Valeriy Lazarev

Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest partnered with the Arkansas Department of Education to examine Arkansas's middle school and high school indicators of postsecondary readiness and success, building on an earlier study of these indicators (Hester et al., 2021). Academic indicators include attaining proficiency on state academic examinations, grade point average, enrollment in advanced courses, and community service learning. Behavioral indicators include attendance, suspension, and exp...

The Texas Education Agency launched the Grow Your Own (GYO) grant program in 2018 to encourage districts to develop or expand existing high-quality education and training courses for high school students and to support district-employed paraprofessionals (including instructional aides and long-term substitute teachers) to pursue certifications that would allow them to enter full-time teaching roles. This study aimed to help state education leaders in Texas understand the progress of districts...

Louisiana's Believe and Prepare pilot program, supported by grants from the Louisiana Department of Education, aimed to prepare teacher candidates or in-service teachers through a residency with a mentor and a competency-based curriculum. To improve teacher preparation and teacher residencies, state and teacher education leaders in Louisiana sought to better understand the early career outcomes for participants in the pilot program. This study analyzed data for the three cohorts that particip...

The Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest Educator Effectiveness Research Alliance expressed interest in investigating annual teacher mobility in Texas. This resulting study, using data from the 2011/12-2015/16 school years, first asked how large teacher mobility was and how much of that movement was between schools in the same district, how much was between districts in Texas, and how much was out of public school teaching in Texas altogether. The study also addressed the relationships b...

Federal initiatives and other research have led states across the nation to sharpen their focus on teacher evaluation in recent years. In 2009 a seminal report, "The Widget Effect," from The New Teacher Project revealed that in districts using a binary rating system to evaluate teachers, less than 1 percent of teachers received an unsatisfactory rating. The remaining 99 percent were, in effect, like widgets, undifferentiated as individual professionals. Since then, a growing body of research ...

The purpose of this study was to identify factors associated with successful recruitment and retention of teachers in Oklahoma rural school districts in order to highlight potential strategies to address Oklahoma's teaching shortage. The study was designed to identify teacher-level, district-level, and community characteristics in rural Oklahoma that predict which teachers are most likely to be successfully recruited (as defined in this study as having completed a probationary period of emplo...