Volunteers have always been essential to the success of 4-H youth development programs. However, the number of available volunteers has declined. Although this decline is not new, it is imperative to recruit and retain adult volunteers for youth programming. Researchers sought to describe characteristics of current Texas volunteers and identify…

Latinx students enroll in higher education in more significant numbers than most minorities. However, Latinx administrators in the United States comprised 14% of total administrators in 2021 (Zippia, 2023b). The Association of American Colleges & Universities (Dedman, 2019) explains the college presidency is 58.1% White and male. White women…

The objective of this study is to add to the existing literature on principal recruitment and hiring strategies by examining the turnover and retention patterns of internally recruited principals. For many hard-to-staff schools--particularly urban and rural schools--internal recruitment is considered a primary method of improving recruitment and…

The United States is experiencing a teacher shortage crisis that is even more pronounced in rural communities. Teachers may be driven away from the profession if they feel inadequately trained or under-supported to address students' mental health needs. As such, an important teacher retention strategy is to ensure schools have enough mental health…

Employers increasingly reach job seekers through online job postings, particularly for jobs requiring a higher education qualification. Job postings available online provide a rich source of real-time and detailed data on the qualifications and skills sought by employers across industries, occupations and locations. Using a sample of over 9…

This study investigates whether a principal's likelihood of hiring a teacher of color is sensitive to the racial composition of students in the school. We used an administrative dataset from Texas including 59,157 principal observations and 662,997 teacher observations spanning 2000-2017 to consider whether or not the disappearing diversity in a…

Talented leaders are essential to building and sustaining successful organizations. This is especially true for schools, where principal leadership plays a major role in fostering student success. Research shows that principals are a significant school-level factor affecting student achievement, second only to classroom teachers. Like other types…

This article examines the unique features of the rural school context and how these features are associated with the stability of principals in these schools. Given the small but growing literature on the characteristics of rural principals, this study presents an exploratory analysis of principal stability across schools located in different…

Since the 1970s, there has been keen interest in examining gender representation in leadership positions across various areas of employment, including K-12 education. Indeed, there have been long-standing concerns about the percentage of women principals. Few studies, however, have examined the percentages of women principals at different…

The Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) supports mentoring for children and youth from disadvantaged circumstances through several of their programs. CNCS believes that caring and capable adults can make a critical difference in the lives of children and youth in need. Mentoring is a proven method to ensure students complete…

This paper reports results from a resume-based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for-profit colleges. For-profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives such as public community colleges being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes…

Across the United States, a movement to create a new kind of public school--"autonomous district schools"--is giving districts the freedoms charter schools receive. Like charter schools, autonomous district schools are freed from innovation-inhibiting state and district policies, allowing talented educators to make academic and…

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…

"The Mentoring Toolkit 2.0: Resources for Developing Programs for Incarcerated Youth" provides information, program descriptions, and links to important resources that can assist juvenile correctional facilities and other organizations to design effective mentoring programs for neglected and delinquent youth, particularly those who are…

States serve a special role in the nation's public education system. Through elected legislatures, states have endowed their various state departments of education with powers over public education, which include granting authority to local entities--typically school districts--to run schools. In their oversight capacity, states--traditionally…