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We surveyed educational leaders in a large, urban school district in the southeastern United States, examining: (1) the factor structure of scores from a new measure of administrators' preferred teacher applicant characteristics, and (2) the relationships between administrator demographics and their preferences.

We implemented a non-experimental, cross-sectional survey design using the Preferred Teacher Applicant Characteristics Survey (PTACS). We undertook descriptive and exploratory factor analyses in order to examine dimensions and underlying patterns among the 31 survey items. The retained factors served as the dependent variables in our multiple regression analyses.

We identified a four-factor structure: (1) personal, (2) professional, (3) student outcomes, and (4) demographics. Our analyses suggest that there was not meaningful variability in administrators' preferred characteristics of applicants across racial and gender variables, but revealed a significant difference between principals and assistant principals for applicant demographics.

Our findings are limited in their generalizability to the respondents from a single urban district who completed our survey in spring 2018. Although we cannot establish causation, the significant difference between principals and assistant principals for demographics may result from principals feeling greater pressure from district targets to hire diverse staff than their assistant principal counterparts. It is important to note that preferences for teacher applicant characteristics are different from actual hiring decisions and the availability of preferred characteristics.

Our study is the first large-scale use of the instrument in a large US urban school district, a context, which poses significant challenges to the education of youth as well as the hiring and retention of educators.

The purpose of this paper is to answer the following research questions: what characteristics do key Belizean educational leaders value in teacher applicants and why? What hiring tools do they use to ascertain whether teacher applicants have the characteristics they prefer?

The authors utilized a mixed-methods approach drawing upon three data sources – face-to-face interviews with Belizean educational leaders, field notes, and government documents. A card sorting activity of applicant characteristics and tools was embedded into the interview.

Informants preferred motivation, caring, subject matter knowledge, and teaching skills. Intelligence was perceived as a potentially negative characteristic unless coupled with other characteristics, such as strong teaching skills, motivation, and caring or the umbrella of other characteristics, such as content knowledge or university training/credentialing. Professional characteristics, such as where one went for teacher training and academic performance, were perceived as having less relative importance than personal characteristics. Least important were applicant demographics. Consistent with the extant literature, Belizean informants perceived the interview, evidence of prior experience, and certification as the most important tools in vetting and hiring applicants.

The exploratory study is limited by the small sample of informants, but provides insights into preferences for applicant characteristics and hiring tools in an understudied international context. This study informs future research that may seek to survey representative samples of various stakeholder groups (i.e. general managers and principals) for their preferences in applicant characteristics and hiring tools from across Belizean schools and educational providers.

The study adds to limited research on preferred teacher characteristics among educational leaders responsible for hiring and/or working with teachers and to the limited international educational leadership research.

We sought to identify codes and themes in the mission statements of Kentucky's school districts and examine the relationship between district characteristics and the mission statements.

We undertook a mixed methods design, specifically, a sequential transformative strategy with a theoretical lens overlaying the sequential procedures and guiding the analysis.

Analysis revealed a range of 1–7 codes per mission statement and a mean of 3.05. Generic student success and individual attention represented the most frequently occurring codes in the mission statements. Chi-square tests of bivariate association yielded no significant differences between districts by locale. Logistic regression analysis revealed that the percentage of students in the district scoring proficient or distinguished in both reading and mathematics was associated significantly (p < 0.05) with the theme of student support.

Although we cannot establish causation between mission statements content and student outcomes or vice-versa, district mission statement remain a visible and public expression of why an organization exists that should guide actions and decision-making, whether instructional, financial or otherwise.

Our study revealed shared institutional language within mission statements across Kentucky's school district, largely without regard to local context. Our analysis suggests that federal and state policy makers are influencing mission statements more so than those at the local level.

Our analysis provides further evidence that suggests that federal and state policy makers are influencing mission statements more so than those at the local level.

School principals make sense of multiple messages, policies, and contexts within their school environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine specifically how school leaders make sense of hiring and subjective evaluation of on‐the‐job teacher performance.

This qualitative study drew from 42 interviews with 21 principals from a mid‐sized Florida school district. Two rounds of semi‐structured interviews (one to two hours each) were conducted with the informants over two summers (2005‐2006). The multi‐year study allows the authors to assess the consistency across principal participants.

Principals' personal beliefs, background, and experiences were found to shape their conceptions and preferences for teacher characteristics. School type (e.g. elementary, secondary, levels of poverty) also influenced principals' perceptions of and preferences for specific applicant and teacher characteristics. Principals in the sample, however, showed surprising consistency towards certain characteristics (caring, subject matter knowledge, strong teaching skills) and job fit (person‐job). Sampled principals reported that each vacancy is different and is highly dependent on the position, team, and individuals. Regardless of the position or school setting, federal, state, and district mandates strongly influenced how principals made sense of the hiring process and on‐the‐job performance.

The findings underscore the complexity of the human resource functions in education and raise important questions of how school leaders reconcile personal preferences and building‐level needs with demands from the district, state, and federal levels.

The authors' findings offer important insight into the complex conceptualizations that principals hold and the balances that must be struck in the face of policy and hiring constraints. How principals make sense of teacher quality, however, has not been examined. This study contributes to the extant research and makes a theoretical contribution to studies using a cognitive frame to understand school leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether teachers with high value‐added scores (as a measure of teacher quality) stay or left test grades and subjects in a medium‐sized school district.

Panel data for this paper encompass teachers providing math and reading instruction and link to individual students in grades 3‐10 from a single Florida school district (2000‐2001 to 2004‐2005). Value‐added modeling is used to estimate a measure of teacher quality, which is entered into binomial logistic regression models.

This paper finds a negative relationship between reading teachers' value‐added scores and attrition (p<0.05) – a finding consistent with the few that have examined the relationship between value added and teacher attrition. A significant relationship is not found between math value added and attrition. There is also no significant relationship between value added and transferring. Secondary and alternatively certified teachers are more likely to exit tested grades/subjects. Classroom percentages of students enrolled in the free/reduced lunch program (a proxy for poverty) are associated with leaving among math and reading teachers.

Not all turnover is negative. Evidence from this paper suggests that schools are not losing the best teachers from tested subjects and grades – those in which schools and school leaders are held accountable. While there are costs associated with turnover, it can serve as an important matching function between workers and employers.

Only, a few published studies have utilized value‐added scores as the measure of teacher quality and tested their relationship with teacher attrition.