergency certification allows individuals with a bachelor's degree to enter the profession without having undergone formal education training or preservice preparation. Despite its widespread use in the United States, emergency certification is a poorly understood human resource process. Little is known about how…

Teacher hiring is a critical lever for improving school outcomes. However, the availability of supply is a significant barrier that affects principals' processes for teacher staffing. Drawing on sensemaking theory and concepts of fit, this study investigates how principals make sense of recruitment and hiring in a local labor market with severe…

Purpose: Teacher shortages disrupt multiple aspects of school functioning. Negative effects of shortages are linked to poor outcomes for students, teachers, and organizational climate and culture. However, less attention has been paid to the impact of shortages on principals' leadership activities. Research Methods/Approach: This study uses…

In 2021, the Oklahoma School Librarians (OKSL) won the ABC-CLIO Leadership Grant. The OKSL division of the Oklahoma Library Association has always been a small division, but as budget shortfalls and teacher shortages ramped up in the early 2010s, as the author states, they reached a crisis point. According to the author, they were losing school…

The use of emergency certification to fill teaching vacancies has increased in many school districts across the United States. Prior research suggests that teachers' underlying motivations for entering the profession are associated with student outcomes, but very little is known about the motivations of emergency certified teachers who enter the…

A teacher shortage continues to plague the SBAE profession. While this shortage has been quantified and explored from the perspective of individual teachers, little research has taken a systemic approach to the problem of the SBAE teacher shortage. We posit the teacher shortage problem as inextricably linked to a convoluted job description and…

School-based agricultural education (SBAE), like many other subject areas, suffers from a critical teacher shortage. Oklahoma has chosen to combat this shortage by offering temporary emergency teaching certifications with minimal qualifications and no requirements for professional development. Recruitment is only half of the solution to teacher…

Nearly 1 in 5 U.S. students attend rural schools. Researchers report that at least half of public schools are rural in 12 states (i.e., Montana, South Dakota, Vermont, North Dakota, Maine, Alaska, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Iowa, and Mississippi) (Showalter et al., 2019). Providing quality education to all rural students is a…

States and local education systems hold the primary responsibility for delivering public education in the United States. During the past several years, the quality of the American education system has become national policy priority, replete with school reform efforts designed to hold all students to high standards, increase student achievement,…

Oklahoma Extension educators encountered barriers related to trainings and program delivery for a caregiver education program produced by Oklahoma State University Extension. Oklahoma family and consumer sciences educators were interviewed about perceived barriers to attending trainings and delivering the program. Findings indicated that staff…

This case introduces the current educational leadership context found in the executive branch of the Osage Nation, which is experiencing an era of rapid growth in the wake of a constitutional reform effort in 2004 to 2006. Utilizing a specific narrative that puts an Osage educational leader in charge of developing a 10-year plan that will guide…

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,…

A recent survey of 41 different state boards of education revealed that officials from 28 states indicate that they are experiencing teacher shortages. The shortages in some states are significant. While the teacher shortage in many states is tied to different factors, one frequently cited reason for leaving the teaching profession is low pay.…

On February 24, 2017, all of the authors of the state-of-the-state manuscripts published in the "Journal of Education Finance" met in Cincinnati, Ohio, to participate in a roundtable discussion focused on recent legislative actions in 38 states. A majority of those papers were revised to reflect a final report on legislative actions…