Teacher Recruitment and Retention: Local Strategies, Global Inspiration

Abstract

Although teacher workforce and labor market concerns have dominated the field of teacher education for decades in the United States (Darling-Hammond et al., 2017; Garcia et al., 2022), the teacher shortage crisis is a worldwide conundrum. “Even where general teacher supply and demand are in balance, many countries face shortages of specialist teachers and shortages in schools serving disadvantaged or isolated communities” (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD], 2011, p. 10). Student achievement correlates to the economic and societal advancement of nations (Hanushek, 2013), and an effective teacher workforce is pivotal to student learning. Studies confirm that teacher quality is the central school-based predictor of student achievement (Lasley et al., 2006; Vagi et al., 2019) and that years of uninterrupted and efficacious teaching can counteract the learning deficits of students placed at risk (Chetty et al., 2011; Freedman & Appleman, 2009). Although the motivating factors for teachers choosing to enter or stay in a school have changed over the last few decades—usually around issues of turnover brought about by school conditions (Craig, 2020; Geiger & Pivovarova, 2018; Ingersoll et al., 2018), few opportunities for advancement (Guha et al., 2017), burnout (Saloviita & Pakarinen, 2021), lack of prestige (Matete, 2021, Lee et al., 2020), limited autonomy (Warner-Griffin et al., 2018), challenging student behavior in the classroom (Williams et al., 2020), and poor pay (Allegretto & Mishel, 2018)—the need for more teacher workforce proposals has not. Despite the vast educational, cultural, and scale differences among our teacher preparation programs around the world, we find that our dilemmas in teacher recruitment and retention are fundamentally similar in nature. Schools worldwide have greater difficulty in recruiting novice teachers (Ingersoll et al., 2018; O’Doherty & Harford, 2018; Perryman & Calvert, 2020) and offering competitive packages to support and retain teachers beyond their initial years in the field. Modernizing the ways we offer meaningful professional incentives to nurture and retain beginning and effective teachers remains top of mind for international practitioners and researchers in the field of teacher education. This editorial is divided into two parts. First, the editors of the Journal of Teacher Education propose that global challenges in teacher education require international collaboration. Although teacher labor issues are best addressed at the regional or local level, educationalists should commit to identifying solutions (read as an orientation toward challenge, Hallman et al., 2022) that are born out of the international exchange of ideas. The suffusion of ideas from the global to the local, and from the local to the global, may bring to bear our best thinking to stem the teacher recruitment and retention crisis. Second, and to demonstrate this point, we highlight four regional examples that showcase teacher education practices specific to teacher recruitment and retention that can be reconsidered as long-standing strategies.