Child care teachers support young children's learning and development and parents' ability to work. However, they earn far less and turn over at far higher rates than K-12 teachers. COVID-19 exacerbated staffing challenges, and the child care workforce was 5.3% smaller in January 2023 than in January 2020. While low compensation likely drives…

Dating back to the late 1980s in the United States, a popular assertion in the field of education has been that about half of all new teachers will leave the profession within their first five years. The lack of quality new-teacher retention programming contributes to the qualified teacher shortages faced by many school districts across the…

In 2012, the state of Louisiana set out to create a unified system of education from birth through grade 12. During the initial planning phase, it became clear that a critical piece missing from this system was training and education for the early childhood workforce. To address this, in 2014, the Louisiana Department of Education passed a policy…

In the national expedition for ways to improve PK-12 public education, teacher hiring emerges as a considerable factor in academic achievement. The intersection of federal, state, and district policies, recruitment and hiring processes, decision-makers' criteria and preferences are some factors that impact teacher selection. More importantly,…

This mixed-methods, concurrent nested study was designed to explore the extent to which one state's school counselors reported daily activities that align with the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) National Model. Despite federal and state legislation, state policies, and a state model supporting school counseling practices, a…

Most children in the U.S. spend time in some form of early childhood education (ECE) program prior to entering kindergarten. In fact, children spend an average of 25 hours per week in nonparental care, including center-based care and informal family, friend and neighbor care. Children develop a foundation for learning during these early years, so…

After widespread accusations that universities were not adequately preparing school leadership candidates with real world experiences, the movement to reform U.S. university principal preparation began. The National Policy Board for Educational Administration approved the Educational Leadership Constituent Council (ELCC) standards as guidelines…

This topic paper details how dual and concurrent enrollment programs can help states overcome workforce readiness and postsecondary access and completion challenges and how governors can strengthen these programs by using their bully pulpit, agenda setting authority and budgetary authority to do so. It concludes with a number of examples of how…

This report examines how technology and automation are changing the job market -- and what states can do to prepare adults for the new workplace. It analyzes shifts from low- to middle-skills jobs, details current education levels, and offers recommendations for retooling adult education programs.

Teach For America (TFA) began in 1990 as an organization purportedly interested in working towards ameliorating a national teacher shortage by sending its corps members into urban and rural schools. In the decades that followed, especially during and immediately following a nationwide onslaught of teacher layoffs instigated by the 2008 Great…

A performance management system can help the state education agency (SEA) become more intentional about what it does and does not do, how work is done, and when to change course. Performance management does not define goals or identify specific strategies, but it puts in place systems that enable learning and adaptation to drive improvement and…

America and the South seem to have turned a corner on the deep and prolonged recession that started in 2008. The stranglehold it has had on jobs and job prospects caught many by surprise, and it has caused education leaders to refocus state policy on the relationship between career preparation and education. This report provides updates on the…

The well known 1983 report "A Nation at Risk" recommended that individuals preparing to teach should meet high education standards and demonstrate an aptitude for teaching and competence in an academic discipline--adding also that college and university teacher preparation programs should be judged by how well their graduates meet these…

Nobody goes into teaching to get rich, but that's no excuse not to pay teachers as professionals. Compensation is one of the most important factors in determining who enters the teaching profession and how long they stay--yet 90 percent of all U.S. school districts pay teachers without any regard for their actual performance with students,…

Among the ways in which states attempt to ensure quality in K-12 education is by requiring that most teachers in public schools be licensed via state-level requirements that vary by state. This patchwork of requirements has not been a problem for most teachers over the last century, because so few teachers taught in multiple states concurrently.…