Teacher vacancies have been a long-standing issue in U.S. public schools, only made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Vacancies tend to be concentrated in high-poverty, high-minority schools and hard-to-staff subjects like special education and STEM. States have implemented various policies to decrease turnover, including offering teachers bonuses…

Job burnout in school psychologists has been recognized as a problem in the field for many years. The contributors to burnout are varied and may include personal as well as professional variables. This research examined the impact the demographic variables of age, years in the field/current job, grade level worked with, type of community worked…

Public schools are the cornerstone of this nation's communities, democracy, and economy. The challenges and deep inequities facing schools today are largely the result of decades of disinvestment, compounded by a global pandemic. All of this has led to a breaking point for the system of public education. In 2023, lawmakers and stakeholders are…

Teacher performance pay is often introduced with the goal of reducing gaps in test scores across groups, yet little is known about how well they achieve this aim. We ask, "Do test score-based teacher incentives impact the Black-White test score gap?" Using student-teacher matched data and a difference-in-differences approach in which the…

Principal turnover is a national problem with costly side effects. There is a growing interest in this problem of practice. Although more studies are emerging, there is limited qualitative research into understanding why principals are leaving their positions. This is a basic qualitative study examining the experiences of three former North…

While many state-level finance equity studies examine the effectiveness of state funding mechanisms overall, fewer examine specific components that make up these mechanisms. This research uses state-level longitudinal administrative data to examine levels of horizontal and vertical equity in the distribution of teacher salary dollars via the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the career trajectories of two teachers in the United States and their decision to leave teaching Spanish. Data for the study emerged from the teachers' narratives about their school-based experiences and the consequences of those experiences on their decisions to reorient their work in the educational…

This qualitative phenomenological study addressed the underrepresentation of Black males in education by exploring the professional and lived experiences of Black male educators in urban North Carolina schools. The study utilized Critical Race Theory (CRT) to contextualize the lived experiences and persistent struggles of Black male educators and…

In North Carolina and across the nation, districts and schools struggle to recruit and retain effective teachers, especially teachers of color. For more than a decade, declining enrollments in educator preparation programs and rises in teacher vacancies and attrition rates, coupled with population growth and increasing demand for teachers, have…

Salaries are one of the most powerful policy levers states and school districts can use to attract qualified, effective, and diverse teachers. What role do states play in supporting strategic use of salaries? This report examines the state teacher compensation policies that influence districts' potential strategic use of teacher pay. It analyzes…

The current brief provides an overview of the 2021-2022 school year student-to-school psychologist ratio for every United States territory, using the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) counts of school psychologists. In addition to this, data are presented on the percentage change in student-to-school psychologist ratio from the…

This article features a Foucauldian analysis of interview data from a qualitative study of four North Carolina public school teachers who are required to clock in and out of school each day via a virtual time clock. In this article, Michel Foucault's theories of discourse, discipline, power, and surveillance are brought into dialogue with…

In 2017, Elon University became one of very few universities in the United States without a medical school to have an in-house Anatomical Gift Program (AGP). The program accepts first-person-consenting individuals only and within 2.5 years has become self-sufficient, supporting anatomy curricular needs of its physical therapy, physician assistant,…

In this dissertation, I explore how international migration and environmental pollution shape human capital accumulation and labor market outcomes.The first chapter examines how college enrollment and major choice decisions of young adults in migrant-sending countries are affected by the removal of international migration barriers. My…

We examine how increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities impacted newborn health and prenatal care utilization in North Carolina around the time Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act was first being implemented within the state. Focusing on administrative data between 2004 and 2006, we conduct…