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In this fast-changing world, digitization has become crucial to organizations, allowing decision-makers to alter corporate processes. Companies with a higher corporate social responsibility (CSR) level not only help encourage employees to focus on their goals, but they also show that they take their social responsibility seriously, which is increasingly important in today’s digital economy. So, this study aims to examine the relationship between digital transformation and CSR disclosure of Chinese A-share companies. Furthermore, this research investigates the moderating impact of governance heterogeneity, including CEO power and corporate internal control (INT) mechanisms.

This study used fixed effect estimation with robust standard errors to examine the relationship between digital transformation and CSR disclosure and the moderating effect of governance heterogeneity among Chinese A-share companies from 2010 to 2020. The whole sample consists of 17,266 firms, including 5,038 state-owned enterprise (SOE) company records and 12,228 non-SOE records. The whole sample data is collected from the China Stock Market and Accounting Research, the Chinese Research Data Services and the WIND databases.

The regression results lead us to three conclusions after classifying the sample into non-SOE and SOE groups. First, Chinese A-share businesses with greater levels of digitalization have lower CSR disclosures. Both SOE and non-SOE are consistent with these findings. Second, increasing CEO authority creates a more centralized company decision-making structure (Breuer et al., 2022; Freire, 2019), which improves the negative association between digitalization and CSR disclosure. These conclusions, however, also apply to non-SOE. Finally, INT reinforces the association between corporate digitization and CSR disclosure, which is especially obvious in SOEs. These findings are robust to alternative HEXUN CSR disclosure index. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the negative relationship between corporate digitalization and CSR disclosures is more pronounced in bigger, highly levered and highly financialized firms.

Digitalization and CSR disclosure are well studied, but few have examined their interactions from a governance heterogeneity perspective in China. Practitioners and policymakers may use these insights to help business owners implement suitable digital policies for firm development from diverse business perspectives.

District-university partners increasingly rely on “grow-your-own” licensure programs to address teacher shortages. Because vacancies in special education represent a chronic issue, our district-university partnership developed LEAP – the Licensed Educators’ Accelerated Pathway, successfully preparing 26 paraprofessionals as special education teachers (SEs). We describe a model university-district partnership in which we collaborated to design and implement paraprofessionals’ SE licensure program.

In this general review, we describe a district-university partnership collaboration that resolved barriers experienced by paraprofessionals working toward licensure in special education (Essential #4, Reflection and Innovation). The specialized design and partnership solutions were grounded in SE preparation research literature.

25 (28 entered the program and 25 completed) paraprofessionals from one large urban and several regional districts completed special education licensure through LEAP. Slightly more than half of LEAP participants were Black or Hispanic (see Table 1), contributing to the diversification of SE workforce. University-district partnership was successful in designing and delivering a program that allowed participants: a) to remain employed, b) attend evening classes in their geographic region or online, c) complete all field experiences in sponsoring districts (Essential #2) and d) receive concierge advising from a “completion coach.” We describe solutions to barriers experienced by paraprofessionals and advocate for district-university collaboration to address chronic teacher shortages.

Limitations include lack of data on success of program completers during their first year of teaching as they began this work in Fall 2023. Further, because the participating district was large and urban, generalization of program details for small and rural districts is difficult.

Practical tips for developing grow-your-own special education licensure programs are providing. Detailed descriptions of barriers candidates experienced and ways the district-university partners resolved these issues are included. Programs like the one described has the potential to positively impact teacher pipeline issues.

The program described provided highly-trained teachers to fill chronic vacancies in special education in three participating districts/agencies. Because students receiving special education services are at risk for school failure and are disproportionately impacted by teacher turnover, addressing this area through grow-your-own licensure programs represents a diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Further, upskilling diverse paraprofessionals to licensed teacher roles represent an economic boost, which they might not otherwise have achieved.

Available research literature signals alarm over persistent teacher shortages in hard-to-staff districts and lack of diversity in the teacher workforce, but few published accounts describe successful programs. Partner collaboration fostered a re-imagining of course formatting and delivery to accommodate adult learners, avoiding problems often reported with alternative programs.