Honors Theses

Date of Award

Spring 5-1-2021

Document Type

Undergraduate Thesis

Department

Public Policy Leadership

First Advisor

Melissa Bass

Second Advisor

Susan McClelland

Third Advisor

Zachary Vereb

Relational Format

Dissertation/Thesis

Abstract

The Mississippi Excellence in Teaching Program (METP) was created in 2013 by a privately-funded grant from the Hearin Foundation of Jackson, Mississippi. In exchange for a full cost-of-attendance scholarship, undergraduate participants in the program at both the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University commit to teaching at a public school in Mississippi for five years after graduation. The purpose of this study is to analyze the teacher placement and retention rates of METP in order to draw conclusions on its effectiveness at retaining high-performing high school students to become teachers in the state of Mississippi.

This study was conducted by analyzing the 64 responses to a mixed-methods survey, which was sent to the 118 graduated participants in METP at both universities in order to generate statistics regarding teacher retention rates and the school placement of members of the first four METP cohorts. This study found that 30 survey participants teach in an A-rated school district, while only 1 teaches in a D-rated school district and 1 in an F-rated school district. Furthermore, this study concluded that 21 survey participants are undecided on their career path after completing their five-year teaching commitment to METP. From these results, this study made several programmatic policy recommendations, including the institution of a post-grad support program, cohort reunions, more exposure to high-needs classrooms during undergraduate student teaching, and avenues for future research.

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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