Christopher Redding’s research while affiliated with University of Florida and other places

In this systematic review, we examine research from 2009 to 2022 to identify and classify the unintended effects of turnaround in the United States. We develop a conceptual framework classifying three types of side effects—spillover effects, systemic side effects, and internal side effects—and differentiate these side effects from unintended negative intervention effects. We identify four broad categories of side effects within this framework based on the population they impact: communities, school systems, educators, and students. We find that the most prevalent side effects are related to educator experiences, staffing, community reaction, education governance, and the proliferation of external actors. We conclude by calling for future research to explicitly examine common side effects alongside the intended effects of turnaround.

U.S. schools have long experienced shortages of special education teachers (SETs), challenging the nation’s capacity to ensure qualified SETs for students eligible for special education services. Addressing SET shortages requires preparation programs supply sufficient numbers of new SETs to meet demand, yet prior research provides few insights into trends in the supply of new SETs. Thus, we examined how the supply of new SETs changed over time in relation to the characteristics of teacher preparation programs. We find decreasing supply of new SETs nationally, primarily driven by reduced supply of new SETs from small colleges. Results suggest the current SET shortage may be connected, in previously undocumented ways, to the broader decline of small- and mid-sized colleges. Finally, findings indicate the nation may be far more dependent on for-profit institutions for supplying new SETs, which has implications for the production of SETs by alternative certification and traditional teacher preparation programs.

We present data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey to document the prevalence of instructional coaching programs (ICPs) and consider how ICPs are distributed by school level, urbanicity, new teachers in a school, student enrollment, school poverty levels, student achievement levels, and state. We show that ICPs are most common in elementary schools, schools located in cities, schools with larger proportions of new teachers, larger schools, schools enrolling larger fractions of economically disadvantaged students, and schools with lower student achievement levels. Additionally, more affluent and higher achieving schools experienced the sharpest increase in ICPs over time.

Many studies rely on teachers’ reported career intentions instead of measuring actual turnover, but research does not clearly document how these variables relate to one another. We test how measures of teacher intentions relate to turnover. Using nationally representative data on 102,970 public school teachers, we conduct a descriptive and regression analysis to probe how teachers’ turnover intentions are and are not associated with moving schools and leaving teaching. While there is some variation across measures of intent, we find evidence that intention is distinct from, but strongly related to, turnover. We advise that surveys continue to capture intention as it provides meaningful information, but we recommend intention not be used as proxy for turnover.

Given urban school and district administrators’ historical challenges with recruiting and retaining a high-quality, racially diverse teacher workforce, there is a need to better understand the factors shaping why graduates return to teach in their home district. This descriptive study examines the high school students who returned to teach in their home district—a large urban district in the southeastern United States. White female, economically privileged, and higher achieving graduates returned to teach at the highest rates, although notable differences by race/ethnicity were observed. Implications for urban teacher recruitment are discussed.

With a goal of contextualizing teacher job dissatisfaction during the first full school year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we contrast teachers’ experiences with the decade and a half leading up to the pandemic. We draw on nationally representative data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and National Teacher and Principal Survey from the 2003–04 to 2020–21 school years. Through descriptive and regression analysis, we show that (1) increases in teacher dissatisfaction beginning in the 2015–16 school year persisted into the 2020–21 school year, (2) levels of dissatisfaction during the pandemic were not equal across subpopulations of teachers, and (3) positive working conditions consistently predicted lower job dissatisfaction, including in the 2020–21 school year.

We estimate the effects of Race to the Top (RTTT) on teacher qualifications, work environments, and job attitudes. Drawing on the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey, we create a nationally representative data set of public school teachers from 1988 to 2018. We adopt an event study difference-in-differences research design to estimate the dynamic effect of RTTT on several teacher outcomes. We find evidence that, following RTTT, teachers were more worried about job security relative to prereform years. We find smaller and less consistent evidence of a relationship between RTTT and decreased teacher certification levels and increased levels of cooperation with colleagues.

Drawing on eight waves of the Schools and Staffing Survey and the National Teacher and Principal Survey, we used a difference-in-differences research design to examine special education teachers’ (SETs) responses to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the subsequent reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA was associated with decreases in the proportion of SETs with special education as a field of study and graduate degrees, an increase in co-teaching, and a decrease in the proportion of SETs working in a resource delivery model, with no evidence that NCLB influenced these outcomes. Little consistent evidence was found to indicate these federal policies influenced SETs’ job attitudes (e.g., job satisfaction). We identified differences in these associations based on school poverty status and grade level. These findings help to better understand the status and challenges of the current SET workforce and the unintended consequences of federal reform policies.

We use event history analysis on an aggregate dataset from 1997 to 2018 to understand the state-level antecedents associated with the adoption of test-based grade retention policies. Findings indicate that the educational conditions of a state to be more predictive of retention policy adoption than the political, economic, and geographic measures. In particular, a greater share of Black students in a state, lower fourth grade NAEP reading proficiency rates, and larger student enrollments in the early grades were all associated with increased odds of grade retention policy adoption.