Background/Context: Progressive human resources thinking has suggested the importance of employee experiences for workforce engagement, inclusion, and retention, but the intentional design of positive employee experiences requires a deep understanding of workers' lived experiences in order to respond to their differentiated needs. Although the…

In this study, we examine teachers' perceptions concerning the relative importance of different administrative supports for teacher retention across school levels (i.e., middle and high schools), retention status (i.e., low or high), and locale (i.e., rural and urban). Results from our Best--Worst Scaling analyses, with a sample of 178 South…

States have increasingly relied on financial policies to address teacher staffing challenges, particularly in high need areas. Case in point, South Carolina developed the Rural Recruitment Initiative (RRI) to provide funding for recruitment and retention efforts in rural and other underserved districts facing severe teacher staffing challenges.…

Property tax limits have been found to reduce property tax revenue, with compensatory increases in replacement taxes often not sufficiently making up for funding loss and systematically promoting inequity. Consequently, such practices suggest severe implications for school district fiscal capacity. Our study explored this issue in South Carolina…

There is much alarm about the current teacher shortage resulting from the pandemic and its aftermath. But teacher shortages have long been a perennial issue in K-12 education. Researchers Richard Ingersoll and Henry Tran analyzed data from the National Center of Education Statistics to compare rural schools to urban and suburban schools to…

Purpose: "Abbeville v. South Carolina" was a nearly three-decade long school funding lawsuit initiated by the education leaders of South Carolina's most rural and impoverished school districts that primarily educated students of color. Recently, the State Supreme Court dismissed the entire case. Guided by a multiperspective framework of…

Purpose: The objective of this study is to provide an overall national portrait of elementary and secondary teacher shortages and teacher turnover in rural schools, comparing rural schools to suburban and urban schools. This study utilizes an organizational theoretical perspective focusing on the role of school organization and leadership in the…