Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers' satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study…

Agricultural education's most pressing issue is a lack of qualified classroom teachers. In 2020-2021, 30 states reported the loss of over 70 agricultural education positions, with many schools closing these positions due to inadequate staffing. Furthermore, in 2021-2022, there were 1,680 agricultural education vacancies nationwide and only 789…

This research investigates whether teachers' unions influence student academic achievement in Southern states that prohibit collective bargaining. Our data are from the School and Staffing Survey and the Stanford Education Data Archive. We measure the strength of teachers' unions by union membership rate and meet-and-confer status of a district…

For years, policymakers, districts, and scholars have pushed for the inclusion of more Black male teachers in US public schools; however, their even smaller subset--Black male special education teachers--has been ignored, particularly by scholars. The results of this study provide insight into the recruitment and retention of Black male special…

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…

Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers' satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. In this paper, we exploit changes in the tested grades and subjects in Georgia to study…

The sustained shortage of school-based agricultural educators necessitates novel research into variables impacting teacher career commitment. In the current study, a previously unexplored variable in the prediction of career commitment within school-based agricultural education was considered, teacher connectivity. Four elements of teacher…

Teacher evaluation reform has been among the most controversial education reforms in recent years. It also is one of the costliest in terms of the time teachers and principals must spend on classroom observations. We conducted a randomized field trial at four sites to evaluate whether substituting teacher-collected videos for in-person…

An abundant and longstanding body of scholarship has underscored the White femininity of the U.S. K-12 teaching workforce and the need to diversify its ranks. Black males, in particular, potentially struggle with the notion of becoming teachers given their often highly negative lived experiences with schools and schooling including low…

Work climate is a broad term that encompasses all facets of the work environment, other than training and education, that support or detract from employees' ability to succeed. In this brief, the authors use a sample of center-based child care classrooms in Georgia to examine how different aspects that affect work climate (e.g., wages, employee…

Even as the nation's 5 million English Learners (ELs) make up one in ten students enrolled in public K-12 education, federal funding has not kept up with their population growth. The result is a long-standing lack of equitable and adequate federal funding to support ELs' language development and help them thrive academically. When the COVID-19…

The shortage of Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) teachers is uncontested. Yet while we have focused on recruiting and preparing DLBE teachers, we have neglected exploring how to retain currently practicing DLBE teachers. This article presents a small-scale study of one aspect of DLBE teachers' work -- the selection and creation of…

Traditionally, teacher salaries have been determined solely by experience and educational attainment. This has led to chronic shortages of teachers in particular subject areas, such as math, science and special education. We study the first long-running statewide program to differentiate teacher pay based on subject area, Georgia's bonus system…

This article is based on the authors' experiences as women academics who engage in informal peer mentoring to persist in the cultural milieus of their respective institutions. The authors draw on poststructural perspectives and the metaphor of the rhizome "running bamboo" to illustrate the connections they forged in a mentoring network…

Teacher turnover across the country presents a persistent and growing challenge for schools and districts, with the highest rates of turnover geographically concentrated in the American South. Research on teacher staffing and turnover problems consistently highlight two subsets of schools as struggling to attract and retain well-credentialed,…