While the majority of U.S students are children of color, only 20% of teachers are people of color. What's more, 40% of the nation's public schools do not have a single teacher of color on record. Research shows that all students, regardless of race or ethnicity, benefit socially, emotionally, and academically from a diverse teacher workforce.…

Scholarship on college choice largely focuses on how students search for colleges but less is known about how colleges recruit students. This article analyzes off-campus recruiting visits for 15 public research universities. We Web-scrape university admissions websites and issue public records requests to collect data on recruiting visits.…

Innovation in education is vital for responding to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and for building progress on longstanding challenges in schools. The infusion of substantial, highly flexible pots of federal relief dollars created an opportunity to pilot new programs and initiatives. Many states and districts opted to invest…

Districts across the country are facing severe shortages of teachers--especially in certain subjects (math, science, special education, career and technical education, and bilingual education) and in specific schools (urban, rural, high-poverty, high-minority, and low-achieving). The severity of the teacher shortage problem varies significantly by…

Recruiting and retaining talented individuals into the teaching workforce, especially in schools in underserved urban and rural communities, is challenging when college graduates face more lucrative professional alternatives and often carry significant student debt. Two promising approaches to attracting and keeping teachers in the profession are…

America and the South seem to have turned a corner on the deep and prolonged recession that started in 2008. The stranglehold it has had on jobs and job prospects caught many by surprise, and it has caused education leaders to refocus state policy on the relationship between career preparation and education. This report provides updates on the…

Nobody goes into teaching to get rich, but that's no excuse not to pay teachers as professionals. Compensation is one of the most important factors in determining who enters the teaching profession and how long they stay--yet 90 percent of all U.S. school districts pay teachers without any regard for their actual performance with students,…

This monograph offers an in-depth look at the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Rural Systemic Initiative (RSI) efforts, an investment of more than $140 million to reform mathematics and science programs in rural K-12 public education and tribal education. The authors seek to promote a foundation of contextual understanding for improving public…

Excerpts from recently-released Department of Education reports outline the success of Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Virginia in recruiting black students and faculty to predominantly white state colleges and universities. (MSE)

Given the surging growth in the U.S. Latino population in recent years, nowhere have those increases been occurring faster than in the southeast. North Carolina, Arkansas and Georgia, for example, have seen population increases between 300 and 400 percent since the early 1990s. Naturally, Latino community leaders and state officials have been…

Although states have maintained a focus on recruiting and retaining teachers, many schools and districts still face daunting challenges in ensuring a qualified and competent teaching corps. It is particularly difficult for schools considered hard to staff-those with high concentrations of low-performing, low-income students; high teacher turnover;…

Magnet schools gained prominence in education in the 1970s as a tool for achieving voluntary desegregation in lieu of forced busing. The theory behind magnet schools as a desegregation tool is simple: Create a school so distinctive and appealing--so magnetic--that it will draw a diverse range of families from throughout the community eager to…