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…

This dissertation seeks to better understand the individual educational technology decision-maker and how they interact with other members of the educational technology decision making process in a public k-12 school setting. To do this, I asked the questions: who are the people who make educational technology decision in a K-12 school district?…

High turnover in the role of school superintendent signaled functional disruption, decreased morale and impaired student achievement. The principal researcher sought to explain perceptions among professional Florida K-12 public school educators about key factors related to the role of school superintendent, necessary qualifications, important…

Concerns about a strong positive correlation between leadership and student success (Wood et al., 2013) coupled with community input around hiring from outside an organization, as opposed to hiring from within, contributes to the complexity of filling superintendent vacancies The limited research available on this issue is amplified due to the…

Purpose: We surveyed educational leaders in a large, urban school district in the southeastern United States, examining: (1) the factor structure of scores from a new measure of administrators' preferred teacher applicant characteristics, and (2) the relationships between administrator demographics and their preferences.…

A School District Principal Preparation Partnership Program is designed to establish collaboration between a University and school districts that employ the school leaders graduated by the university. This collaboration improves school principal preparation by integrating relevant school district policies, practices, knowledge, and skills into a…

In looking at four broad factors related to teacher assignments in the Los Angeles School District--instructional load, homophily, colleague qualifications, and professional culture--researchers of urban education policy at the University of Southern California discovered three main lessons for practice: First, that teacher working conditions are…

This study investigates how teacher qualifications at the campus level were related to achievement, absenteeism, and discipline outcomes for Black and Hispanic students in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. Campus-level teacher qualifications included shares of advanced degrees, formal…

This study analyzes how the availability of Black and Hispanic teachers within schools in the Houston Independent School District is related to Hispanic and Black students' academic and behavioral outcomes during the 2018--19 and 2019--20 school years. The analyses found that Hispanic and Black students' test scores, attendance and discipline…

In 2014, The Wallace Foundation launched the Principal Supervisor Initiative (PSI), a four-year, $24 million effort to redefine principal supervision in six urban school districts. The PSI aimed to help districts overhaul a position traditionally focused on administration, operations, and compliance to one dedicated to developing and supporting…

The purpose of this study was to examine the current shortage of certified dual-language and bilingual teachers at dual-language programs. Currently, there exist problems surrounding the wider implementation of dual-language education programs as a result of the widespread teacher shortages, which has been shown in the literature to drastically…

Policymakers and professional educators attempt to be good stewards of public funds while simultaneously raising expectations for student outcomes that reflect academic excellence in the public school system. The purpose of this study was to determine the efficiency of Texas public school districts and the factors influencing the inefficiency of…

The rapid expansion of computer science (CS) instruction in primary and secondary education has highlighted the shortage of teachers qualified to teach the subject. A key strategy for building CS teaching capacity has been preparing teachers of other subjects (e.g., math, technology applications, business) to teach introductory CS through…

This study analyzed the equitable distribution of qualified teachers across schools in the Houston Independent School District (HISD) in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. It examined how the characteristics of teachers were distributed in schools relative to the characteristics of the students attending those schools. For each HISD campus, the…

The purpose of this study is to share how African American/Black male K-12 novice educators navigated their own educational journey to become K-12 educators in an urban school district in central Alabama. An urban school district was identified from findings from the Census Bureau and had a school that sat inside an urbanized area and inside a…