Three Buckets and Eight Strategies: Recruiting, Supporting, and Retaining a Racially Diverse Special Education Teacher Workforce

Cultivating a racially diverse special education teacher workforce is critical to the success of students with disabilities, particularly students of color with disabilities. We examine the literature and provide suggestions for recruiting, supporting, and retaining special education teacher candidates of color. Specifically, we present a vignette that highlights the decision-making process of a Black male on a journey to become a special education teacher. We propose recruitment strategies (e.g., anti-racist mission and vision statements), support strategies (e.g., racial affinity groups), and retention strategies (e.g., adopting anti-racist curriculum) that Institutions of Higher Education must consider to promote efforts to diversify the special education teacher workforce.

A Classroom Observer Like Me: The Effects of Race-congruence and Gender-congruence Between Teachers and Raters on Observation Scores

State and local education agencies across the country are prioritizing the goal of diversifying the teacher workforce. To further understand the challenges of diversifying the teacher pipeline, I investigate race and gender dynamics between teachers and school-based administrators, who are key decision-makers in hiring, evaluating, and retaining teachers. I use longitudinal data from a large school district in the southeastern United States to examine the effects of race-congruence and gender-congruence between teachers and observers/administrators on teachers’ observation scores. Using models with two-way fixed effects, I find that teachers, on average, experience small positive increases in their scores from sharing race or gender with their observers, raising fairness concerns for teachers whose race or gender identities are not reflected by any of their raters.

Exploration and Practice of New HSS Construction in the Public Affairs Administration Major of Medical Colleges: An example of Southwest Medical University

The new humanities and social sciences construction is an important part of the current higher education reform in China. It is an exploratory reform in the field of humanities and social sciences in the sense of adapting to the national strategic development and responding to the scientific and technological revolution. Taking the opportunity of the new humanities and social sciences construction, the major of public affairs administration in Southwest Medical University upgraded the concept, mode, content and means of personnel training, gave full play to the platform advantages of medical colleges, realized the deep integration of medicine and management, explored and constructed a new HSS construction program that integrates the three systems of “talent training, teacher workforce and quality culture”, which is expected to provide reference for the advancement of higher education reform.

The editor’s note: A better start for teachers

Long-standing teacher shortages have only gotten worse during the COVID-19 pandemic, says Rafael Heller. As more teachers leave the profession, the teacher workforce is getting younger and greener. To stop the churn, school systems need to address the specific needs of their new teachers. Some are also beginning to pursue grow-your-own strategies that encourage current students, paraeducators, and other staff who are already invested in the community to become teachers.

Waking Rip Van Winkle: A proposal to redesign the education workforce

The education model in which a single teacher instructs a single classroom of students has been remarkably persistent, but teacher shortages, low morale, and poor teacher retention are signs that it’s not working well for teachers. Ray Reutzel and Parker Fawson describe how Utah’s Center for the School of the Future is seeking to redesign the teacher workforce to improve outcomes for both teachers and students without increasing costs. Their integrated workforce model brings students together in a pod led by a master teacher, classroom teachers, teacher interns, aides, and tutors. Students receive more individualized support, and prospective teachers have more opportunities to practice their skills before receiving a license and becoming a lead teacher. The model also includes pathways for paraprofessionals to complete education coursework while they continue to earn an income.

Young Teachers’ adaptation in the Education System of the Moscow Region in Conditions of Labor Shortage

Growth of the number of students, the increase in the teacher's workload, as well as the characteristics of the age structure of the teacher workforce indicate the seriousness of the problem of teacher shortage in the Moscow region. It is obvious that attracting and retention graduates of pedagogical universities in the regional education system is extremely important. This article presents the results of young teachers’ adaptation process research including the issues of interaction with colleagues, students and their parents, workload and salary, as well as the respondents ' assessment of university training in terms of the use knowledge and skills in work. The sample (n= 64) included teachers who worked at schools from a few months to four and a half years. Based on the survey results, conclusions about the possibilities of improving the mechanisms of adaptation of young teachers in the schools of the region were drawn.

Sorting it Out: The Effects of Charter Expansion on Teacher and Student Composition at Traditional Public Schools

Since their introduction in the 1990s, charter schools have grown from a small-scale experiment to a ubiquitous feature of the public education landscape. The current study uses the legislative removal of a cap on the maximum number of charters in North Carolina as a natural experiment to assess the impacts of charter school growth on teacher quality and student composition in traditional public schools (TPS) at different levels of local market penetration. Using an instrumental variable difference-in-differences approach to account for endogenous charter demand, we find that intensive local charter entry reduces the inflow of new teachers at nearby TPS, leading to a more experienced and credentialed teaching workforce on average. However, we find that the entry of charters serving predominantly White students leads to reductions in average teacher experience, effectiveness, and credentials at nearby TPS. Overall these findings suggest that the composition of the teacher workforce in TPS will continue to change as charter schools further expand, and that the spillover effects of future charter expansion will vary by the types of students served by charters.