Meeting the requirement for highly qualified teachers as outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act has left school districts in a quandary, especially those that serve a population of students deemed "at-risk" and where attracting and retaining highly qualified teachers is difficult. One professional development program based on…

In 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) completed an 18-month study of the costs of teacher turnover in five school districts. The selected districts varied in size, location, and demographics enabling exploration of how these variations affected costs. Costs of recruiting, hiring, processing, and training…

This book is intended to serve as a stimulus for discussion of what is needed to provide all American children with a world-class education opportunity and to make education a top priority in every state and the country as a whole. A range of contributors offer a diverse number of possible solutions to the current educational crisis in American…

Significant improvements in student learning require real change at the heart of instruction: the interaction of students and teachers around the content to be learned. This paper suggests a set of design specifications for strengthening this interaction of student, teacher and content and increasing student performance across a school district.…

For many small rural school districts across America, the effort to attract and retain quality teachers continues to be a major concern. Schools located in what are considered to be "hard to staff" areas experience the most difficult. While not all communities face the problems of inadequate teacher supply, many small and rural school…

This resource manual is designed to assist Alaska school districts in recruiting and retaining special education teachers. It offers 50 practical suggestions for developing an effective recruitment program, focusing on the processes of gathering information; developing recruiters, materials, and strategies; and screening and interviewing…

A county (Harris County, Texas) education agency, along with Special Education Directors and Personnel Officers from the county's 24 school districts, identified problems in recruiting special education teachers and such related service personnel as psychologists, psychological associates, educational diagnosticians, speech therapists, art…

In 1998 South Carolina state legislation established the Teacher Specialist on Site (TSOS) program, to assign teacher specialists to school districts designated as below average or unsatisfactory. The need for TSOS has grown each year, and despite varied recruitment efforts, many vacancies exist. Concerns that vacancies would disproportionately…

This study examined the extent to which Ohio school districts had implemented several policy and procedure recommendations in order to address the problem of perennial substitute teacher shortage. Surveys of district superintendents, who had completed a questionnaire on substitute teacher policy and procedures 3 years before, examined: district…

The average tuition of a four-year public college is $3510 per year (Adriane, 2003). In this study, letters were sent letters to the education departments of fifteen state universities in a southern state by a school level administrator. Each university was asked to help the local education agency (LEA) find prospective teachers from the…

This report presents the Austin Independent School District's (AISD) Affirmative Faculty/Staff Recruitment Plan 1983 evaluation findings. The plan has two long range goals: (1) to have male and female representation at all employment levels whenever possible; and (2) to attain ethnic percentages for all levels of the professional personnel…

A review of national trends shows that American schools will face serious teacher shortages beginning in the late 1980s and extending through the turn of the century. The Educators 2000 Project is a cooperative effort among several Louisiana Universities, the Urban League, and the Orleans Parish Public Schools (Louisiana) that focuses on the…

ANALYSIS OF DATA FROM 146 SCHOOLS ACROSS THE COUNTRY SHOWS ACQUISITION OF QUALIFIED STAFF PERSONNEL TO BE A MAJOR DIFFICULTY IN OPERATING NEW SCHOOL PROGRAMS. THE EIGHT MOST DIFFICULT PROGRAMS TO STAFF WERE PRESCHOOL, REMEDIAL READING, ELEMENTARY SCHOOL LIBRARIANS, SOCIAL WORKERS, TEACHERS FOR EMOTIONALLY DISTURBED CHILDREN, PSYCHOLOGISTS, SPEECH…