The ongoing crisis in teacher pension funding has led states to consider various reforms in plan design to replace the traditional benefit formulas, based on years of service and final average salary (FAS). One such design is a cash balance (CB) plan, long deployed in the private sector, and increasingly considered, but rarely yet adopted, for…

How are teacher pension benefits funded? Under traditional plans, the full cost of career teachers' benefits far exceeds the contributions designated for them. The gap between the two has three pieces, which may (with some license) be mnemonically tagged the three R's of pension funding: "redistribution," "return," and…

Texas reduced new teacher preparation requirements in 2001 to allow more alternate paths to licensure. Within 5 years, this policy change resulted in more than half of the state's new teachers being alternatively licensed. Using a series of first difference models, this study examines the relationship between the increased supply of new teachers…

Research Findings: This study examined the relationship between Chinese early childhood teachers' socioeconomic status and turnover intention during the COVID-19 pandemic, with relative deprivation and perceived support as the mediator/moderator. Altogether 1070 early childhood teachers were recruited and surveyed online. The statistical results…

Shadow education (or private supplementary tutoring) has grown exponentially both as a phenomenon and an area of research. Based on a qualitative content analysis of international research on private tutoring published in the last four decades (1980-2018), this study explores how teachers and their teaching practices are represented in this…

Because charter school principals are granted more autonomy and discretion than principals of traditional public schools, it is imperative to search for the attributes of principals that may improve charter school performance. This study examines the relationship between principals' collective bargaining and charter school effectiveness. Using…

For the first time in the history of the State of the States, all 50 states will be represented with entries this year. A number of state legislatures are working to provide public education the necessary fiscal support to provide students with a high quality 21st century education, or restore funding levels for public education to pre-Great…

This qualitative multiple case study is a follow-up to a study completed in 2007 that examined characteristics of rural school districts experiencing a high rate of superintendent turnover. The original study design incorporated extensive interviews with participants across four rural school districts; triangulating interview results with…

Addressing Sorensen and Tuma's resource-reward theory, we explored teacher attrition from an economic perspective. The study aimed to explore the extent to which teachers' resources and terms of employment correlate with attrition behavior. In a sample of 10,340 Israeli K-12 teachers it was found that many beginning teachers who left the…

The management of multiple dilemmas became a norm overnight for Catholic school superintendents navigating the COVID-19 pandemic as they quickly moved to making decisions that would have long-term effects on the system of schools they led. This paper attempts to make sense of the new educational dilemmas that have confronted Catholic school…

Levels of governance (the nation, states, and districts), student subgroups (racially and ethnically minoritized and economically disadvantaged students), and types of resources (expenditures, class sizes, and teacher quality) intersect to represent a complex and comprehensive picture of K-12 educational resource inequality. Drawing on multiple…

This study examined the effects of teacher characteristics, perceived school climate and work conditions, and students' characteristics on public school kindergarten teachers' act of moving to another school, leaving the profession and staying in the same school. The data came from School and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the Teacher Follow-up Survey…

In this article, the author discusses how kindergarten is close to being universal across the United States. More than half (56%) of the children who are attending kindergarten are in full-day programs. Whether they are in full-day programs or half-day programs, the kindergartners certainly do daily work in the areas of reading and language arts.…

On a recent visit to Murmansk, Russia to explore collaborative possibilities between the University of North Florida and Murmansk State Pedagogical University (MSPU), two educators jumped at the chance to visit a local kindergarten. As a former kindergarten teacher, one was curious to see how this kindergarten varied from what she had experienced…