Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic era, concerns about teacher turnover and teacher shortages remain at the top of the education agenda. But contrary to media reports about a "wave of resignations and retirements" (e.g., Heller, 2021), early evidence from state databases showed a more nuanced picture: teacher attrition was actually…

School systems have long faced teacher shortages, with high turnover rates exacerbating the shortage, particularly in Career and Technical Education (CTE). Teachers who enter CTE through alternative licensure (AL) face unique obstacles transitioning from industry to teaching. This study addressed the retention challenge among AL CTE teachers by…

Teacher attrition is squarely in the policy spotlight. Major news outlets have featured recent stories highlighting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teacher shortages. In this brief, the authors frame the magnitude of teacher attrition during the pandemic, including from the 2020-2021 school year to the 2021-22 school year, using publicly…

Teacher shortages continue to be a challenge for state policymakers, and while national media coverage paints a picture of widespread shortages, a closer examination reveals that shortages tend to be concentrated in specific subjects and schools. The primary policy response to shortages is often to recruit more teachers, but research demonstrates…

We use a unique dataset of student teaching placements in the State of Washington and a proxy for teacher shortages, the proportion of new teacher hires in a school or district with emergency teaching credentials, to provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between student teaching placements and teacher shortages. We find that…

As school systems work to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, states continue to grapple with persistent teacher shortages, a lack of teachers of color in the workforce, and high turnover rates undermining recruitment efforts. Teachers' effectiveness and their likelihood of staying in teaching are strongly influenced by the quality of preparation…

Purpose: In this paper we investigate school district staffing challenges during the 2021-22 school year, the second school year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Research Methods/Approach: We use novel data from Washington state collected by scraping websites for job postings during the 2021-22 school year; the districts represented in the study serve…

Across the United States, many districts find themselves short on bilingual teachers. More than half of the states face a shortage of such teachers, with shortages most acute in states that provide bilingual education to the greatest numbers of English learners. Bilingual and dual-language education have proven to have a positive effect on the…

This article evaluates the applicability at the state and district level of web scraping--an automated data-extraction technique that regularly exports and refreshes data from the Internet--to provide a low-cost way to get a close-to-real-time snapshot of the demand side of the teacher labor market. Once set up, web scraping can quickly build and…

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…

Prior research has shown that about 15% of teachers are hired into the same school in which they student taught, about 40% are hired into their student teaching district, and the location of teachers' student teaching placements is more predictive of where they are hired than where they went to high school or college. While this suggests that…

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,…

Nationally, more than 75% of individuals who are credentialed to teach are prepared in traditional college- or university-based teacher education programs (TEPs). But the college and employment pathways that prospective teachers take to TEP enrollment and completion have not been comprehensively examined. A better understanding of how credentialed…

This brief is the fourth of a four-part series that focuses on bilingual education, bilingual educators, and addressing the bilingual teacher shortage in contexts across the United States. This research was commissioned by the New Jersey State Department of Education, which is committed to providing quality bilingual education to its…

Teacher shortages disproportionally impact high need schools that can be hard to staff. However, effective teachers have an influential role in improving low-performing schools. Focusing on recruiting and retaining teachers to low-income and low-performing schools is crucial not only to closing achievement gaps, but also to ensuring that students…