The purpose of this study is to determine what factors affect teachers to stay or leave Illinois public school districts that are classified by their state report cards as having 95% or greater low-income student enrollments. Many teachers are dropping out before getting much experience. These teachers are either going to higher socioeconomic…

Due to the overwhelming number of teachers exiting the profession each year, recruitment and retention efforts continue to be a high priority for stakeholders within agricultural education. Specifically, teacher attrition has been identified as one of the leading problematic issues hindering growth of school-based agricultural education (SBAE)…

Background/Context: Research consistently emphasizes the importance of social-emotional learning (SEL) in education settings (Cipriano et al., 2023; Wigelsworth et al., 2023). In addition, it has become increasingly evident that educators' social-emotional competence and well-being plays a crucial role in fostering SEL among students (Braun et…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented challenge for state, district, and school leaders across the country. Whether states and districts mandate or choose an in-person or remote model or a hybrid model, which includes some aspect of virtual learning, ensuring that vulnerable students and teachers have a remote learning option has…

The shortage of school-based agricultural education (SBAE) teachers in the United States has been a chronic issue for decades. Besides not having sufficient graduates in our teacher preparation programs, the number of SBAE teachers annually leaving the profession further exacerbates the problem. While the reasons why SBAE teachers leave the…

We study changes to teacher working conditions from 2016-17 to 2022-23, covering school years before, during, and after the COVID pandemic. We show working conditions were improving leading into the pandemic but declined when the pandemic arrived. Perhaps more surprisingly, the pandemic was not a low point: teacher working conditions have…

COVID-19 shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. We examine teachers' experiences during emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 using responses to a working conditions survey from a sample of 7,841 teachers across 206 schools and 9 states. Teachers reported a range of challenges related to…

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education and requiring large scale school transformation on a pace never before seen. Though prior research on organizational change has emphasized the importance of working conditions for teacher satisfaction and student achievement…