Staff Recruitment

This issue is the second in a three-part series on quality teaching. The other two issues in the series focus on teacher recruitment and teachers' career structures and work environment. This issue examines research and expert consensus on teacher preparation,

The first brief in this series, Teacher Shortages: What We Know, explores research on teacher shortages and highlights recent state task force findings. This report is one of five policy briefs examining strategies states are using to address shortages.

This study uses applications-to-transfer data to examine separately which teachers apply for transfer and which get hired and, in so doing, differentiates teachers from school preferences.

In the face of a growing school-age population, U.S. schools and school districts are struggling to maintain teaching standards while recruiting bright new teachers and retaining their most-effective ones. This literature review represents a comprehensive and critical examination of research published since 1980 on the topic of teacher recruitment and retention in the United States.

Policy Brief 2018-1: Addressing the Importance and Scale of the U.S. Teacher Shortage

One of the more difficult issues involves a debate between observers who are concerned about an overall teacher shortage, and others who see it largely as a distributional problem where some schools have a relative surplus of teachers while other schools struggle with a persistent, unmet demand for qualified teachers. Those in the former camp focus on policies that aim to improve the recruitment and retention in the teaching profession in general, while those in the latter camp focus on policies that target education funding to fill positions for certain hard-to-staff schools and/or subject areas.

Though policymakers are increasingly concerned about teacher shortages in U.S. public schools, the national discussion does not reflect historical patterns of the supply of and demand for newly minted teachers.

The authors study the mal-distribution of teachers and examine its causes then describe examples of both states and local school districts that have fashioned successful strategies for strengthening their teaching forces. 

While anecdotal accounts of substantial teacher shortages are increasingly common, we present evidence that such shortages are not a general phenomenon but rather are highly concentrated by subject and in schools where hiring and retaining teachers are chronic problems. We discuss several promising, complementary approaches for addressing teacher shortages.

The focus of this project is to create research in teacher education that positively impacts teacher recruitment, preparation and retention in urban environments. The novel approach we are using to attack this problem is that of capturing, analyzing, synthesizing and simulating human interactions in Mixed Reality (part real, part synthetic) environments, thereby creating training/screening settings that are realistic and yet do not put actual children at risk.

Research on teacher turnover has led to the identification of retention strategies to help advance the profession and improve the recruitment, preparation, and support of teachers. This report summarizes available research on these strategies and discusses potential barriers and research on their relative cost-effectiveness.

"But I am addressing my remarks not just to those of you assembled today in this majestic Rotunda but to a generation of college students, professionals rethinking their careers, military veterans, retirees and others who may be thinking of becoming a teacher. Put plain and simple, this country needs an army of great, new teachers—and I can think of no better place to start recruiting them then in Thomas Jefferson's hallowed halls."

We investigated the effects of a statewide program designed to increase the supply of
teachers in “hard-to-staff” areas.

Policy makers are concerned about reports of teacher shortages and the high rate of attrition among new teachers. Prior studies indicate that mentor-based induction can reduce the numbers of new teachers leaving schools or the profession

Recruiting high quality employees is one of the key functions of public human resource managers and a critical component of effective public service delivery. This is particularly true in education but little is known about public sector or teacher hiring patterns in areas that are predominantly rural, poor, and isolated from other locales.

This article reviews the research and best practices on succession planning in education as well as in other sectors. The authors illustrate how forward-thinking superintendents can partner with universities and other organizations to address the leadership challenges they face by creating strategic, long-term, leadership growth plans that build leadership capacity and potentially yield significant returns in improved student outcomes.

The teacher shortage in the nation's public schools—particularly in our high-poverty schools—
is a crisis for the teaching profession and a serious problem for the entire education system.
It harms students and teachers and contributes to the opportunity and achievement gaps
between students in high-poverty schools and their more affluent peers.

In this final report, we present findings on the implementation and impacts of an intervention
that identified school districts' highest-performing teachers and then used monetary
incentives to encourage them to transfer into the lowest-achieving schools.

Who should be recruited to fill the two to three million K–12 teaching positions projected to come open during the next decade? What kinds of knowledge and training should these new recruits have? These are the questions confronting policymakers as a generation of teachers retires at the same time that the so-called baby boom echo is making its way through the education system.

We use a unique longitudinal sample of student teachers (“interns”) from six Washington state teacher training institutions to investigate patterns of entry into the teaching workforce. We estimate split population models that simultaneously estimate the impact of individual characteristics and student teaching experiences on the timing and probability of initial hiring as a public school teacher. 

This paper provide some recommendations to increase the pool of potential teachers, make it tougher to award tenure to those who perform least well, and reward effective teachers who are willing to work in schools serving large numbers of low-income, disadvantaged children. 

Recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers is essential for student learning. As a 2019 Learning Policy Institute analysis found, “Investments in instruction, especially high-quality teachers, appear to leverage the largest marginal gains in [student] performance.” Research has shown that teacher cuts during the last recession disproportionately impacted districts and schools serving students of color and students from low-income families. 

This article critically reviews the recent empirical literature on teacher recruitment and retention published in the United States.

A salary increase in an urban school district can attract more applicants. The policy attracted applicants who would have only applied to higher-paying school districts in the absence of the salary increase. Improvements in the applicant pool can lead to an increase in the quality of new-hires.

In this policy brief Heather Hough and Susanna Loeb examine the effect of the Quality Teacher and Education Act of 2008 (QTEA) on teacher recruitment, retention, and overall teacher quality in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). They provide evidence that a salary increase can improve a school district’s attractiveness within their local teacher labor market and increase both the size and quality of the teacher applicant pool. 

Competition for teachers is fierce and expensive. In fact, many schools and organizations pay thousands of dollars each year to third party talent sourcing sites such as Linkedin, Indeed, and Glassdoor to help them find quality candidates. And sometimes this search can feel more ‘luck of the draw’ than strategic.

Contemporary educational theory holds that one of the pivotal causes of inadequate student achievement, especially in disadvantaged schools, is the inability of schools to adequately staff classrooms with qualified teachers. Deficits in the quantity of teachers produced and in the quality of preparation prospective teachers receive have long been singled out as primary explanations for underqualified teaching.

This brief summarizes the results from a study of the recruitment, employment, and retention of minority k-12 teachers. The study examines the extent and sources of the minority teacher shortage—the low proportion of minority teachers in comparison to the increasing numbers of minority students in the school system.

This report fills an important gap in the literature on school leadership by presenting an approach for understanding the resources and expenditures associated with efforts to prepare, hire, evaluate, develop, and support school leaders and by presenting estimates of those resources and expenditures. 

This study examines the Noyce Program, which provides scholarships for STEM majors in return for teaching in high need schools. Implications for teacher education programs include that recruitment strategies should identify candidates who are committed to teaching in high need schools and programs should provide experiences to encourage this commitment not just to become certified.

In this paper, the authors use value-added methods to examine the relationship between a school’s effectiveness and the recruitment, assignment, development and retention of its teachers.

This research suggests that the effectiveness of principals in managing the recruitment and advancement of teachers will contribute to improvements in student learning. One of the key ways these managers influence performance is through human capital management: the attraction, development and retention of the employee talent the organization needs.

The current study examined methods for training teachers to use functional analysis methods.

The authors offer a new vision of teacher career pathways for the 21st century that holds promise for recruiting and retaining excellent teachers who further student learning. They showcase recent initiatives at the local, state, and national level that promote teacher role differentiation and create different models of teacher staffing and teacher career continuums.

To highlight principal shortage trends, examine school leader recruitment issues, and offer policy recommendations for improving school leader recruitment efforts at the federal, state, and local level.

The authors investigate how the labor market decisions of recent college graduates, new teachers, and employers affect the academic quality of the teaching workforce in public schools.

This report reviews an extensive body of research on teacher recruitment and retention, and identifies five major factors that influence a teacher’s decision to enter, remain in, or leave the teaching profession, generally, and high-need schools, specifically.

This brief is intended to inform state leaders and others in the field about the participating states’ efforts to strengthen the recruitment, preparation, support, and supervision of school leaders.

The Teacher Shortages and Surpluses Databurst is an analysis of states' work to track teacher shortages and surpluses, and to implement the policy solutions to address these challenges. This resource includes an overview of promising practices currently being implemented, a snapshot of all 50 states' and the District of Columbia's efforts in addressing teacher supply and demand challenges, and noteworthy state policies by region across the country.

 A raft of initiatives and reforms have been introduced in many countries to attract and recruit school teachers, many of which do not have a clear evidence base, so their effectiveness remains unclear. Prior research has been largely correlational in design. This paper describes a rigorous and comprehensive review of international evidence, synthesizing the findings of some of the strongest empirical work so far.

This book examines issues pertaining to making effective hiring decisions. The authors present a research-based interview protocol built on quality indicators.

The federal role in developing the teacher workforce has increased markedly in the last
decade, but the history of such involvement dates back fifty years. Relying initially on
policies to recruit and train teachers, the federal role has expanded in recent years to
include new policy initiatives and instruments around the themes of accountability,
incentives, and qualifications, while also continuing the historic emphasis on teacher
recruitment, preparation, and development.

Attracting and retaining teachers can be an important ingredient in improving low-performing schools. In this study, we estimate the expressed preferences for teachers who have worked in low-performing schools in Tennessee. Using adaptive conjoint analysis survey design, we examine three types of school attributes that may influence teachers’ employment decisions: fixed school characteristics, structural features of employment, and malleable school processes.

The faux teacher shortage is of tremendous consequences. It routinely results in both states and school disricts lowering their standards for who is license and hired. But more important, it serve to distract us from fixing the chronic and persistent and alignment of teacher supply and demand. 

This research addresses the problem of teacher shortages in urban, high-needs schools.