As the research base in support of dual language instruction become stronger and more widely recognized, dual language instruction program popularity has risen and the number of programs implemented across the United States has grown (Christian, 2018). Demand for qualified teachers and school administrators is high, but teacher supply has not…

Kindergarten through Grade 12 (K-12) teachers with less than 10 years of experience are leaving the education profession at an alarming rate nationwide and have created fiscal and educational hardships in the profession. The early departures of new teachers have vast implications on U.S. education systems at national and state levels.…

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…

This qualitative descriptive study explored how special education teachers described their retention practices in a specialized school in the northeastern District of Columbia. The most significant issue districts face in staffing schools with qualified teachers is not the lack of certified teachers overall but a chronic and continuous…

The current demand for teachers outpaces the supply of teachers. Policymakers and educational administrators have altered teacher certification rules to address the teacher shortage. One such alteration is the creation of alternative certification pathways for teachers. The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of alternatively…

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…

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each, I use applied econometric methods and economic theory to study the American teacher workforce. The first paper evaluates a novel policy to address teacher shortages by promoting experienced school staff to be teachers of record. Controlling for demographics and baseline scores, I find that…

In the last two decades, district leaders have prioritized financial incentives for educators to solve teacher mobility and quality disparities in low-income schools. In addition, the Wing Institute has projected that in 2025, U.S. schools will not have enough teachers for the increasing number of students. State and local school districts have…

Music therapy degree programs originated in the 1940s and while programs have come and gone, not much was known about the profession's trends. The current education policy was adopted in 2000, two years after the National Association for Music Therapy and the American Association for Music Therapy unified to form one governing organization called…

There has been a marked decline in the number of graduates from the secondary education science and math program at a regional public university in a Midwestern state over the last ten years. Using qualitative and quantitative data gathered from interviews and surveys, this study revealed that this trend damages the ability of rural schools in the…

The demand for high quality teachers in P-12 public school districts in California outweighs the supply. A 2018 report by the Learning Policy Institute states that 88% of teacher demand is a result of attrition (Darling-Hammond et al., 2018). The issue of teacher retention is examined through the conceptual framework of new teacher mentoring.…

This Education Leadership Portfolio (ELP) focuses on addressing the increasing need for more racial diversity in the Delaware teacher workforce. It is a multi-dimensional effort to meet the increasing need for and supply of teachers of color in the state. Therefore, the scope of this ELP centers around the University of Delaware (UD) College of…

Widespread critical shortages of high-quality teachers in the United States (Sutcher, Darling-Hammond, Carver-Thomas, 2016) has prompted considerable research on staffing trends within the teaching profession. Research suggests both an increase in the demand for teachers and a "chronic and relatively high annual turnover compared with many…

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationships of self-efficacy, self-advocacy, and professional development opportunity of special education teachers in a suburban public high school in Western, Connecticut. The problem to be addressed is that as the need for qualified special education teachers increases, the number of qualified…

Qualified teachers are the backbone of K-12 education. Unfortunately, fewer teachers are enrolling in teacher education programs and new teachers are quitting the profession at an alarming rate. This has placed a burden on school districts to implement out-of-the box measures to fill vacant slots. Such measures include offering provisional…