A Retention Study of Career-Based Intervention Teachers in Ohio

Abstract

The need for qualified teachers in America's elementary and secondary schools has been a subject of a significant number of studies in the past twenty years. In the mid-1980's two widely disseminated reports focused attention on the coming shortage of teachers (National Academy of Sciences, 1987;National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). Due to increasing student enrollments and the aging of the present teaching workforce, these two reports predicted a commensurate increase in demand for new teachers. These predictions have been upheld by numerous other studies, including studies which delineated the shortages in specific teaching fields, such as math, science and special education (Boe, Bobbitt & Cook, 1997;Grissmer & Kirby, 1997;Weisbaum & Huang, 2001).