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New York State is experiencing teacher shortages in specific subject areas. One way to address these shortages is through the certification and placement of new teachers. This study explored the pathways through which new teachers between 2015/16 and 2017/18 earned certificates, their certification areas, and their subsequent placement and retention in districts across the state, particularly high-need districts. While the majority of new teachers earned certificates through the traditional in-state pathway, this varied somewhat by certification area. The proportion of teachers who earned certificates through the individual evaluation pathway was higher for the shortage certification area of career and technical education than for other certification areas. The most frequent certification area was the shortage certification area of special education, while the shortage certification areas of career and technical education and bilingual special education were among the least frequent. New York City district schools employed new teachers who earned certificates through the alternative in-state pathway at a higher rate than other types of high-need districts (rural, large city--not New York City, and other urban/suburban) as well as average- and low-need districts. New teachers employed in high-need districts had higher rates of retention in the same district for a second year than new teachers employed in average- and low-need districts. Just 5 percent of new teachers in New York State were uncertified. [For the full report, see ED615881. For the Study Snapshot, see ED615882. For the appendixes, see ED615884.]

To assess education progress in the early grades and identify achievement gaps, this study examined reading achievement data for kindergarten and grade 1 students in two districts in Illinois: District U-46 (Elgin Area Schools) and District 186 (Springfield Public Schools). Drawing on a different reading assessment in each district, the study team documented reading achievement in these two early grades for two kindergarten cohorts (2016/17 for District U-46 and 2017/18 for District 186) and examined disparities in achievement for several student demographic groups. In particular, the study identified gaps in reading achievement at different time points in kindergarten and grade 1 by students' race/ethnicity, eligibility for the national school lunch program (an indicator of poverty), English learner status, participation in special education, and gender. The findings can enhance alliance members' understanding of reading achievement trends and gaps and can inform district administrators', policymakers', and educators' decisions about which students could benefit from additional reading supports. In addition, the findings can motivate conversations about the root causes of inequities in reading achievement and how to resolve them. [For the full report, see ED610445; for the appendixes, see ED610446; for the study snapshot, see ED610449.]

We introduce a new quality measure to assess randomized low-discrepancy point sets of finite size $n$. This new quality measure, which we call "pairwise sampling dependence index", is based on the concept of negative dependence. A negative value for this index implies that the corresponding point set integrates the indicator function of any unanchored box with smaller variance than the Monte Carlo method. We show that scrambled $(0,m,s)-$nets have a negative pairwise sampling dependence index. We also illustrate through an example that randomizing via a digital shift instead of scrambling may yield a positive pairwise sampling dependence index., Comment: 41 pages

We present different implementations for the irreducible Sobol (IS) sequences introduced in [3]. For this purpose we retain two strategies: first we use the connection between IS and Niederreiter sequences to provide a very simple implementation requiring no computer search; then we use criteria measuring the equidistribution to search for good parameters. Numerical results comparing these IS sequences to known implementations show promise for the proposed approaches.