The COVID-19 pandemic forced school leaders to balance health needs and learning needs in unprecedented ways. Promoting student health needs required schools to shift to virtual instruction. Promoting student learning needs required daunting efforts and adjustments by students, families, teachers, and school leaders. The purpose of this study is…

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…

Public debate surrounds the success of charter schools in serving students and providing a generative environment for teacher innovation. Through semi-structured interviews with eleven (N = 11) K-12 charter school music teachers, this study aims to contribute to the understanding of charter school music teachers' perceptions of their setting in…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to explore whether or not increased accountability measures found in the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) impacted teacher job satisfaction. Student growth measures required by the OTES increased teacher accountability. Today, teachers are largely evaluated based on the results of what they do in the…

Teacher evaluation systems introduced by states and school systems in the past several years have focused attention on improving the performance of public school teachers, but they have been cost- and time-intensive, placing a significant burden on states' and districts' resources. In Tennessee, for example, trained evaluators conducted nearly…

The Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) was first implemented during the 2013-14 school term. This study examined principals' dispositions at the end of this school term. Findings revealed several major concerns. The most prominent were (a) not having sufficient time to implement the program properly, (b) basing a teacher's performance heavily…

The purpose of this study was to elicit elementary and middle school administrators' perceptions of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES). The researchers created a questionnaire to learn administrators' experiences with and attitudes, opinions, beliefs, and knowledge of OTES thus far. The questionnaire consisted of twenty-five Likert-based…

Guided by Honig and Hatch's conceptualization of bridging and buffering, we analyzed the first teacher collective bargaining agreements negotiated after the enactment of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System to understand how state law has shaped provisions for teacher evaluation, compensation, reductions in force (RIF), transfers, and contract…

In this study, we provide a contemporary examination of the similarities and differences between early childhood general educators (ECEs) and early childhood special educators (ECSEs) within a theoretically driven model that accounted for the associations of beliefs and knowledge with practice. We used structural equation modeling to examine the…

Several studies have described the characteristics and employment situations of teaching artists in the United States. This study adds to that literature by describing the characteristics of teaching artists working in K-12 school environments, the nature of the classroom roles of such teaching artists, the professional development and supervision…

Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into those internal to and those external to the system. In the process, we unpacked the traditional state-local dichotomy. Using interview data (n = 45) from six case-study states, we analyzed local leaders', state-internal actors', and state-external…

The modernization of teacher evaluation systems, an increasingly common component of school reform efforts, promises to reveal new, systematic information about the performance of individual classroom teachers. Yet while states and districts race to design new systems, most discussion of how the information might be used has focused on traditional…

To effectively integrate digital technologies in K-12 schools, teachers must be provided with undergraduate experiences that strongly support these integration resources and strategies. The National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers (NETS.T) provide a framework for teacher candidates and inservice teachers to identify their…

This quantitative study investigated the relationship between teacher dispositions, subject content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and reasons that school principals recommend non-renewal of teachers' contracts. Nearly 2,000 school principals in 13 states completed an emailed survey. In deciding whether to non-renew a teacher contract,…

Early childhood teachers are rightly concerned with implementing a system that was, at least in the initial stages, designed with a different set of teachers in mind--teachers of older students who have standardized achievement data. In most states, policy, practices, and guidance for early childhood teachers are just now being developed or…