Educator labor markets vary considerably across the country and can change quickly during recessions. We use data from the Quality Workforce Indicators (QWI) on educators in Elementary and Secondary Schools from 2000-01 to 2022-23. We demonstrate how to transform the quarter-level data in the QWI to construct valid educator labor market measures.…

This is a practical set of guidelines on the management of secondary teachers. It has two main purposes: firstly, to act as a tool for technicians when planning and analysing data on their secondary teacher workforce in relation to teacher requirements, allocation, and utilization. Secondly, it will help inform policy makers about the challenges…

News headlines across the country continue to include policy updates, new strategies, and other information relating to the continuing teacher shortage in the United States. School-based agricultural education is not immune to the teacher shortage. Agriculture teacher shortages have been documented for more than a century. Extensive research has…

High schools in California--and around the country--increasingly offer computer science (CS) and often would like to expand CS offerings further. However, these expansions pose a number of challenges for administrators and policymakers, especially if they are going to happen effectively and equitably. We consider four of the most pressing…

Prior research has found that economic downturns have positive effects on new teacher quality, but has not been able to determine the extent to which this relationship arises from a supply response (increased quantity or positive selection of teaching candidates) vs. a demand response (selection in hiring enabled by falling demand). In this paper,…

We explore the dynamics of competitive search in the K-12 public education sector. Using detailed panel data on teacher hiring from Boston Public Schools, we document how teacher labor supply varies substantially across vacancies even within a single district depending on position type, school characteristics, and the timing of job postings. We…

The vision of every elementary, middle, and high school in the United States is to deliver an excellent educational setting to each and every student who enters their school building. Educational research overwhelmingly demonstrates that a primary factor contributing to an "excellent educational setting" is having highly qualified and…

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…

The Vocational Major was introduced in Victoria, Australia in 2023 to raise the status of Vocational Education and Training (VET). To address demand for qualified VET teachers in secondary schools, VET trainers without a teaching qualification are granted permission to teach VET. This policy contributes to a vicious circle which maintains the low…

In Massachusetts, as is true nationally, teachers are less racially diverse than students. As of the 2021-22 school year, 87 percent of teachers in the state were White, compared with only 54 percent of students. In response to this disparity, Massachusetts lawmakers have proposed legislation targeting the shortage of teachers of color. In this…

The contexts in which Aotearoa New Zealand leaders learn and work have improved in some respects from 30 years ago and deteriorated in others. The improvements include a significant shift away from heroic, often dictatorial, models of leadership towards a greater focus on the many layers and types of leadership required for secondary schools to be…

It has been asserted that the test-based accountability of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) increased instruction in tested subject areas reading and math, leading to reductions in arts education. We tested this using two waves of data, before and after NCLB implementation, in a difference-in-differences design. The analyses indicated that the total…

Much recent debate among policymakers and policy advocates focuses on whether states should reduce teacher licensure requirements to ease the burdens of recruiting high quality teachers to the workforce. We examine the effectiveness of individuals who entered the teacher workforce in Massachusetts during the pandemic by obtaining an emergency…

We explore the dynamics of competitive search in the K-12 public education sector. Using data from Boston Public Schools, we document how teacher labor supply varies substantially by position types, schools, and the timing of job postings. We find that early-posted positions are more likely to be filled and end up securing new hires that are…

This study explored the practice of "teacher-volunteerism" in Ontario, Canada. A teacher-volunteer refers to those teachers who are fully certified to be employed as teachers in Ontario and who remain active in the teaching labour market. Teachers in Ontario, facing a competitive labour market, have increasingly volunteered inside of…