School systems have long faced teacher shortages, with high turnover rates exacerbating the shortage, particularly in Career and Technical Education (CTE). Teachers who enter CTE through alternative licensure (AL) face unique obstacles transitioning from industry to teaching. This study addressed the retention challenge among AL CTE teachers by…

Prior work on teacher candidates in Washington State has shown that about two thirds of individuals who trained to become teachers between 2005 and 2015 and received a teaching credential did not enter the state's public teaching workforce immediately after graduation, while about one third never entered a public teaching job in the state at all.…

A growing quantitative literature finds evidence that student teaching placements predict later outcomes of teacher candidates and their students, but there is little large-scale quantitative evidence about the mechanisms for these estimated relationships. We used data from a survey of STEM teachers in Washington State to better understand how…

We use data on over 14,000 teacher candidates in Washington state, merged with employment data from the state's public schools and Unemployment Insurance system, to investigate the career paths and earnings of teacher candidates in the state. Around 75% of candidates are employed in some education position in each of the 5 years after student…

This paper explores the emotional experiences of three first-year Latinx teachers in Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) programs. Drawing on interviews completed over the course of a year-long critical ethnography with collaborative elements, I created a series of transcription poems highlighting salient emotions. Applying feminist theories…

This paper examines factors associated with the retention and mobility of teachers of colour in one state in the USA, with a special focus on beginning and novice teachers. We examine year-by-year retention and mobility rates for four time periods, beginning in 2015-16. We use logistic regression models to investigate the relationship between…

We use a novel database of student teaching placements in Washington State to investigate teachers' transitions from student teaching classrooms to first job classrooms and the implications for student achievement. We find first-year teachers are more effective when they teach in the same or an adjacent grade, in the same school type, or in a…

Emerging research finds connections between teacher candidates' student teaching placements and their future career paths and effectiveness. Yet relatively little is known about the factors that influence these placements and how teacher education programs (TEPs) and K-12 school systems match teacher candidates to mentor teachers. In our study of…

We used data on the student teaching placements, degrees, teaching credentials, and workforce outcomes of more than 1,300 graduates of special education teacher education programs in Washington to provide a descriptive portrait of specific measures of special education teacher preparation and their relationships with workforce entry and…

Teacher shortages disproportionally impact high need schools that can be hard to staff. However, effective teachers have an influential role in improving low-performing schools. Focusing on recruiting and retaining teachers to low-income and low-performing schools is crucial not only to closing achievement gaps, but also to ensuring that students…

A growing quantitative literature finds evidence that student teaching placements predict later outcomes of teacher candidates and their students, but there is little large-scale quantitative evidence about the mechanisms for these estimated relationships. We use data from a survey of STEM teachers in Washington State to better understand how…

We used survey and administrative data from Washington State to assess the degree to which special education teacher preparation, district literacy instructional practices, and the alignment between preparation and practice were associated with the reading test score gains of students with high-incidence disabilities taught by early-career special…