RE: Personnel Development

     Dr. Ratliff has asked a good question: Don't the strategies of job sharing and team teaching exacerbate the teacher shortage for hard-to-staff schools?  In the 1990's the number of newly credentialed teachers actually increased (More than half of this growth has been due to intern rather than prelilminary/professional clear credentials with intern credentials more than tripling while first-time preliminary and professional clear credentials grew by 20%). So, we can posit that not everyone who gets a teaching credential takes a job as a K-12, full-time teacher. But because no agency currently follows credentialed candidates into the classroom, there is no way of accurately determining the percentage of new credential recipients who will take jobs.  In fact, while a great deal of data on the existing teacher workforce is collected by various agencies, these data cannot be used to answer many important questions because the there is no comprehensive data system to link the data bases.  Much more could be learned about workforce participation, job taking and persistence rates, movement between schools and districts, the "reserve pool" of teachers, and other elements of workforce distribution if the the state would adopt a common plan for data collection, linkage, and analysis. Questions like Dr. Ratliff's as well as others such as How do we attract eachers to hard-to-staff schools? How do we encourage teachers to stay in hard-to-staff schools? On what parts of the system (e.g. recruitment, job placement, retention in the first few years) should we focus resources? are difficult or impossible to answer withoug reliable, current, statewide data and sound analysis.