Resources for Supporting a Stronger, More Diverse Educator Workforce

These special issue brief overviews and highlights how R2CC states are innovating to address these shortages and provides additional considerations for strategies to address shortages in the short and long term.

This brief is the third of a four-part series that focuses on bilingual education, bilingual educators, and addressing the bilingual teacher shortage in contexts across the United States.

This brief from R4CC is the second of a four-part series that focuses on bilingual education, bilingual educators, and addressing the bilingual teacher shortage in contexts across the United States. This research was commissioned by the New Jersey State Department of Education, which is committed to providing quality bilingual education to its linguistically diverse student population.

In 2016, the North Carolina State Board of Education (NCSBE) developed the Teacher Compensation Models and Advanced Teaching Roles (ATR) pilot program. Initially a three-year pilot, the program was revised in 2018 to become an eight-year pilot through the 2024-2025 school year. This document from R6CC provides insights into some early lessons learned in implementing the program.

This brief from R6CC highlights lessons learned from eight North Carolina school districts that are designing and implementing Opportunity Culture school staffing models. Six of North Carolina’s initial ten Advanced Teaching Roles pilot districts, elected to use the Opportunity Culture model.

The R8CC assisted the Indiana Department of Education (IDOE) in finding research-based strategies for recruiting teachers. This report focuses on the techniques and approaches IDOE, districts, and schools can use in their efforts to recruit teachers, especially teachers of color.

The R8CC developed this brief as part of its support for the Indiana Department of Education’s educator recruitment and retention efforts. The brief highlights how educator preparation programs, institutions of higher education, and school districts can improve the teacher pipeline. Furthermore, the brief outlines what strategic and collaborative partnerships look like and how they can aid recruitment and retention efforts. 

The R8CC developed this brief as part of its support for the Indiana Department of Education’s educator recruitment and retention efforts. The document details the different types of recruitment and retention data and how to use such data to answer key questions. In addition, the brief outlines how to use data throughout the process of teacher and leader recruitment.

Over the years, districts and states have worked to tackle teacher shortages creatively using a variety of incentives, mentorship initiatives, trainings, and leadership programs. But how can education leaders discern which efforts are improving teacher retention? The imminent effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the teacher workforce make answering this question even more urgent. Although none of us knows what a post-pandemic future may hold, a recent R9CC project with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) offers some lessons and tools for states and other districts to consider as they grapple with this issue.

R9CC wrote a blog about the anticipated impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the already significant shortages of teachers in specific subjects and regions across the U.S. Research has shown that the pandemic led to teachers reporting higher stress and being more interested in leaving the profession. A survey of U.S. teachers by RAND found that nearly 1 in 4 teachers were likely to leave their jobs by the end of the 2020–2021 school year, up from one in six teachers in earlier years. And Black teachers were particularly likely to plan to leave. The teachers surveyed cited pandemic-era teaching conditions, such as technical problems while teaching remotely, as linked to job-related stress, depressive symptoms, and burnout.

The R9CC team of experts are using evidence-based resources to support districts like CPS to assess and strengthen their educator talent management systems. We collectively examined eight major teacher retention programs to help CPS discern which strategies assist programs in meeting their retention. Through this process, we sought to understand the data they currently collect and their measures of success and to identify essential formative and summative data required to monitor and improve the impact of each retention strategy. We started by charting the key components of each program based on informal interviews with program leads. Documenting this information highlighted an opportunity to centralize the details of each program to allow a comparison of data collection tools and methods.

R9CC and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) collaboratively collected and analyzed teacher workforce data to identify barriers to recruiting and retaining an effective and diverse teacher workforce. R9CC and ISBE used the Teacher Shortage Tool from the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders to identify equity and diversity gaps within the teacher pipeline and created problem statements that characterize the teacher shortage in Illinois. R9CC conducted an extensive series of high school and college student focus groups and interviews with current and former teachers across the state to understand the causes of these problem statements. 

This blog by the R9CC explores two challenges exacerbated by the pandemic that is likely to become even higher priorities: equitable education and teacher shortages, recruitment, and retention.

The most recent IPA Talk video features Dr. Jennifer Kirmes, Illinois State Board of Education’s (ISBE) Executive Director for Teaching & Learning. Dr. Kirmes discusses Region 9 Comprehensive Center’s work with ISBE on the Continuous Improvement of a Statewide Plan for Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Recognition project, among other work. Dr. Kirmes explicitly discusses the recent report summarizing teacher and student focus groups developed as part of the partnership.

The R12CC conducted a scan to explore the innovative programs, policies, and practices that state education agencies and other education entities are using to mitigate educator staffing challenges. The report highlights common and promising practices used to address educator shortages, examines how key states are tackling shortages specifically in the context of COVID-19, and provides a state-by-state crosswalk of efforts to recognize, address, and mitigate educator shortages by region. Collectively, workforce data and local context considerations, strategies, and resources can help Colorado, and other state education stakeholders develop comprehensive approaches to addressing educator shortages.

The following modules are a brief introduction to the Talent Management Alignment Workbook, which outlines eight steps to assess the strength of alignment among talent management policies and practices across multiple state-level programs and/or initiatives. It guides leaders of state education agencies (SEAs) through the process of assessing the current state of alignment within and between talent management practice areas and developing recommendations to move toward a more coherent system.

In a forum hosted by the NCC for State education leaders, the authors of the 2021 book Teacher Diversity and Student Success: Why Racial Representation Matters in the Classroom present important and informative empirical findings. The findings provide the important backdrop of the racialized history of teaching and provide policy and practice solutions that can work to address racial gaps in the teacher workforce in the short and long term.

In a presentation to the CCNetwork, Stacey Pelika, Director of Research for the National Education Association, and Chad Aldeman with Edunomics Lab, a National Center Partner, presented a picture of teacher shortages that is much more nuanced and less dramatic than the headlines. They shared a picture that makes a compelling case for addressing short-term needs while rethinking and rebuilding systems that will attract, prepare, support, and retain teachers for schools of the future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created disruptions in the teacher workforce, including reductions-in-force due to budget cuts, hesitation from teachers to return in-person to the classroom, and relaxed standards for entering the profession. This brief from the National Comprehensive Center is aimed at district and school staff involved in the teacher selection process. It provides literaturebased recommendations to improve the teacher selection process as a cost-effective means of strengthening the teacher workforce.

The National Comprehensive Center shared a blog, Beyond the Soundbite: Investigating Teacher Shortages Before and During the Pandemic. This blog includes information and a link to a video about teacher shortages.