Recruitment and Selection

Published by the National Center to Improve Recruitment and Retention of Qualified Personnel for Children with Disabilities, this brief focuses on the collaboration between district personnel preparation partnership programs and institutions of higher education to boost the recruitment and retention of special education personnel. The report finds that key components of a successful program include collaboration among partners, tailoring programs to meet unique needs, offering flexible methods of course delivery, and reaching out to nontraditional teacher candidates.

This article—published by the National Center to Improve Recruitment and Retention of Qualified Personnel for Children with Disabilities—examines how four states implemented new technologies (at either the state or regional level) in order to revamp their approach to recruiting and retaining special education teachers and specialists. Though limited data are available, all of these technologies appear to have had a positive impact on states’ recruitment and retention efforts.

This article—published by the National Center to Improve Recruitment and Retention of Qualified Personnel for Children with Disabilities—provides a set of guidelines to help state-level leaders address the needs of special education teachers and specialists. The document outlines the essential elements necessary to build personnel capacity and highlights best practices in the field.

This research study, published and funded by The Wallace Foundation, focuses on six urban school districts that are seeking to enhance the principal pipeline through participation in the Principal Pipeline Initiative. This initiative focuses on preservice preparation, including selective admissions to high-quality programs, selective hiring and placement, leader standards that align with specific sites, and on-the-job evaluation and support.

In this report, McKinsey examines 25 school systems around the world, including the 10 best performing, to drill down on what matters most in the systems. It found that attracting the right people to become teachers, properly developing them into effective instructors, and ensuring that the system is modeled to deliver the best possible instruction to every child are key elements to the top-performing school systems. 

This report by the Rainwater Leadership Alliance presents detailed information and examples from successful principal preparation programs on their approaches to recruitment, selection, training, ongoing support, and continuous improvement.

McKinsey draws on its experience of working with school systems in more than 50 countries to produce a report that examines the practice of the top-performing school systems in the world and examines how these countries make recruiting the “top third+” students of their academic cohort a priority, and in return, develop some of the most effective teachers.

This toolbox, prepared for by The New Teacher Project, is a collection of 250 resources garnered from 50 schools and districts. Areas of focus include teacher recruitment, hiring, and retention, and cover topics ranging from using student growth measures and teacher evaluation to instructional planning and professional development. 

One of the biggest challenges in education today is identifying talented candidates to successfully lead turnarounds of persistently low-achieving schools. Evidence suggests that the traditional principal pool is already stretched to capacity and cannot supply enough leaders to fix failing schools. But potentially thousands of leaders capable of managing successful turnarounds work outside education, in nonprofit and health organizations, the military, and the private sector.