It is pointed out in this Digest that there is an imbalance between the number of Black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American teachers and the percentage of children of similar ethnic backgrounds in the schools. The growing minority student enrollment in public schools has increased the demand for proportional minority teacher representation.…

This digest examines the rural teacher shortage from a policy perspective and suggests strategies to address the problem. The rural teacher recruitment and retention problem varies across states. An adequate number of teachers are trained each year nationwide, but the problem is with distribution. Recent research on rural teacher recruitment and…

Today's teachers shortage is most severe in urban districts, which struggle to recruit and retain new teachers and face persistent gaps between white, middle class teachers and diverse students. Teachers' lack of cultural and linguistic familiarity in such situations can be damaging to the goal of ensuring that all children achieve to their…

This brief report summarizes a longer report with the same title. It examines the problems of the increasingly severe shortage of qualified teachers in American higher education and the need to recruit large numbers of new faculty during the next decade and, as the potential solution to both problems, the recruiting of women to fill these faculty…

This digest focuses on the data that show significant disparities between the number of teachers of color and the number of students of color and examines how well schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing in supplying teachers of color for U.S. classrooms. The document is organized into three sections. The first section discusses…

While the shortage of qualified administrators is not as serious as the shortage of qualified teachers, some schools continue to fail to attract qualified leaders. Referred to as "hard-to-staff" schools, they are often characterized by high-poverty students, low test scores, high staff turnover, and under qualified teachers. This ERIC…