Thousands of California school employees have received preliminary pink slips in recent weeks as districts scrabble to close budget gaps caused by falling enrollment and rising costs. Most went to school administrators and classified school staff, such as clerks, administrative assistants and paraeducators.

Districts were complying with a  them to send preliminary pink slips by March 15 to any employee who could potentially lose their job before the beginning of the next school year. Many of the notices are withdrawn by May 15 — the last day final layoff notices can be given — as districts make decisions about seniority. 

This year the layoffs have taken a dramatic turn as district leaders increasingly target classified and central office staff to balance budgets.

School districts have lost both average daily attendance funding, due to declining enrollment, and federal Covid dollars. At the same time, districts are paying more for pensions, health care, supplies and special education. 

“You have some large school districts and even some mid-sized and smaller school districts that are in complete financial crisis right now, and on the verge of insolvency or going into receivership,” said Troy Flint, chief information officer for the California School Boards Association. “When the deficit is so great you almost have to make hatchet-type cuts.”

District offices in the crosshairs

District staff are being targeted by some districts. In Sacramento City Unified, everyone working in the district office, including the interim superintendent, was issued a pink slip.  and are also planning to make major cuts to their central offices. 

“The board directive, ever since we declared the deficit, has been pretty clear: Whatever cuts we have to make, keep them as far away from the classroom as possible,” said Brian Heap, Sacramento City Unified’s chief communications officer. 

District officials can’t say how many employees at the Serna Center – Sacramento City Unified’s headquarters – will ultimately lose their jobs until they complete a plan to restructure the office, Heap said.

“We have to have somebody running payroll. We have to have somebody in the business office. We have to have somebody in our academic office,” Heap said. “But what does that look like? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

Sacramento City Unified officials have announced they will send layoff notices to 800 employees, most who are classified employees, to help reduce a $134 million budget deficit.

“I’m certainly nervous,” said Heap, who also received a pink slip. “I mean, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.”

The Los Angeles Unified in February to issue 3,200 layoff notices, including 657 to central office staff and other centrally funded classified positions. The layoffs, expected to actually result in 650 lost jobs, are estimated to save the district about $250 million. The district is facing an $877 million deficit next school year and $443 million the following school year, according to board materials.

Oakland Unified could  of its central office staff along with counselors, case managers, attendance clerks, community school managers and other support staff to make up $21 million of an estimated $103 million deficit, according to media reports. The to issue a total of 421 preliminary layoff notices and reduce the hours of 144 employees, according to Oaklandside.

Nonteaching jobs often cut first

Classified staff are often targeted for layoffs for practical and political reasons, Flint said.

“They [districts] try to concentrate layoffs among classified staff and administrative personnel simply because teachers have the most direct impact on student experience and academic achievement, and because teachers — as the school employees who are most well known to parents and the community — generally are the most sympathetic profession in the education field,” Flint said.

The California School Employees Association, which represents about 240,000 of the state’s K-12 classified school support staff, reported that at least 2,700 pink slips had been issued to its members by the state’s March 15 deadline. An additional 519 members received notices that their hours would be reduced and another 254, with jobs funded by federal dollars, were given 60-day layoff notices, according to a union report issued on March 6. 

Districts should make sure they have cut every possible expense before they start removing staff from school campuses, said CSEA President Adam Weinberger, who works in the Perris Union High School District in Riverside County. 

“When classified employees are laid off, students lose more than services; they lose trusted adults in their lives — bus drivers, educators, custodians and office staff who build relationships with our students. And those connections are essential to a safe and supported learning environment,” Weinberger said.

California school boards also approved layoff notices for administrative staff and workers represented by other unions, including members of the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 50,000 classified school employees in California districts including Sacramento City Unified. SEIU officials could not be reached to provide information about the number of members who received layoff notices.

Teachers did not get off unscathed

Even with efforts to shield teachers from layoffs, more than 1,900 pink slips were sent to members of the California Teachers Association by March 13, according to the union. The union represents teachers, librarians, school healthcare workers and school counselors. Last year about  received notices.

The pink slips are being issued at the same time that many bargaining units of the CTA and other unions are negotiating with their school districts for new contracts, most asking for higher salaries and improved benefits.

San Diego Unified approved a contract with its teachers early this year that prohibits the district from laying off teachers or other certificated staff for the 2026-27 school year. Instead, the district sent layoff notices to 133 classified school support staff, according to the CSEA.

San Diego Unified board member Sabrina Bazzo said she is proud of the decision not to cut teachers, saying it’s not what is best for students.

There are still many districts laying off large numbers of teachers, as well as classified support staff.

According to the CSEA, Long Beach Unified officials planned to send pink slips to 515 teachers and other credentialed staff, 15 to managers and 54 to support staff. Santa Clara Unified planned to send pink slips to 113 credentialed staff and 49 to classified workers. Antioch Unified approved a resolution reducing its credentialed staff by 104 positions and its classified staff by at least 193 positions, according to a union report.

Pasadena Unified indicated it had also issued 161 pink slips to its credentialed employees and 240 to classified school support staff.

“The reductions are significant and affect every school and department in our district,” said Pasadena Superintendent Elizabeth Blanco in a statement. “We are living within our fiscal reality, as difficult as it is, to protect student learning, the district’s long-term ability to serve future generations, and local control.”

Annual ritual causes anxiety

Many have called the annual ritual disruptive to schools and demoralizing to the employees who receive them.

“Our members are working paycheck to paycheck, and they’re looking for stability,” Weinberger said. “I know we have many members that get one every year and, then they’re rescinded and that creates instability in their lives.”

Eventually, those employees begin to look for other, more stable, jobs to ensure they can provide for their families, he said.

EdSource reporter Mallika Seshadri contributed to this report.

You may have heard this story before. In fact, I wrote a nearly identical sentence around this time last year.

But enrollment keeps falling as staffing levels rise. Since 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic, student enrollment is down 1.4 million (a 2.8% decrease) while employment is up by 479,000 (a gain of 7.3%).

Part of the staffing gains comes as the result of schools adding 90,000 teacher jobs. Combined with declining enrollment numbers, that has allowed most states and districts to effectively lower their teacher-to-student ratios.

However, most of the employment gains are not coming from classroom teachers. In raw numbers, from 2018-19 to 2024-25 schools added 389,000 non-teaching jobs.

The gains are widespread across staffing categories. The numbers of district administrators and support staffers are up 25.9% and 16.9%, respectively. But so are school-based roles including paraprofessionals (up 16.6%) and guidance counselors (up 12.2%). To help address student attendance and mental health needs, schools have also added 22.4% more support service staff, which NCES defines as employees “who nurture but do not instruct students” and includes “attendance officers; staff providing health, speech pathology, audiology or social services; and supervisors of the preceding staff; coaches, athletic advisers and athletic trainers.”

Only two categories of school employees, librarians and media support staff, did not see an increase over this six-year time period. That continues a over the last few decades as schools employ fewer full-time librarians.

Analysts like myself and of a fiscal cliff once the infusion of federal COVID relief funds, appropriated between March 2020 and March 2021, stopped flowing. That money is long gone now, and yet schools continue to hire. Were we all wrong?

We were certainly off on the timing. Back in 2022, when I was part of the team at the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, we a “bloodletting” in the 2024-25 school year. As I write this in early 2026, with schools continuing to add staff, that projection looks wildly overblown.

One reason we got the call wrong is that we underestimated how much governments were using their one-time federal funds to shore up funds and build up their budget reserves. More importantly, the broader economy has better than many experts anticipated.
But perhaps we were just too early. After all, the fundamentals have not changed. Because schools are largely funded based on how many students they serve, lower enrollments will translate into lower revenue totals. And by hiring more people and salaries, districts have committed themselves to much higher personnel costs. These trends cannot continue to move in opposite directions forever. 

Meanwhile, while the NCES employment figures cited above are the most accurate measure of total staff time available in schools, they take time to collect. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects monthly data on the total number of employees in a given industry or sector. That information comes out faster, and the latest numbers that public school employment may be starting to plateau. 

For now, there’s still no sign of a peak or cliff in either data source, but what happens next will largely depend on the direction of the broader economy.  

Gen Z educators, born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, are entering classrooms with fresh energy and an innovative approach. They are digital natives and are eager to leverage technology thoughtfully. They bring a keen understanding of student needs because they were students themselves recently. They are naturally inclined to collaborate, provide more choice and individualized learning in their classrooms, and work alongside students and families with more frequent communication and care.

That combination makes Gen Z teachers the type of talent that education needs right now. It also means that schools must adapt if they hope to keep them.

For 35 years, has welcomed thousands of new educators into classrooms. Gen Z stands out. They aren’t looking for a job — they’re seeking a mission. Gen Z deeply values equity and social change in a career. When they decide to pursue teaching as a career, they are intentionally choosing service. But that sense of purpose won’t sustain them if the policies and practices in their schools and districts don’t match their values and needs. If schools want to attract and retain Gen Z teachers, they must create conditions that align with their values: connection, community, mentorship, growth, flexibility and well-being.

Gen Z values belonging. Many entered the workforce after years of isolation during the pandemic, and they crave relationships with colleagues and leaders who see and support them. Schools should pair every new teacher with an experienced mentor, create ample opportunities for learning and collaboration with colleagues, and build school cultures that encourage open dialogue about challenges and wins. Community isn’t a bonus — it’s what keeps young teachers from feeling alone and leaving the profession.

This generation also expects to grow in their careers. They want to know how they can expand their impact beyond their first classroom — whether by becoming instructional coaches, policy advocates or school leaders. Districts should create transparent development tracks, fund leadership fellowships and make ongoing training accessible and relevant. When teachers can see a future for themselves in education, they stay longer and grow into leaders who have a greater impact on student learning.

Gen Z teachers are creators. They use technology intuitively and want to leverage it to help students thrive. Schools should invite them to pilot new tools, design lessons that use artificial intelligence responsibly and help shape digital learning policies. Flexibility in scheduling, hybrid professional development and collaborative planning time also shows trust in teachers’ professionalism and creativity.

Having spent my career coaching first-time teachers, I’ve seen how powerful it is when principals, instructional coaches, mentors and even district staff listen to their ideas. During the pandemic, the youngest educators became the experts in virtual learning. Today, many of those same teachers are leading conversations about AI in the classroom and shaping the future of instruction.

For example, through TFA’s , teachers and staff come together to explore how innovation and technology can close opportunity gaps. Gen Z educators are leading the way in exploring how to use AI and digital tools to make learning more engaging. This collaboration not only builds confidence for Gen Z teachers; it equips veteran educators with new tools to reinvigorate their teaching in an AI-driven future.

Lastly, Gen Z has been refreshingly vocal about one thing older generations often downplayed: mental health. They want to serve students well without sacrificing themselves in the process. This isn’t a sign of weakness — it’s wisdom. Teaching has always been demanding, but today’s educators face , citing issues like and as key factors causing burnout.  

Schools and districts can respond not only by addressing the root causes behind burnout, but by implementing new wellness-focused policies. They can offer access to free or low-cost therapy and counseling, either directly or through expanded benefits, and build wellness days into the academic calendar that are genuinely restorative — not just “catch-up” time. They can provide time for teachers to meet in small groups, where they build relationships, discuss shared experiences and challenges, and brainstorm solutions. Forward-thinking districts are even piloting mental-health stipends that teachers can use for gym memberships, mindfulness apps or co-pays for counseling. These ideas may seem small, but collectively they signal that teachers’ well-being matters as much as student achievement — and that sustainability is part of professionalism.

Schools and districts that ignore this moment risk losing an entire generation of talent. Culture-building, mentorship and leadership development may once have been considered extras, but today they are essentials. Retaining passionate educators requires redesigning the experience of teaching itself, making those in profession feel more connected to fellow educators and supported by schools.

Investing in recruiting and retaining Gen Z teachers is investing in the next generation of educational leaders. These teachers will drive innovation, strengthen student outcomes and help communities imagine what’s possible. They’re showing up ready to serve. It is now up to education leaders at every level — in schools, district offices and state departments of education — to embrace and empower Gen Z educators in the classroom. Doing so will not only help address the teaching shortage, it will drive changes in teaching and learning that help schools better prepare students for their futures. 

Taken at face-value, these are all admirable efforts to rectify America’s teaching and learning crisis – where students are and subjects and only would recommend the profession to future generations of teachers. But if we’re serious about building a strong and sustainable teacher workforce capable of accelerating student learning, we need to step back and ask a more fundamental question: How do we end the revolving door of underqualified teachers working with our students?

This is a question my colleagues and I at Deans for Impact have grappled with over the past decade. 

We’ve seen states expand scholarships for aspiring teachers. We’ve seen investments in residency programs that provide longer culminating clinical experiences. We’ve seen calls for better alignment to evidence-based instructional methods. We’ve seen programs mobilize aspiring teachers as tutors. Each of these is important. But too often, the impact is shallow and short-lived. 

Scholarships get people into programs but not the right ones. Residency programs remain prohibitively expensive for many. Requirements and accountability to new standards don’t shift practice on their own. Programs worked but were funded by one-time investments without appropriately planning for financial sustainability. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Through our work with states, educator-preparation programs, and schools nationwide, four conditions rise to the top when designing pathways that deliver: 

• Instructionally-focused: Pathways should be aligned to the scientific evidence of how students learn 
  
• Practice-based: Pathways should fully prepare teachers for the broad range of realities of the classroom.
  
• Accessible: Pathways should be affordable and supportive so that all who aspire to teach can enter and complete quality preparation
  
• Innovative & Responsive: Pathways must continuously evolve to meet local needs and emerging research.

When taken together, these four conditions can create a holistic system that better prepares teachers, sustains them in the profession, and, most importantly, accelerates outcomes for students. The aim of DFI’s is to chart a course of action policy leaders can take to ensure all pathways are affordable and high-quality. 

In communities across the country, we are beginning to see efforts that move beyond piecemeal fixes toward more holistic reform efforts that bolster these four conditions.

In Louisiana, the recommendations made and adopted by the statewide Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Recovery Task Force helped modernize entry into educator-preparation programs, strengthened mentor teacher support, expanded scholarships for aspiring teachers, and built momentum for the state’s first . These policy changes, paired with new investments in high-impact tutoring and a longstanding commitment to ensuring all students access grade-level content, have helped bolster the pipeline of teachers and drive growth in student learning.

In the most recent NAEP results, Louisiana was one of only two states to surpass pre-pandemic reading performance. It was also one of just a few states to experience an increase in the number of individuals enrolling to become new teachers. Thanks to these new policies, aspiring educators don’t have to find themselves in a situation like , a Mississippi college student who chose social work over his dream of becoming a teacher because he couldn’t pass an entry exam.

In Indiana, the University of Notre Dame’s trains high-impact tutors, many of whom are on track to become teachers, on principles of cognitive science and equips them to deliver literacy instruction aligned to the state’s new science-of-reading standards. For example, Alliance for Catholic Education Teaching Fellow said she feels much better equipped for the realities of the classroom because of her experience as a Tutor-ND tutor. 

These efforts are reinforced by statewide requirements that preparation programs align literacy instruction with research-based approaches, ensuring that aspiring teachers are prepared to deliver rigorous, effective instruction. These mutually reinforcing efforts recently contributed to the state’s largest year-over-year growth in third grade literacy rates on . 

Other states are also leading the way. From HB2 in Texas to strategic staffing in Arizona, these examples of policy and practice working in tandem point the way forward. School communities in Texas will now have flexible funding to prepare talent in quality pathways that address specific workforce needs. Arizona schools are rethinking the role and work of teachers in ways that make teaching more attractive, collaborative and effective. Together, these examples show what happens when we ditch fragmented, one-off investments and embrace building a foundation of what works.  

Teacher preparation can no longer be an afterthought. The talent, ideas, and innovations we need are already here. What’s been missing is a system designed to connect them. By focusing on making pathways instructionally focused, practice-based, accessible, innovative and responsive, policymakers and advocates can build and scale pipelines of teachers with the skills needed to ensure every student succeeds. 

Second grade teacher Becca Bradley offered to help out with an intervention time that divided the lesson in half, allowing Bradley’s second graders to participate in the lesson and benefit, as well.

“For 22 years, I’ve always felt like I’ve been stuck in this room, and it’s all on me,” Sinden said. “I mean, I can do a lot of things, but I can’t do it all well. So, I feel like teaming with second grade, it’s just opened up so many opportunities, and their ideas have been great.”

The small rural school district of 617 students in Jackson County is one of two schools in Michigan starting its second year of a “team teaching” pilot that moves away from a traditional “one teacher, one room” model and assigns a group of teachers, aides and other staff to an entire set of students, sometimes combining multiple grades.

While the team teaching model is intended to look different depending on the needs of the school, students typically learn from multiple teachers a day, sometimes with multiple teachers or educators in the room at the same time. 

At Concord, time is set aside for daily breakout math and reading group instruction in the lower grade levels. During these lessons, younger students are blended with different grades, while older students in grades 8 to 10 participate in cross-curricular learning units teaching teams have devised. For instance, eighth grade students combined their studies on science-based environmental policy with math to demonstrate the pros and cons of the policy.

About 100 miles to the east in downtown Detroit, team teaching has helped the staff of the Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences focus on their strengths, assigning each of its teachers in kindergarten and second grade to a specific group of students for their phonics work.

Early returns on team teaching are positive at the K-8 charter school, with data showing improved scores in math for second graders who were a part of the pilot this past fall, Chief Academic Officer Monica McLeod said.

Like several of the schools nationwide that have adopted the team teaching model during its recent reemergence, McLeod cited two concurrent objectives: To attract and retain talented teachers and to make the profession more sustainable and connected by giving teachers more ownership over student learning.

“It pushed all of us to lean into our strengths and our trust and belief in each other,” McLeod said.

Created a shared responsibility

The team teaching model was introduced in Michigan last fall through the , a nonprofit that designs, funds and supports programs to recruit, develop and retain teachers. The initiative partnered with , which trains teachers on strategic staffing models and helps schools develop staffing models that work for their students.

With , MEWI CEO Jack Elsey said team teaching is one of several initiatives his organization has taken on in recent years in its comprehensive view of the educator pipeline. 

With three more Michigan school districts debuting the staffing models this fall and 12 schools implementing strategic staffing statewide, Elsey said there is cautious optimism that team teaching could present benefits for both teacher retention and student achievement.

“I think overall, teachers feel better supported by their colleagues because they’re in the same physical space with them,” he said. “They can talk about those kids among people who know those kids just as well as they do and they can say, ‘You know, I’m really struggling with delivering this math lesson, can you deliver this math lesson to my kids today?’ because I think you do it in a better way.”

For Concord, participating in the pilot made sense with more than half of the district’s teachers becoming eligible for retirement in the next few years, Superintendent Rebecca Hutchinson said.

Teachers have reported that the pilot has helped them get to know their students on a deeper level and dive deeper into the core curriculum, Hutchinson said. It’s also helped teachers lean into their strengths, while allowing them more planning time and collaboration with members of their teams, Hutchinson said.

“It creates this distributed expertise, but also this shared responsibility,” said Hutchinson, who is in her 18th year with the district, including the past six as superintendent. “It’s not just about who’s in front of me and what’s in front of me right now.”

Elevating the teaching profession

Foundationally, ASU has a “no one model” philosophy behind Next Education Workforce’s role in helping redesign teaching models, allowing for a distribution of expertise with the intention of deeper, personalized learning for students.

In Mesa Public Schools, the largest public district in Arizona, Next Education Workforce Executive Director Brent Maddin says there is evidence that teachers working in teams are than their colleagues in traditional classroom models. 

Mesa also has seen correlational data show teachers in team models are more effective than their colleagues in traditional classrooms and are happier and more engaged in their work, Maddin said.

“Our work, in particular, is largely focused on the educators and creating the conditions for them to thrive and to do their work differently,” Maddin said. “We’re not coming in with a particular ‘one size fits all’ approach. Instead, whatever the staffing model ultimately becomes is co-constructed by the educators in the communities in which the model is being implemented.”

Detroit Academy of Arts and Sciences decided to start slowly, with just kindergarten and second grade teachers agreeing to participate in its first year.

Teachers were instrumental in both designing and tweaking the model early in the year, switching morning small group meetings focused on social-emotional learning to daily themes like “Motivational Monday” and “Talk about it Tuesday.” While students saw each of the grade’s five teachers every day for different subjects, they were assigned to a home room teacher and a classroom that was designated with the name of a fruit.

Toward the end of the year, second grade teachers gave team teaching the ultimate endorsement in a Power Point presentation to administrators and third grade teachers explaining why the model should follow their students into the next grade. The school kicked off the academic year expanding the pilot to third and sixth grades this fall.

“It was amazing,” second grade teacher Lindsay Solomon said. “I could stand up there and teach, and my co-teacher could go around and support scholars. Even if there was a behavior issue, she could quietly put that fire out without me ever having to stop teaching.”

Second grade teacher Tayla Watson described the relationship she had with team co-teacher Broyles as complementary, with each other’s strengths helping in areas where the other might struggle. With five grade-level teachers sharing a roster of 115 students, it also allowed the teaching staff to more easily cover for each other when there were absences, Watson said, resulting in fewer interruptions to student learning.

“I think we have a lot more trust from our administrators and our leaders, because we are united and working together,” Watson said. “I think that that is something that could really elevate the teaching profession.”

No one model

At Concord, team teaching looks different in every grade. Children in second and third grades are combined and assigned a homeroom teacher who acts in a role similar to their classroom teacher. In fourth and fifth grades, students also are combined, but there are two teachers in the room at the same time. In higher grade levels, teachers come in for 30 minute subject “rotations” for each of the four core classes.

As an eighth grade teacher last year, Kayla Taylor could co-teach the humanities, with Taylor leading the way and another teacher providing additional oversight and support. 

A student teacher was added in the second semester, bringing a third educator to the mix that allowed for more small group learning. This year, Taylor will teach ninth and 10th grades, with different weekly planning days on the schedule for both grades. Despite more planning between teachers to make it happen, Taylor said the model was effective in making a better use of students’ time.

“Even though the schedule was more traditional, we were able to do more in terms of stations or kind of differentiating the instruction depending on individual student needs,” Taylor said. “That wasn’t necessarily just the students with IEPs or 504 (plans) but also the advanced students and the students in the center, to ensure that everyone was continuing to make progress.”

Hutchinson said there have been early signs of success, with both eighth and ninth grades reducing the number of students failing or needing to recover credits. 

With the district expanding team teaching to 10th grade this year, Hutchinson said each grade level continues to map out its own plan for its newest set of students, with shared goals around cross-curricular collaboration, “deeper” learning and building communication and reasoning.

“When you feel like you have a high sense of collective efficacy around the success of kids, it’s rewarding when you can sit down and make a plan and put that plan into action and that kid will succeed,” she said. “That’s the ultimate gift.”

The Michigan Educator Workforce Initiative and ����Ӱ�� both receive funding from Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

That finding comes from a hodgepodge of state documents and research reports. With the caveat that those sources may count things in slightly different ways and at different time periods, the pattern that emerges is consistent. 

In fall 2020, the country was still in the thick of the COVID pandemic. The economy was on uncertain footing, many schools stayed remote and teacher turnover rates fell. That is, more educators stayed put. 

But as the world began to open up, teachers started leaving in higher numbers, first in 2021 and then again in 2022. That fall, the country hit modern highs in the percentage of teachers leaving their positions. 

But those moves were temporary. Last year, Wall Street Journal (and former 74) reporter Matt Barnum found that teacher turnover rates in 2023 for each of the 10 states for which he was able to find data. Not all the changes were big, but the trends were all falling. 

For fall 2024, the current school year, I was able to find data from six states: Colorado, Delaware, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina and Massachusetts. All but Texas experienced year-over-year declines in teacher turnover. 

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey shows similar trends nationally. For a broad category that includes all state and local government education employees, employee quit rates surged in 2022, fell in 2023 and then decreased again in 2024. Similarly, the American School District Panel from found turnover rates falling among teachers and principals in the fall of 2023 and 2024. Notably, the biggest declines were seen in the places where turnover had surged the most during the initial pandemic years. 

You could squint at the data closely and note that turnover rates are still a bit higher than where they were pre-pandemic. But zoom out, and the numbers look broadly similar to historical trends. For example, Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald looked at from 1984-85 to 2021-22 and found that total turnover, including teachers who left the profession, switched schools, or left teaching but stayed in education, has ranged from about 14% to 20% in Washington since the mid-1980s. It did indeed hit a modern peak (of 19.8%) in 2021-22, but Goldhaber and Theobald’s in Washington showed turnover was again starting to fall in 2023. 

How should we put these figures in context? First, despite its recent surge, public education has maintained than any other industry except for the federal government. In any given month, less than 2% of public education employees leave their jobs, compared with rates twice that high in the private sector. 

Within public education, teachers tend to have lower turnover rates than other employees do. Colorado, for example, has published by role since 2007. The chart below shows the results. Teachers (in red) tend to have similar turnover rates as principals (light blue), but those are much lower than the turnover rates in other roles. Paraprofessionals, in dark blue, typically have turnover rates that are 10 to 15 percentage points higher than teachers do. 

How should we square this with soft data coming out of teacher surveys? Those results are messier, but they could fit the same basic trajectory. One high-quality study out of Illinois found that teacher working conditions worsened substantially from 2021 to 2023. And research looking at a range of survey and pipeline indicators suggested that the state of the profession was as of data ending a couple years ago. More recently, Education Week’s Teacher Morale Index a significant rebound in 2024-25 over the prior year.  

None of this is to say that policymakers should be content with the status quo. And indeed, there continue to be problem spots. Rural schools, those in low-income areas and certain teaching roles, especially in special education, tend to have higher turnover rates than others. But those call for more specialized and tailored solutions rather than universal policies.  

Moreover, policymakers can at least take heart that the worst of the teacher turnover surge appears to be in the rearview mirror. 

Public schools added 121,000 employees last year, even as they served 110,000 fewer students.

This is a continuation of recent trends. In per-student terms, public schools have hit new all-time staffing highs in each of the last three years.

����Ӱ��’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, and I have been following these trends and mapping out how they’re changing across the country. We’ve now updated our charts through the 2023-24 school year. Click on the map below to see what's happening in your community. 

Student/Teacher Ratio Growth

As in previous years, we screened out very small districts and those without sufficient data (marked in black). That allowed us to examine staffing and enrollment trends for over 9,500 districts, comprising 92% of K-12 students nationwide. We then compared the teacher and student counts from 2023-24 — the most recent available — with the same figures for 2016-17. 

About one-quarter of districts had fewer teachers per student last year than they did seven years earlier. Those are shaded in orange or yellow. Districts in Alaska, Nevada and especially Florida are predominantly orange on the map, meaning they have higher student-to-teacher ratios than they did before the pandemic.

But many more districts are shaded blue or gray, meaning they serve fewer — or a lot fewer — students per teacher than they did seven years earlier. Overall, three-quarters of districts fell into one of these categories.

At the most extreme are places where student enrollment declined while the district added staff. There were almost 3,000 districts in this category. Chicago, for example, lost 55,000 students while adding 4,200 teachers. Fairfax County, in Virginia, lost 7,000 students but added almost 700 new teachers.

Slightly less extreme are districts that shrunk their staff counts, but not as fast as they lost students. For example, Santa Ana Unified in California reduced its teacher count by 14%, but it suffered a 30% decline in student enrollment. Similarly, San Antonio, Texas, reduced its teacher count by 7% as student enrollment fell 15%.

Another group of districts gained students, but they increased their teacher counts even faster. Chesterfield County in Virginia served 7% more students with 22% more teachers. Also in Virginia, Loudon County added 27% more teachers to serve 4% more students.

Thanks to an infusion of $190 billion in federal relief funds, schools have been on a hiring spree over the last few years. You can visibly see the effects of the federal money in some of the district charts. For example, before the pandemic, Los Angeles Unified was reducing its teacher count pretty much in line with its declining enrollment. But with the infusion of federal (and state) funds, Los Angeles kept staffing levels constant despite further enrollment declines. Gwinnett County in Georgia shows a similar bifurcated trend. Its staffing and enrollment lines were moving in tandem until the federal funds drove a rapid increase in hiring.

Two teams of highly regarded researchers found that the federal funds helped boost student achievement, and the staffing gains are surely part of that story. But policymakers should be worried that the elevated hiring levels won’t be sustainable without new investments.

As a hypothetical, I looked at what might happen if districts were forced to go back to the staffing ratios they had in 2018-19. In that scenario, public schools across the country would need to lay off the equivalent of 156,000 teachers (512,000 staff members overall). Large districts like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Gwinnett County, Dallas and Philadelphia would all need to lay off 10% or more of their teaching staff.  

Cuts of this magnitude are not on the immediate horizon. State investments in public education to grow last year, and many were able to build up their reserve funds or frontload some purchases like textbooks or equipment over the last few years. into those savings allow some districts to temporarily painful cuts.  

But a paper from the looked at district budget expenditures to estimate how many educator jobs were funded solely by federal COVID aid. They found that, in Washington state alone, roughly 8,400 teachers were hired with the federal funds.

Now that that money is gone, thousands of educators' jobs are at risk. Districts will either need to reduce staff counts or find other ways to pay them.

On a per-student basis, that means public school staffing levels once again climbed to new all-time highs.

The NCES numbers are expressed in terms of full-time equivalents (FTEs), which are adjusted based on the number of hours worked by part-time staff. The FTE numbers are the most accurate  measure of total staff time available, but they take time to collect. Separately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects raw headcount numbers on the total number of employees in a given industry or sector. Those data come out faster, and the latest numbers that public schools have continued hiring this year.

Despite all the continued attention to supposed , the truth is that schools employ more educators than ever. At the same time that student enrollments fell by 1.3 million (a decline of 2.5%) over the last five years, schools added the equivalent of 55,000 teachers.

As a result, 45 states and the District of Columbia have effectively lowered their student-to-teacher ratio over the last five years. In most places, the changes are small, but 13 states — Colorado, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, California, New Mexico, Virginia, Illinois, Mississippi, Indiana, Utah, Oregon and Louisiana — reduced their ratios by more than one student per teacher. Only Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Alaska and Florida had more students per teachers last year than they did going into the pandemic. (We’re currently working on updating our map showing the same trends at the district level.)

But it’s not just teachers: Over the last five years, schools have added 171,000 full-time staff members in a variety of roles. If you walked into a school today, you’d find more paraprofessionals and administrators. Schools also have more guidance counselors, psychologists and support service staff, which NCES defines as employees “who nurture, but do not instruct students” and includes “attendance officers; staff providing health, speech pathology, audiology or social services; and supervisors of the preceding staff; coaches, athletic advisers and athletic trainers.”

Only three categories of school employees — administrative support staff, librarians and media support staff — did not see an increase over this five-year time period. The largest of these is administrative support staff, people whose primary responsibilities are to assist principals or department chairs. The number of librarians and media support staff also fell, part of a over the last few decades as fewer schools employ fewer full-time people in their libraries.

This may feel like déjà vu all over again to readers who have followed these trends closely since the pandemic. But with districts using the last of their COVID relief funds late last year, it will soon become clear whether they can sustain the investments they’ve been making. There’s no sign of the peak yet, but the fiscal cliff is getting closer.

By 2030, Gen Z will make up . These young people represent the future of education, and K-12 leaders need a comprehensive plan for attracting and retaining them.

As superintendent of Bellwood School District 88 near Chicago, I believe teaching can be an attractive career choice for today’s youth. I’m proud that 21 Gen Z teachers (11% of our instructional staff) are working at Bellwood, where nearly all our students are identified as low-income. Here are five strategies I’ve found to be effective in recruiting and retaining Gen Z educators.

First, we used the shortage we experienced as an opportunity to innovate. Like many districts nationwide, we saw our teacher retention rate plummet during COVID. At the start of the 2020-21 school year, 48 of Bellwood’s 167 full-time educators did not return. But because the administration sought new ways to position Bellwood as an employer of choice, the retention rate increased from 71% in 2020 to 79% in 2022. In 2023, it reached a seven-year high of 87.5%. 

We reimagined classrooms to make them more functional and inviting for teachers and students. We also expanded recruitment by teaming up with the teachers union and local colleges. In partnership with , we launched a “grow your own” talent initiative this year, which aims to create a diverse pipeline of future educators from within the community by developing a residency-like advancement program. One candidate piloted the program last school year, nine candidates began the certification program this fall and 10 will enter the cohort in spring 2025. One of the administrative assistants in the program has already transitioned to a teaching role.

Second, we’re making sure young people know that teaching is a largely stable career that brings significant value to society. Education is one of the , with high demand across the country for qualified teachers — especially in hard-to-fill subject areas like special education, bilingual education, and math. But in the 2020–21 school year, just 591,000 students were enrolled in teacher preparation programs, a decline of from 2010-11. 

In Bellwood, teaching is seen as a way to give back to the community. Many of the staff have deep roots here, and 38 have been with the district for more than 10 years. Some have spent as many as 20 years here. This commitment is a powerful draw for those who value purpose-driven work. Bellwood’s “grow your own” program shows prospective teachers that the district is invested in their success, which encourages them to invest in their students in turn. 

Third, we leverage Gen Z’s desire for professional growth and career flexibility. Research suggests these benefits are extremely important to today’s  young adults. , more than three-quarters of Gen Z employees want more opportunities to learn new skills, and 61% would like to move up in their careers or increase their responsibilities. 

Teaching can be a dynamic career choice, with opportunities for advancement into positions of leadership, policy or advocacy. This is something that district leaders should emphasize in their recruiting. But, they must also walk the walk.

In Bellwood, educators have access to flexible career pathways that align with Gen Z’s expectations for growth. We engage teachers in discussions about their own professional development, ensuring they feel a sense of agency and investment in their career trajectory. We have that count toward master’s degrees, with financial incentives tied to their professional advancement. Recognizing educators and supporting their ambitions makes the profession more appealing to the next generation.

Fourth, because new teachers likely have significant financial challenges such as student debt, policymakers and district leaders can make the profession more attractive to young people by creating affordable pathways such as apprenticeships, loan forgiveness and other incentives.

Bellwood’s on-the-job training program, created in partnership with BloomBoard, offers prospective educators a teaching degree paid for by the district. Instead of requiring participants to quit their jobs to complete a student teaching internship, they work full time in K-12 classrooms for the duration of the program, with hands-on practice and learning fully integrated into their workday. And instead of writing papers or taking tests, participants submit lesson plans, videos of themselves teaching and student work to their professors.  In addition, the district offers stipends and bonuses to teachers willing to take on hard-to-fill positions.

Lastly, Gen Z can be attracted by promoting teaching as a field ripe for innovation. Gen Z’s digital skills are essential in today’s classrooms, where how and what students need to learn is rapidly shifting as technology evolves. District leaders can appeal to young people by positioning teaching as a career where their understanding of technology can lead to meaningful change.

Bellwood’s investment in tools such as Chromebooks or tablets for every student, interactive whiteboards, fast and reliable wi-fi, and Google Workspace, ensures that the district’s classrooms are equipped for Gen Z educators to create dynamic and interactive learning environments. We also provide training on the use of technology for instruction, and district leadership has created a culture where teachers can feel safe to innovate and try new approaches in their classrooms, including lessons that incorporate new technology, project-based learning, or cross-curricular collaboration.

By investing in innovative recruitment and development strategies, districts can attract and retain the next generation of educators — ensuring students’ long-term success.

Consider Newton High School, located in a large metropolitan area in Texas, where an alarming 39% of teachers left their positions between spring 2020 and fall 2021. The principal hired replacements, many of whom were new to teaching, and then worked to build trust and a collective vision among her staff. Yet, before the next school year, another 43% of Newton’s teachers quit, restarting the cycle. Over four years, the high school lost and replaced 88% of its staff, leaving only 12% of the teachers who started teaching in the 2019-20 school year remaining by 2022-223. 

What happens to a school community when large numbers of teachers leave? High turnover student academic performance, in part because of the loss of human capital: When teachers leave, they take their knowledge and skills with them. This is especially damaging to schools when the replacement is less experienced, which is often the case in high-poverty schools.

Turnover can also erode the social capital— the relationships and culture — that holds a school together. We designed a of four high schools to investigate how turnover influences how teams work together; what happens to reform efforts, which often take years to reach fruition; and, perhaps most importantly, what schools are doing, or could be doing, to cope with negative effects.

Turnover weighs down schools. Strong relationships and shared culture are important if schools are to improve by engaging in ongoing inquiry and revising their practices from year to year. When teachers leave, these bonds weaken. Teachers lose close colleagues, making it harder to collaborate on curriculum or seek trusted advice and support. As one teacher at Newton said, “It’s building those relationships again, and then they leave.”

This can discourage teachers from investing in relationships, further accelerating turnover, and disrupts teamwork as well. Teachers spend valuable meeting time just getting on the same page, which limits their ability to learn from past lessons that were effective and to reflect on which instructional strategies worked, and why. One Newton teacher said her team “can’t build anything because we can’t keep people here for more than one year. You’re constantly starting over from scratch.”

But schools can adopt strategies to mitigate these harmful effects. One strategy is to track team progress from year to year. For example, at Rivera High School, which had high turnover among English teachers, well-organized calendars and a shared bank of lesson plans gave educators an alternative to reinventing the wheel multiple times, as they had in the past. New teachers could draw from this resource rather than starting from scratch. This helped them improve instruction and overall student learning experiences.

Another effective strategy is maintaining stability in teacher teams whenever possible. Principals can unintentionally make the problem worse by shifting teacher assignments frequently — a form . Even a single teacher’s departure can have big ripple effects, eroding team progress from the prior year.  The most stable teams we observed could build upon the previous year’s work to reach new heights. 

Of course, schools can only do so much to mitigate the harmful effects of turnover — the issue also requires action from policymakers. The problems caused by teacher turnover are not equally distributed across schools: turnover disproportionately impacts schools serving low-income students and children of color. It’s a systemic problem that exacerbates and perpetuates inequality between schools. Schools that have high turnover rates should receive additional funding to help stabilize their teaching and administrative staff. Accountability measures must also be adjusted: Rather than punishing schools for turnover-related issues, policymakers should offer targeted support. Additional public transparency around turnover data is needed to reveal the depth of teacher losses — which are by the typically reported annual turnover rates. 

Our data were collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, which might have . In fact, today, a wider number of schools are experiencing high rates of turnover that was — prior to the pandemic — once unique to higher-poverty schools. But we believe our findings apply even when turnover is less severe because our study demonstrates that even the loss of one to two teachers can have a detrimental impact.

To be sure, some turnover can be good for schools, as when new teachers bring fresh perspectives or disgruntled educators leave. However, we found few instances of this in our study. Instead, we saw high rates of turnover break up social networks, erode trust and diminish institutional knowledge. Turnover prevents schools and districts from implementing long-term improvements that engender hope and optimism in parents, policymakers and community members. You simply cannot build a house on shaky ground. It is past time to recognize and address this problem head-on and create stable, thriving learning environments that empower students and teachers to succeed. 

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts.

is the most concerning. The district’s current $300 million budget gap is set to triple next year, which isn’t surprising since enrollment dropped 10% over six years as the district added staff. Now, it won’t close schools, won’t reduce the workforce and is being told by the mayor to give in to union demands for big raises. How would the math work? The mayor wants the district to take out a short-term, high-interest loan. Oh, and the city and district still need to work out how to .

is a close second. Two years ago, leaders agreed to a costly labor agreement that they admitted would require major cuts. But then they didn’t make those cuts. Instead, leaders exhausted all reserves and are borrowing money they’ll have to pay back by 2026. What’s the plan for the $100 million budget deficit? None yet. 

Why are financial crises suddenly common among large urban districts? Federal relief funds are part of the issue. Despite warnings that the money was temporary, many city districts used those one-time funds for salary raises and new staff hires.  

Some never had a plan for what would happen next. For example, when the federal relief funds ended, leaders in seemed surprised by a glaring $143 million hole in their budget forecast.

Of course, it’s never easy to cut labor. But avoidance makes it worse over time. In a recent hostage-like negotiation, the superintendent demanded $10 million from the city within 24 hours or the district would start issuing pink slips.

Falling birth rates are another factor. Over the long term, fewer kids means fewer dollars and a need for fewer schools. Closing schools is tough work, and many city districts especially aren’t up for it. In , schools are down to capacity. After pressing pause on its school closures, now has until Dec. 15 to come up with an alternative or face a potential .

Sometimes it’s basic financial mismanagement. For months, , inadvertently overpaid its staff, which, not surprisingly, has created a drain on the budget.

got behind on filing its financial reports and ended up with a state-imposed “corrective action plan” that involved repayment of $43 million. After the state imposed an external financial audit, the district has since .

In , where Las Vegas is located, “miscalculations” keep shifting the budget gap by tens of millions. And because New Orleans dragged its feet on surfacing a $20 million miscalculation of local tax revenue, each of its schools must cut some six or more staff midyear.

In St. Louis, the issue appears to be an unwarranted spending spree by a newly hired — and now fired — superintendent.

All these financial messes are leaving kids in the lurch. The dysfunction destabilizes the district, often leaving little time to make consequential decisions like staffing cuts or school closures. Employees are demoralized. Trust in the system erodes. Families with means pursue other options. Most of all, the financial upheaval takes all eyes off the district’s primary responsibility: student learning.

What is it about city school systems that predisposes them to such financial dysfunction? One obvious factor is that leaders are underprepared to manage complex financial operations that can involve upward of a billion dollars — or more — in public funds. Coming off a that outpaced inflation, few of today’s leaders have any experience with making hard budget tradeoffs. As forecasts change, leaders ignore the signs, stall or, in the case of , pass off major budget-cutting to a task force of 40 volunteers.  

Another reality is the intense, unbalanced political dynamics common in today’s urban centers. Powerful labor groups make unaffordable demands. Vocal parents resist program reductions or school closures. Some elected board members reverse planned cuts, imagining they’re defending constituents from the heartless bean counters in the district’s finance office. The good finance leaders flee the turmoil. Eventually, the district runs out of beans.

Strong district leadership should be an antidote. Leaders need to be , sharing options and explaining financial tradeoffs. They need to make hard choices, laser-focused on what’s best for students. They need to safeguard their schools’ financial integrity, ensuring that today’s decisions don’t erode the education of tomorrow’s students.

Missing in action are states. Typically, legislatures throw up their hands and bemoan local control. Many are wary of state takeover policies in part because of their of impacts on students.

But there are . Requiring multi-year budget forecasts and minimum levels of fiscal reserves are a start. States can then adopt policies that get triggered when districts overspend and deplete those reserves, each with the goal of helping the district get back on track. With some 80% to 90% of expenses going to personnel, states could mandate that labor contracts be reopened for renegotiation. They could appoint a financial auditor to communicate honestly about district finances. Also triggered could be a requirement that the board and leaders undergo finance training and hold more frequent meetings until budget gaps are addressed.

Standing by while finances erode further in these urban districts is unfair to the many students who depend on their leaders to manage the billions being deployed for their education. Continuing to look the other way will make things worse. City kids need the adults to figure this out.

School districts had to make similar calculations with the financial windfalls they received in the wake of COVID-19. Known officially as the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Funds — — $190 billion was disbursed by Congress to schools and districts in three installments from March 2020 to March 2021.

It was the largest one-time infusion of federal funds ever, and the money officially expires at the end of September. So what have researchers learned about ESSER, and what should it mean for future federal investments?

Any evaluation of the ESSER funding has to start by defining its purpose. Was it intended as a financial lifeline for a large and important public-service sector in the midst of a turbulent economic climate? Was it supposed to nudge schools to reopen their doors for in-person instruction? Or was it meant to help re-engage students and help them address learning loss?

Congress essentially took an “all of the above” approach. It did specify that 20% of the last round of ESSER funding be directed toward addressing learning loss, but the allowable activities were extremely broad and inclusive. Without a clear purpose or goal, districts could — and did — spend their money in wildly different ways.

The result is that no one really knows how districts spent their ESSER money. Marguerite Roza and the team at did yeoman’s work of collecting what spending data they could find from state reports, but it’s far from a comprehensive story.

When AASA, The School Superintendents Association, surveyed its members recently, it that the wide diversity of investment strategies with the ESSER money “does not illustrate or support any additional trends within specific categories.” They found that districts spent the funds on tutoring, summer and afterschool programs, facilities, professional development for teachers, supports for English learners and students with disabilities, early-childhood programs and a host of other activities. At an event marking the survey’s release, the superintendent from Umatilla, Oregon, highlighted her district’s to invest in a cadre of substitute teachers who could be deployed as needed. The superintendent of schools in Fargo, North Dakota, emphasized the large number of initiatives his district launched and that those should be evaluated one by one rather than as a group. 

Congress could have set clearer priorities and set aside funding dedicated to specific initiatives, such as tutoring. But it may have been justified in deferring to local communities. on school finance has found that, in general, additional money helps boost a variety of student outcomes, but there’s still an open debate about funds should be distributed and spent. So flexibility was probably the right bet during a period like COVID.

But without greater clarity on goals, the question of whether ESSER funding worked is hard to answer.

Did the program provide a financial lifeline to schools and districts in an uncertain economic climate? That answer is an unequivocal yes. The early rounds of funding helped districts for personal protective equipment like masks, upgrade their technology and begin to re-staff schools after COVID layoffs and hiring freezes.

Did ESSER convince districts to reopen their schools? That’s less clear. The first round of funds, which were approved in March 2020, wasn’t enough to help most schools reopen their doors to in-person learning the following fall. And the last round, approved in March 2021, probably came too late to have an effect. According to the , only 7% of districts were fully remote by the time the last round of ESSER passed, and half of all districts remained fully remote or hybrid through the end of that school year.   

Did ESSER boost student outcomes? The early answer to that question appears to be yes, it did lead to meaningful improvements. By identifying districts that happened to get more or less money, two research found that the ESSER funds helped boost outcomes by a similar amount as past financial investments did.

But did ESSER provide the right amount of money? The answer here is yes and no. The “no” side is dominated by practical realities. One-time windfalls are hard to handle, especially in an industry like education, where 85% to 90% of expenditures are tied to salaries and benefits. In a detailed on the ESSER funds, New America’s Zahava Stadler quoted a school business official as saying, “While [it was] fantastic that schools had these resources to be able to get through COVID and then try to recover … those big Title I districts got so much money in such a short amount of time. [It’s] really hard to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on one-time expenditures within that window.”

It’s also hard to ignore the fact that the expiration of the money will likely lead to a fiscal cliff as districts scale back. How bad will that be? One way to estimate it is to note that, according to data compiled by , districts had about $67 billion in ESSER funds left to spend as of one year ago. That money is now all about gone, and the states are not in a position to the gap. This is likely to lead to large program and staffing reductions, which would be destabilizing for schools and bad for kids.

But the other way to look at this question is from the student perspective. It’s fair to conclude that students would likely be far worse off in the absence of the ESSER funds, and they remain so far behind pre-COVID performance levels that researchers estimate it would take an additional $450 billion to $900 billion to get kids fully back on track.

No policymaker is seriously talking about making additional investments on anything close to this sort of scale. But focusing on student learning needs should be the ultimate goal, and that’s a discussion policymakers should be having as the ESSER funds wind down.

If I told you there was one education reform that had the potential to address all these problems at once, you might think I was crazy. But shifting away from the one-classroom, one-teacher model in favor of a team-based approach, with different roles and responsibilities for various team members, has all these benefits and more. 

How can schools realize this potential? To find out, I spoke with leaders of three team-based teaching models — Kristan Van Hook from the (TAP), Bryan Hassel from and Brent Maddin from Arizona State University’s . Collectively, they have helped hundreds of schools transition away from one-classroom, one-teacher staffing plans.

Under the traditional approach, teachers are solely and fully responsible for what goes on in their classroom. As an example, if a school has 100 fifth graders, they are divided into four classes of 25 kids, each with its own teacher. But as Maddin points out, from a student’s perspective, this division inevitably creates something of a lottery. If one of those teachers is a beginner and one of them is a highly regarded veteran, well, take a number.  

This model can also be isolating from the teacher’s perspective. There’s no time to huddle with colleagues, and most schools have only instructional coaches for the entire staff. Districts do employ nearly a million paraprofessionals to assist teachers and smooth over the cracks somewhat, but the system still puts one teacher in charge of one class of kids, and the job doesn’t change much from year to year. Regardless of whether they’re a rookie or a veteran, the teacher will be in charge of the same number of kids. If they want to earn more money, they need to earn a master’s degree or step out of the classroom and into a leadership role. 

A team-based approach is different. Instead of each teacher being responsible for one class of kids for the full day, teams composed of teachers, paraprofessionals and instructional coaches share responsibilities for a larger group of students. 

Depending on the school, these groups are typically led by a master teacher who receives extra compensation for leading mini-teams of three to eight people. (In their original for Opportunity Culture, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel called this “extending the reach” of the best teachers.) Hassel says the average teacher leader in Opportunity Culture schools receives an extra 20% in pay.

This approach has benefits for students and teachers. A student might spend some time receiving direct instruction from a master teacher, then work in small groups, or practice a skill by themselves. 

From a teacher’s perspective, the teams replace isolation with collaboration and make the job more sustainable. Team members work together to identify student needs and plan instruction. This approach helps beginners transition into the classroom and gives team members time to compare notes, which can also help if the district is pursuing some large initiative such as adopting . 

Most importantly, the team-based staffing models can boost student outcomes. External of the Opportunity Culture’s multi-classroom teacher roles found that it helped typical educators raise their performance from the 50^th to the 77^th percentile. A last year of the TAP system found that it boosted high school graduation rates by 3.8 percentage points. Those gains also reduced criminal activity and led to fewer individuals relying on welfare between the ages of 18 and 22.  

Teachers also seem to appreciate working in teams. One of TAP schools found a teacher retention rate of 94%, far surpassing national averages. In Opportunity Culture schools last year, 94% of teacher leaders a positive impact on staff collaboration, and 96% said the team approach helped improve learning.  And teachers working in schools felt more supported, had equal or lower turnover rates and were more likely to recommend teaching as a career compared with those other schools in their district. 

Team-based staffing could also help address other problems schools have been facing, such as high rates of at the same time have been hard to find. This is partly because the traditional approach has no built-in redundancy: If a teacher gets sick, there is no one on staff to cover the class. Even something as mundane as going to the bathroom can be a problem. In contrast, having teams creates built-in flexibilities enabling teachers to cover for each other on a daily and hour-by-hour basis. 

It also helps schools with the challenge of dealing with declining student enrollment. Maddin notes that schools that operate with fixed staffing ratios have a hard time navigating those declines — and the potential for staff layoffs — while in a team-based approach, staffing levels aren’t as strictly tied to student head counts. 

Transitioning to a team-based staffing system is not a simple affair. Potential obstacles include money, teacher buy-in and like licensure rules or evaluation policies. 

Van Hook says leadership stipends are typically the most expensive part of the switch, but most places already have similar people in place — they’re just not integrating them fully. Van Hook, Hassel and Maddin all say it’s possible to switch to a team-based staffing model without adding any ongoing costs. 

There are some transition costs, but accelerants like the federal and state-based policies like North Carolina’s program can help more schools make the switch. 

When asked about the biggest challenges and risks, all three leaders expressed concern about a “light touch” version of this work. Maddin says he can tell if a school’s culture hasn’t changed much if teachers don’t have sufficient planning time or feel responsible only for their same 25 kids, if student schedules look exactly the same every day or if a school needs to hire a substitute when a teacher has an early morning doctor’s appointment. 

In other words, shifting away from the one-classroom, one-teacher model requires fundamental changes. But a true team-based approach offers a wide variety of benefits for both educators and students. 

So what can leaders do now to batten down the hatches while this perfect storm is still on the horizon? Here are four concrete actions: 

Review layoff provisions 

Labor is by far the biggest line item in school district budgets. The one-time infusion of ESSER money allowed districts to artificially inflate their staffing levels, so schools may need to lay off a lot of workers in the coming years.

How many? Imagine if staffing counts fell back to the same levels they were in the last year before the pandemic, in 2018-19. If that scenario plays out, districts will need to lay off 384,000 full-time staff, or an equivalent number of part-time staff. Since schools tend to lay off part-timers first, this figure may be undercounting the total jobs at risk. 

To put these numbers in perspective, layoffs of this magnitude would be worse than the Great Recession that hit schools in 2009-10. At that time, public schools the equivalent of 110,000 full-time teaching jobs and 364,000 full- and part-time positions . 

There are a lot of uncertainties in these projections. Still, layoffs anywhere near this size would be for many schools and districts, especially in the low-income communities that received the largest infusions of ESSER money. Besides the affected workers, layoffs student achievement and tend to staff diversity efforts.

Now is the time to avoid, or at least minimize, these problems. According to a 2023 from the National Council on Teacher Quality, about one-third of districts largely or solely rely on last-in-first-out layoff policies and another third use them in combination with other factors. Those approaches are blind to a teacher’s classroom abilities and ignore factors like whether the educator works in hard-to-staff schools or subjects.

Instead, district leaders should review their policies now to shield the lowest-performing schools and hardest-to-staff roles from the biggest cuts. Could they set a policy protecting, say, the lowest-performing 25% of schools and any teaching position that had less than three applicants? These may not be the right cut-offs for every district, but simple numerical rules like this would help minimize the worst impacts of layoffs. 

Close underenrolled schools and help students and staff transition  

����Ӱ��’s Linda Jacobson worked with researchers from the Brookings Institution and found 4,428 schools across the country that had suffered student enrollment declines of 20% or more. Thanks to declining birth rates, more schools are projected to be on this list in the coming years. 

Like layoffs, closures of underenrolled schools can be harmful to students and staff. But districts that delay painful decisions eventually have to make bigger, even more disruptive changes. Students would be better off if districts were honest about their budget problems and took steps, like matching displaced young people with dedicated counselors or giving them priority access to the best schools, in order to make those transitions easier. If districts wait to close underenrolled schools until they’re under true financial duress, it will be harder to put any of those types of transitional supports in place. 

Compete for all the kids in your area 

It turned some heads last fall when came out that New York City was proposing to spend $21 million on an ad campaign to boost enrollment. It’s not crazy for a district to advertise its offerings, but it needs to be realistic about costs and benefits. For example, one crude way to look at it is to calculate the break-even costs. With New York City $30,000 per pupil, it would take about 700 newly enrolled students to cover its advertising budget. 

This isn’t just about competing with public charter schools, private schools or homeschooling. In many states with , districts have a financial interest in persuading as many local families as possible to enroll their children in their schools.

Evaluate everything

It’s probably too late for districts to use their ESSER funds to put all the necessary processes and data collections in place for formal, rigorous program evaluations, but it would still be smart to use any remaining money to invest in data analyses. If the district expanded or created a summer or tutoring program, did the participating students make gains? How did students, parents or staff experience the program? Even simple data comparisons would be helpful for pointing out what went well and what didn’t and making the case for continued investment. 

As NWEA’s Lindsay Dworkin noted recently, “It has always been important to understand which programs or interventions are working, for which students and at what cost.” Those types of questions are now more important than ever. 

When Congress created the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program, everyone knew the one-time money would eventually run out. Districts only have a few months left to start preparing for the financial storm that’s coming. 

The publication of A Nation at Risk (ANAR) in 1983 was the defining moment of the “first wave” of education reform. It articulated improbably long-lived insights that continue to define education policy and discourse to this day. In particular, ANAR underscored, with uncommon rhetorical flourishes, the contrast between the ambitious ideals of a “Learning Society” and existing educational standards defined by modest minimum requirements, such as the low expectations embedded in high schools’ minimum competency tests and “cafeteria-style” curricula. Clearly, ANAR’s most prominent recommendation was the adoption of high school graduation requirements grounded in a “New Basics” curriculum that would feature four years of English; three years of science, math, and social studies; a half year of computer science; and, for college-bound students, two years of foreign language instruction.

However, ANAR also commented on several other dimensions of the education system in the United States, including the state of the teaching profession. In particular, ANAR concluded that “too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter of graduating high school and college students.” The report also underscored the inadequate subject-matter focus of teacher training, low pay, teachers’ limited influence on key professional decisions (e.g., textbooks), and the targeted character of teacher shortages. These findings—and the seven specific recommendations ANAR made regarding teaching—have been the focus of education research, commentary, and policymaking to this day.

Below, I provide a compact overview of key insights from the research and policymaking that occurred in the wake of these recommendations. I focus specifically on the developments relevant to in service teachers, while the important issues related to recruitment, induction, and mentoring in the teaching profession are addressed separately by Michael Hansen in a previous analysis. ANAR made four specific recommendations relevant to in-service teachers. One is that teacher salaries should be “professionally competitive, market-sensitive, and performance-based” and linked to “an effective evaluation system” that rewards effective teachers and guides underperforming teachers toward improvement or termination. A related second recommendation advocates for collectively developed “career ladder” designations that distinguish beginning, experienced, and master teachers. ANAR’s remaining two recommendations for in-service teachers focus on supporting teacher improvement through funded time for professional development.

Theories of Action

ANAR’s recommendations for in-service teachers tacitly reflect two broad and complementary theories of action for improving teacher effectiveness and student outcomes. One involves improving the effectiveness of existing teachers. The intent is for this to occur through professional development activities and through the implementation of well-designed financial and professional incentives. Both of these intend to promote an understanding of high-quality classroom practices as well as their consistent use. The second theory of action focuses on selection—that is, performance assessment systems designed to retain and elevate the most effective teachers while ensuring that persistently ineffective teachers exit the classroom. Notably, these policy recommendations stand in sharp contrast to conventional efforts to promote teacher effectiveness through generic salary increases unrelated to performance or need and through reducing class sizes by hiring more teachers.

The motivations for ANAR’s theories of action rest upon several important stylized facts about teachers that have become increasingly well established since its publication. Arguably, the most foundational evidence concerns the variation in effectiveness across teachers. An older debate had questioned whether there are aspects specific to teaching that make it prohibitively difficult to measure teacher effectiveness in a valid and reliable manner. However, richer data and methodological advances have led to a consensus about the general validity of teacher effectiveness measures while also acknowledging important evidence on the degree of noisiness common to such measures.

These studies indicate that the variation in teacher effectiveness is large, particularly relative to the effects of other promising education interventions. Specifically, a one-standard deviation improvement in teacher effectiveness corresponds to a gain in student performance on standardized tests of roughly 0.1 to 0.2 standard deviations. Critically, the manner in which teachers are currently assessed — that is, informal, “drive-by” evaluations — captures virtually none of this documented variation, rates the vast majority of teachers as satisfactory, and results in little performance-based attrition of low-performing teachers from the classroom.

Another important stylized fact is that, at the hiring stage, school leaders have little capacity to identify the teachers who will become more effective. This combination of facts that teachers vary considerably in impact, but this impact can be observed much more easily after several years in the classroom than at the hiring stage—suggests the need for broader access to the teaching profession coupled with discerning assessment systems that guide subsequent personnel decisions. In particular, decisions to tenure rather than dismiss the lowest-performing teachers can have dramatic consequences given the length of teaching careers.

Over the past fifteen years, this evidence has motivated a number of ambitious public and philanthropic efforts to systematically improve the effectiveness of the teacher workforce through performance-based assessment systems. Recent research has also provided more credible evidence of direct initiatives designed to improve the performance of all in-service teachers through professional development. I discuss these policy innovations and the related research below.

Improving teacher effectiveness

ANAR recommended that teachers receive eleven-month contracts so that they could spend more time in professional development and provide additional instruction for students with special needs. While the eleven-month contract has not been widely adopted, broader efforts to improve the performance of in-service teachers through direct training and support involve a substantial expenditure of time and money. However, accurately identifying the magnitude of these outlays is not straightforward given the accounting challenges of categorizing such activities and their demands on time for both teachers and nonteaching staff. For example, a 2019 study by Alexander and Jang examined expenditure reports for Minnesota school districts and found that 1 percent of 2013–14 operational expenditures was spent on activities defined by the state as staff development. In contrast, a 2015 study by the New Teacher Project found that 2013–14 expenses related to teacher improvement constituted, on average, 8 percent of district budgets. This figure consisted of both direct expenditures on teacher improvement, such as professional development, coaching, and new-teacher support, as well as related indirect expenditures, such as the management, strategic, and operational expenses for these improvement efforts.

Focusing specifically on professional development, a 2014 study commissioned by the Gates Foundation found that the typical teacher spends sixty-eight hours per year on professional learning directed by districts, or eighty-nine hours when courses and self-guided professional learning are included. Most of the time spent by teachers in professional development occurs in workshops and professional learning communities conducted by district staff. The cost of this professional development was estimated at $18 billion per year in 2014. Teacher perceptions of the quality of these investments have generally not been encouraging, nor do they appear to have clear links to teacher performance or improvement. The Gates report also stresses the overwhelming use of district staff instead of market-tested external providers to provide professional development, as well as limited teacher voice in choosing their training.

Despite the considerable expense and prominence of teacher professional development, credible research on the impact of these investments has also been quite limited over much of the period since ANAR’s publication. For example, Yoon et al. reviewed more than 1,300 studies potentially addressing the impact of teacher professional development on student learning and found only nine studies that met the evidence standards in the federal What Works Clearinghouse: six randomized controlled trials and three quasi-experimental studies conducted between 1986 and 2003. However, what these studies revealed suggests a striking proof of concept: teachers who received substantial professional development could boost the achievement of the average control-group student by 21 percentile points. Notably, these nine professional development initiatives focused on elementary grades but differed in their theories of action.

However, other quasi-experimental studies serve as a reminder that implementing effective professional development consistently at scale is a serious challenge. Jacob and Lefgren examined the effect of teacher training in Chicago Public Schools using a credible natural experiment in which schools with low baseline test scores received additional resources for staff development. They found that this initiative had “no statistically or academically significant effect” on math or reading achievement of elementary students. Similarly, Harris and Sass examined student-level longitudinal data linked to teacher data for the state of Florida and did not find an overall impact of professional development on teacher productivity. However, they did find positive effects of content-focused math professional development on student outcomes at the elementary and middle-school levels.

Over the past decade, experimental studies of teacher professional development have proliferated. In general, they have provided mixed evidence of the learning impact of investments in professional development. For example, experimental studies by Garet et al. found that reading- and math-focused training changed teacher knowledge and practice but without clearly improving student achievement. However, meta-analytic summaries of such experimental professional development evaluations suggest that positive effects exist but vary considerably by program design. For example, Basma and Savage examined seventeen literacy-focused professional development studies and found an overall effect size for reading achievement of 0.225. Similarly, in a meta-analysis of ninety-five STEM-focused professional development studies with experimental and quasi-experimental designs, Lynch et al. report an average effect size of 0.21.

However, other multisubject meta-analyses suggest smaller but still positive effects on student learning. For example, Fletcher-Wood and Zuccollo identified fifty-three experimental evaluations of teacher professional development and found an overall effect size of 0.09. Similarly, Sims et al. reviewed 104 experimental evaluations and found an overall effect size of 0.05. Given the considerable financial expense of most training investments, effects of this size, though positive, raise serious questions about cost-effectiveness.

These reviews also note and seek to examine the considerable variation across professional development programs in terms of impact. Kennedy argues that the widely discussed design features of teacher professional development — namely program duration, emphasis on content knowledge, and use of professional learning communities — are far less relevant than whether the training addresses any of the four persistent challenges of teaching: portraying content, managing student behavior, enlisting student participation, and knowing what students understand. In a similar vein, Sims et al. characterize professional development programs by the more general ways they change teacher skills and behaviors. Specifically, they characterize teacher professional development by four “IGTP” traits that indicate whether teachers are provided with new insights (I), goal-oriented behaviors (G), and techniques (T) that are embedded in practice (P). And they conclude that professional development programs with all four traits have an effect size on student learning of 0.17. However, these assessments may obscure the relevance of professional development initiatives that focus on the most effective elements of content and practice, such as an emphasis on “science of reading” approaches in literacy-focused training.

Overall, this evidence indicates that ANAR was prescient in emphasizing the need for ongoing training of in-service teachers. The available evidence suggests that such training can have substantial effects on student learning. However, realizing the increasingly well-established potential of this training is not straightforward. It involves the perennial challenge of translating research findings—that is, the critical design features of effective professional development— into genuine changes in high-impact practice at scale.

Teacher evaluation and performance-based incentives

ANAR also made prominent recommendations to dramatically change how we pay and evaluate public school teachers. In general, the status quo to this day compensates teachers according to single-salary schedules that rigidly structure pay according to years of experience and observed qualifications (e.g., a graduate degree) that do not consistently predict teacher effectiveness. This approach has historical origins in well-intentioned efforts to eliminate overt discrimination and capriciousness in teacher pay. Today, critics allege that this inflexible approach has led to low and undifferentiated salaries that do little to attract, motivate, and retain the most-effective teachers and to direct the least-effective teachers out of the classroom, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and high-need subjects. Furthermore, this approach to pay is coupled with low-stakes, “drive-by” teacher evaluations that capture little of the variation in teacher performance and do not provide reliable guidance for professional learning.

ANAR envisioned an alternative in which teacher compensation was substantially higher but also based on performance in a manner that would direct persistently underperforming teachers either to improve or to leave the profession. In the aftermath of ANAR’s publication, several states and districts experimented with providing teachers with extra pay and career-ladder recognitions for demonstrated merit (though, not generally, dismissing chronically underperforming teachers). These reforms tended to be short-lived despite encouraging results. While the rollback of these reforms was clearly a policy choice, the underlying causes are debated. Ballou argued that it largely reflected the opposition of teachers’ unions. Murnane and Cohen contended that it reflected the distinctive character of teachers’ professional practice — that is, multidimensional and difficult to observe. However, random-assignment evidence from a comparatively well-implemented career ladder program in Tennessee indicates that it was effective in identifying teachers who raised student achievement.

The past two decades have witnessed a diverse variety of ambitious efforts, often encouraged by prominent philanthropic and federal initiatives, to measure teacher performance and to link it to improvement supports and incentives such as financial benefits, career-ladder designations, and dismissal threats. The research on these different reforms suggests their promise but also underscores the nontrivial challenges (e.g., design features, implementation, and political credibility) that make the consistent realization of this promise difficult. For example, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) initiative disbursed more than $5 billion to states in a competition based in part on their commitment to developing systems for promoting teacher effectiveness. While RttT was effective in promoting state policy adoption, its effects on key design features and implementation are far less clear. In particular, while states were more likely to have multiple measures of teacher performance in the wake of RttT, the use of this data to inform salary and retention decisions remained uncommon. The state reforms over this period were “rarely sustained over time,” offered low bonuses, and rated fewer than 1 percent of teachers as unsatisfactory.

A more granular focus on the available evidence from specific initiatives provides richer insights into these issues of design, implementation, and political durability. For example, several studies focused narrowly on simply providing teachers with incentives for improved performance. These studies often found null (or weak) effects that are likely to reflect the unique character of these programs. “Cash for test scores” experiments with individual incentives for teachers in Nashville and group incentives for teachers in Round Rock, Texas, found little to no evidence of effects on teacher practices, attitudes, and the learning gains of their students. Similarly, studies of a group-based teacherincentive experiment in New York City found that they had no overall effects on key teacher or student outcomes.

Critics of teacher incentives suggest that these null findings reflect a misunderstanding of teacher motivations and the manner in which such incentives might debase intrinsic motivation. However, three design features of these studies could also contribute to these null findings and have important implications for performance-based assessment and compensation. First, the fact that participants know that these experimental incentives have a short term (e.g., two years) can sharply attenuate the resulting motivation to undertake changes in professional practices. This same concern can also apply to the incentives embedded in at-scale policy reforms that are viewed as faddish and unlikely to endure politically. Second, these initiatives generally focused on student achievement as the incentivized outcome. This may weaken the impact of incentives if teachers do not see or understand how they should change everyday practice to realize these rewards. A related third point is that these incentive studies generally did little to support and guide teachers in how they could change their professional practices to earn these rewards.

Three other studies suggest the potential importance of other design features. A teacherincentive study in Chicago Heights, Illinois, found positive effects on student achievement (but only in the first wave of the experiment) when the incentives were framed as the loss of an award rather than a gain. Second, the Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI) found positive effects when offering high-performing teachers a high-powered incentive ($20,000) linked to a distinctly clear, easily observed, and important behavior: working in a hard-to-staff school for two years. However, it is notable that these incentive-based gains were difficult to realize. More than 1,500 teachers had to be approached in order to fill only eighty-one vacancies. Third, the Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) program in Dallas similarly provided large incentives to highly effective teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff schools. Morgan et al. presented evidence that ACE produced dramatic gains in student performance: a 0.3 effect size in reading and 0.4 in math. This study also found that this success replicated as the program went to scale and that these gains were reversed when the program was eliminated.

Notably, these focused incentive programs all fall short of the more comprehensive system of assessments, supports, and incentives recommended by ANAR. TAP: The System for Teacher and Student Advancement (formerly known as the Teacher Advancement Program), which was introduced in 1999 and is currently active in “nearly twenty states and hundreds of school districts across the US,” is closer to ANAR’s vision. Specifically, the defining features of TAP include career ladder designations for teachers and job-embedded, professional learning led by master teachers. In support of this professional learning, TAP also provides teachers with comprehensive evaluations of their professional practice. However, it is not clear that this “instructionally focused accountability” articulates clear mechanisms for directing consistently low-performing teachers out of the classroom (the selection mechanism in ANAR’s theory of change). Finally, TAP includes performance pay typically linked to observations of teachers’ professional practice, such as classroom observation, portfolios, and interviews, as well as test scores.

The available evidence suggests that TAP is effective in improving teacher performance and student outcomes. Specifically, in a quasi-experimental study based on 1,200 schools from two states, Springer, Ballou, and Peng found that TAP increased student performance, particularly at the elementary school level, with effect sizes varying from 0.12 to 0.34 by grade. Similarly, Cohodes, Eren, and Ozturk, leveraging the rollout of TAP across schools in South Carolina, found that it generated improvements in several long-run outcomes, including educational attainment, criminal activity, and the take-up of government assistance. However, a random-assignment evaluation of TAP in Chicago schools by Glazerman and Seifullah found that it did not improve student achievement and that it was also vexed by the challenges of implementing this reform with fidelity, such as teacher payouts being smaller than originally stated and no rewards based on value added because of inadequate data systems.

Two other high-profile studies provided further evidence of the serious challenges of implementing comprehensive reforms of teacher assessments and compensation as well as of credibly assessing their effects. The first example is the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF). Congress established TIF in 2006 to provide grants to high-need schools implementing performance-based compensation systems. The four required components of TIF reforms also resembled those suggested by ANAR: (1) measures of teacher performance, including observations of classroom practice; (2) large, differentiated, difficult-to earn performance bonuses; (3) additional pay for career-ladder opportunities, such as becoming a master teacher and coach; and (4) professional development linked to the teacher assessments. A congressionally mandated study of TIF focused on the 2010 grant recipients in more than 130 school districts and found it led to student achievement of 1 to 2 percentile points higher in reading and math.

However, there are two important caveats to this evidence of modest impact. First, the implementation of these reforms in the study districts was incomplete. Only about half of the participating districts reported implementing all four components of the reforms required by TIF. In particular, professional development was frequently not provided, and most teachers received bonuses, “a finding inconsistent with making bonuses challenging to earn.” Second, the treatment–control contrast assessed in this random assignment study did not examine the effect of TIF versus “business as usual.” Instead, the treatment schools in the study were intended to receive pay-for-performance bonuses while the control group received automatic bonuses. And all study participants, both treatment and control, were assigned access to the three other TIF components: career ladder responsibilities and rewards, evaluative feedback, and professional development. In this critical but often overlooked detail, the federal study of TIF more closely resembles the studies of teacher incentives noted above than a true evaluation of teacher assessment systems.

The Gates-funded Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching initiative is a second widely discussed example of implementing and evaluating teacher assessment systems. This initiative sought to introduce assessment reforms within three school districts and four charter management organizations. Similar to both TAP and TIF, this effort featured focused professional development and career ladder incentives along with performance pay and retention decisions based on direct, structured observation of teacher practice and value-added scores. A quasi-experimental study found that these reforms did not clearly improve the focal student outcomes of high school graduation and college attendance. However, the implementation of the reforms appears to have been weak. The teacher evaluations flagged few teachers as poor performers, and in sites with available data, only 1 percent were dismissed for poor performance. As with the federal TIF evaluation, the treatment contrast that was studied was muted because the comparison schools in this study often adopted similar policies.

IMPACT, the highly controversial teacher assessment reforms introduced in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS), is distinctive as a seminal and enduring effort to implement ANAR’s recommendations with fidelity. IMPACT evaluated DCPS teachers on multiple measures with a heavy emphasis on structured classroom observations, including some conducted by district staff, and linked professional development. These evaluations resulted in measures of teacher performance that exhibited variation rather than being largely uniform. IMPACT linked these measures to high-stakes consequences: substantial pay increases for “highly effective” teachers, particularly those in high-poverty schools; dismissal for a small number of “ineffective” teachers; and a dismissal threat for “minimally effective” teachers who did not become effective within a year.

A quasi-experimental study of the incentive contrasts embedded in IMPACT found it had positive effects on teacher performance. This study’s design leveraged a feature of IMPACT in which teachers with performance scores just below a threshold value were deemed “minimally effective” and subject to a dismissal threat while those with scores at or above the threshold were not. A comparison of teachers just below and above this threshold found that the threat of dismissal caused minimally effective teachers either to leave the district or to improve their measured performance substantially. A powerful financial incentive for highly effective teachers to repeat their prior performance also appeared to have positive effects.

Three other aspects of IMPACT merit emphasis. First, the political credibility and resiliency of IMPACT appeared to be highly salient. In 2010, when the city (and district) leadership who championed IMPACT were forced out of office, the first “minimally effective” designations did not appear to change teacher behavior. However, the ratings reported in the summer of 2011, when it appeared that IMPACT would endure, did drive changes in teacher behavior.

Second, evidence indicates that IMPACT not only improved the performance of existing teachers but also replaced underperforming teachers who exited with substantially more effective instructors. Specifically, a quasi-experimental study by Adnot et al. finds that, when a low-performing teacher exited, their replacement raised student performance by 0.14 standard deviations in reading and 0.24 standard deviations in math. Third, the performance benefits of IMPACT’s incentives endured through subsequent revisions to the teacher supports and ratings structure.

A second district reform of note (and one with strong parallels to IMPACT) began in the Dallas Independent School District in 2015. Specifically, like IMPACT, the Teacher Excellence Initiative (TEI) replaced a single-salary schedule with compensation based on multiple measures of teacher performance. Furthermore, like IMPACT, it also did so in the context of accountability for school principals. TEI also implemented a unique design feature to discourage inflated or arbitrary ratings of teachers. It fixed the overall distribution of ratings and penalized principals for subjective ratings that were highly misaligned with test-based ratings. A synthetic-control study by Hanushek et al. found that these reforms led to statistically significant increases in student achievement that grew over time to a roughly 0.2 standard deviation in math and a 0.1 standard deviation in reading.

Concluding thoughts

ANAR’s recommendations that focused on improving the effectiveness of in-service teachers were a harbinger of some of the most dramatic education policy innovations of the past forty years. And these innovations have provided us with several proofs of concept and new insights that establish the potential to improve student learning through dramatic changes in teacher evaluation, in-service training, and compensation.

However, it must also be acknowledged that there has clearly not been large-scale, lasting change regarding ANAR’s teacher-focused recommendations. Uninformative, low-stakes assessments of professional practice and rigid single-salary schedules are still the norm for the vast majority of teachers in US public schools. And while in-service teachers do engage in extensive professional development, the impact of these expensive and highly variable investments is uncertain at best.

Any serious effort to reimagine the assessment, training, and compensation of in-service teachers should begin by confronting the factors that have contributed to the long durability of the status quo. There appear to be three broad and interrelated impediments to substantive change. The first is the need to improve the knowledge base of how best to design the key features of these reforms. For example, efforts to improve teacher evaluation and introduce performance-based teacher pay rely critically on valid and reliable measures of teacher performance. Promising gains in measuring teacher effectiveness are likely to come from continued improvements to structured rubrics for classroom practices. Incentives can better guide the professional improvement of teachers when they are linked to the high-impact, everyday classroom practices teachers directly control and can enhance through complementary training.

Another important area where improved knowledge is critical to driving at-scale change concerns the design of teacher professional development. The typical professional development experience, workshops directed by internal district staff, is often criticized (e.g., the New Teacher Project 2015). At the same time, a recent and growing body of experimental studies indicates that purposively designed professional development can have substantial impact. This literature generally emphasizes the particular benefits of in-service training that focuses on meeting more general challenges of teacher practice. While more can be learned about the design of professional development, the question of how to design its delivery is even more uncertain. A study from the Gates Foundation suggests that relying more on external providers of professional development will make it easier to move nimbly to market-tested and effective approaches. However, several of the teacher assessment reforms discussed here instead emphasize redesigning internally provided professional development to rely on master teachers who may be better positioned to serve as coaches providing embedded and relevant training. These issues underscore the need to build a complementary learning agenda around any new reforms (e.g., inquiry cycles, networked improvement communities).

A second impediment to realizing ANAR’s vision concerns the multifaceted operational challenges of implementing meaningful reforms effectively at scale. The null findings from credibly identified studies of professional development in at-scale field settings suggest this issue. However, more-direct and sobering evidence comes from several well-funded, high-profile efforts to introduce teacher assessment and compensation reforms at some scale. These include (1) the failure to deliver value-added bonuses because of data-system inadequacies in TAP; (2) the limited variation in teacher ratings and their infrequent use in personnel decisions in the Gates Foundation’s Intensive Partnership for Effective Teaching; (3) the inconsistent delivery of professional development and the broad distribution of bonuses under the federal Teaching Incentive Fund; and (4) the limited use of teacher evaluations to guide salary and retention decisions under the RttT initiative.

A third and closely related impediment is political opposition. With regard to introducing performance-based pay, this most obviously refers to the opposition of teachers’ unions. However, it can also involve unresponsive public-sector bureaucracies. Furthermore, reform efforts can also fail when their success and durability rely on politically determined funding commitments. The political opposition to reform in the broader public also turns on misinformation about what the existing evidence discussed here actually indicates. Specifically, opponents of the types of reforms recommended by ANAR often argue that investments in professional development are effective while performance-based pay has failed.

Given these interlocking issues, a compelling way to achieve change at scale may involve forming political coalitions around compelling reforms that adopt some but not all of ANAR’s proposals. For example, it may be possible to move school districts toward more effective professional development delivered by a carefully curated set of outside vendors if their provision involved cost-sharing that saved district resources. Alternatively, it may be possible to achieve durable political support for a teacher evaluation system if that system focuses narrowly on identifying master teachers and providing them with training and extra pay to coach their peers but takes a more incremental approach toward dismissing underperforming teachers. Intentionally combining such efforts with careful evaluation could, over the longer term, seed further evidence-based change in this important domain.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: . 

These choices manifest themselves in a variety of ways, including how much money states provide for their public schools, how many people work in those schools and in what types of roles, and how teachers are recruited and trained. Here are five big differences: 

1. Per-pupil spending 

At the national level, public schools an average of $15,810 per pupil in 2019-20, not including debt or construction costs. But that figure hides tremendous variation across the country. Idaho and Utah schools, for instance, spent less than $10,000 per pupil, whereas Vermont; Washington, D.C., and New York schools spent upward of $25,000 per student. 

In real, inflation-adjusted terms, school spending nationally is 6% higher than it was a decade ago, and it’s up 28% over the last two decades. The gap between states is also growing over time. Over the last 20 years, the 10 lowest-spending states have increased their school funding by 16%, while the top-spending states have boosted theirs by 48%. 

These figures are not adjusted for cost-of-living differences, and it is clearly cheaper to live in Boise than in New York City. But other decisions are driving these spending differences as well. 

2. Student-to-teacher ratios 

According to the most recent , Vermont has the lowest student-to-teacher ratio in the country, at 10.5 students for every teacher. Maine, D.C., New Hampshire, New Jersey and New York were all under 12 to 1. The data are in terms of full-time equivalent employees, or FTEs, which account for the number of hours an employee actually works.  

In contrast, states in the South and West tend to have far more students per teacher. Oregon, Idaho, Louisiana, Florida, Alaska and Washington are all clustered together at just under 18 to 1. Alabama comes next, at 19 to 1, followed by California, Arizona and Utah at over 22 students per teacher. 

To put it another way, in per-student terms, Vermont public schools employ more than twice as many teachers as California, Arizona or Utah schools do. 

3. Total staffing levels 

Nationally, teachers make up just under half of all public school employees. But that ranges from 31% in Ohio up to 60% in Idaho. That is, Idaho’s investments in education are more likely to go to teachers, whereas Ohio’s are more likely to go to other types of staff. 

As with teachers, Vermont has the lowest student-to-staff ratio, with just 4.5 students for every full-time equivalent staff member. Maine, Connecticut, D.C., Ohio and New Hampshire are all below 5.5 students per school employee. Some of these states are among the most expensive places to live, but their staffing choices also make their schools more expensive.

On the other end, some states operate with much leaner staffing models. For example, public schools in Alabama, Arizona, Idaho and Washington schools all have 10 to 12 students per staff member. In other words, the typical public school in some states employs about half the staff as is common in other states.

4. Teacher preparation programs 

States also get their teachers through very different pathways. According to the 2020-21 , about 30% of educators in their first three years in the classroom came through an alternative certification program. 

Midwestern and Northeastern states tend to rely less on alternative routes and more heavily on traditional training. Among states with reliable data, Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Michigan, Connecticut and Kansas all have less than 20% of their new teachers coming through alternative programs. 

On the higher end, more than half of all new teachers enter through nontraditional routes in Florida and Texas. New Mexico topped the list, with nearly two-thirds of all new teachers entering teaching in this way. These states may be making pragmatic decisions about local supply and demand, but relying more heavily on alternative programs also improves teacher and likely lowers for teachers, while it may come at the cost of .  

5. Teacher credentials 

Teachers are very well educated, and more than 60% have earned a master’s degree or higher by their third year in the profession ( of all American adults). 

But those national trends mask wide variation across the states. Only 30% to 40% of teachers in Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and South Dakota have earned a master’s, versus 87% in Massachusetts, 91% in Connecticut and 96% in New York. 

In other words, the teaching profession looks very different depending on which state you happen to live in. What might appear weird to people in New York or Massachusetts may be standard practice for teachers, educators and schools in Florida or Arizona. As schools across the country work to re-engage students and get them back on track academically, it’s worth learning from these differences and understanding what can be ignored versus might be worth replicating.  

There are still pockets of layoffs due to unique local circumstances, but they are by no means widespread. 

Still, widespread staff reductions seem very likely to happen in the very near future. Marguerite Roza at the Georgetown Edunomics Lab the expiration of federal relief funds in September 2024, combined with unprecedented , a “perfect storm” for school budgets. 

As a result, it’s likely that school districts will have to trim their staff in the next two to three years. No one knows exactly when the storm will hit or how bad it will be, but I estimate it could easily result in 136,000 fewer teacher jobs. 

Where will layoffs hit the hardest? This question is easy to answer at a high level: The districts most at risk will be those that have lost the most students and those that got the most ESSER money. Those tend to be large, urban, high-poverty districts.

Education Resource Strategies took look at which states are most at risk, starting with how much the ESSER money represented compared with their typical education budget. Assuming that districts spent the federal money evenly over the entire grant period, this figure ranged from 4% to 5% in states like New Jersey, Connecticut, Colorado and Utah, and up to 12% to 17% in states like Alabama, New Mexico, Louisiana and, especially, Mississippi. 

But state-level data are not sufficient to drill down to find districts most at risk. While some places received no ESSER funds at all, the highest-need districts saw influxes totaling up to 40% of their annual budgets.

So, to get a more precise estimate, I looked at staffing ratios and how they have changed over time. About three-quarters of school districts across the country have reduced their student-teacher ratios over the course of the pandemic. That is, they have more staff per student than they used to. For this analysis, I looked to see how many teachers a district would lose if they went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19. 

Take Chicago as an example. According to the , its student-teacher ratio shrunk from 16.5 students per teacher in 2018-19 to 14.5 in 2021-22. Over this three-year period, it added 5% more teaching staff even as student enrollment dropped 8%. For Chicago to go back to the same staffing ratio it had just a few years ago, it would need to shrink by 2,873 teachers. 

Districts Most at Risk for Teacher Layoffs

All told, if every district in the country went back to the same staffing ratio it had in 2018-19, the nation would lose 136,000 teaching positions. 

Districts wouldn’t have to lay off all those teachers; they could start by letting attrition and slower hiring rates reduce their employee headcount. If state budgets , that might allow many places to avoid, or at least limit, the number of layoffs. 

But it’s also possible that my 136,000 estimate is on the low side. For one thing, districts tend to protect full-time classroom teachers from layoffs, especially higher-paid veterans. That means they would need to many more junior teachers and other part-time employees to make up the difference. Given the makeup of the teacher workforce, that would have devastating effects on diversity efforts aimed at bringing more young Black and Hispanic educators into the workforce. 

In one historical parallel, schools lost of teachers from 2009 to 2010 as the Great Recession began to hit school district budgets. When that happened, it wiped out a decade’s worth of staffing gains as schools a total of 364,000 jobs. 

So, when might layoffs hit schools? At the moment, the economy looks quite strong. Inflation is , and the is as strong as it’s ever been. But the last and biggest pot of federal relief money, $122 billion in ESSER III funds, expires at the end of September 2024, and Congress has given no signs that it will extend that deadline, let alone authorize additional funding to soften the decline. 

So school districts mustn’t get complacent. Large urban districts with high concentrations of poverty will likely need to downsize. Districts that spent less of their COVID relief money on labor will be less at risk of needing to make big layoffs. Districts that are packing a higher share of their spending into this final year are especially vulnerable to hitting a big fiscal cliff. 

There are a lot of uncertainties about the exact timing and magnitude of the impact, but districts will have to scale back their budgets in the coming years. By my estimates, that could mean as many as 136,000 fewer teachers. 

This is known as a time loop, and the states, “When memories of past circuits of a time loop are permitted, there is the possibility of transforming the imprisoning circularity into an upward spiral, a learning curve.”

But what is a possibility in science fiction is a futile dream in the world of U.S. public education. Those in charge of properly staffing schools, districts and state agencies seem incapable of escaping the same patterns of hiring and layoffs over a period of many years.

The cycle begins with alarms about teacher shortages. These claims go back decades and almost always focus on unfilled positions rather than the actual number of teachers employed and the actual number of students enrolled.

Legislatures then appropriate additional funding as an enticement. Much of this money goes to raises for educators already in the profession, but it also allows school districts to create openings for classroom teachers, specialists and support employees.

As an aside, when wealthy suburban school districts create openings, they attract not only new teachers, but experienced educators from poor urban districts. This leaves the poor districts with less experienced veterans and new recruits.

Eventually, something puts a stop to the accelerated hiring. The effects of the recession hit public education in 2009. Local school districts had added 84,000 employees between September 2007 and September 2008. By September 2009, 68,000 were gone.

Unions didn’t take these layoffs lying down. The National Education Association claimed without immediate action. This led to what was commonly referred to as the edujobs bill in Congress. Ultimately, the reduction in the public education workforce was held to .

There was no acknowledgement that many of the laid-off employees were the very same people who had been recruited into the profession just a year or two earlier. “Last in, first out” seniority rules sealed their fate.

The edujobs bill simply postponed the effects of the recession for a while. Staffing levels continued to fall through September 2012. But they picked up again every year thereafter, surpassing pre-recession levels by September 2019.

The cycle continued with the unexpected COVID pandemic in March 2020. With virtually all public schools closed, by September 2020 local districts were employing 550,000 fewer people.

This was quickly followed by an unprecedented $122 billion federal aid package. Hiring bounced back almost immediately. show local school districts now have more employees than in any other September in history.

This hasn’t gone unnoticed. While teacher shortage stories still dominate press coverage, analysts like , Marguerite Roza and tie the record number of school employees to the record drops in student enrollment and warn of the next crisis in the cycle: the so-called fiscal cliff.

The 2023-24 school year will be the last one for the federal COVID relief money, which means states and school districts will have to fund all those raises and new hires from their own budgets. Some will raise taxes to do so, while others will start to prune employees.

Considering that time loops are a fictional/theoretical condition, it is remarkable how much space on the internet is devoted to escaping one. Most solutions adhere to the “learning curve” method, in which the time loop captive escapes through trial and error, ultimately finding the way out. But it seems that those running the nation’s school systems agree with : “To escape the time loop, we must realize that we are all stuck in a time loop and there is no escape.” In other words, this is the circumstance that exists, and the time loop captive must make peace with it.

Which probably means that when the alien invasion of 3023 leads to layoffs in the public school system, an AI-integrated humanoid robot will be writing a version of this very same column.

Mike Antonucci’s Union Report appears most Wednesdays; see the full archive.

Virginia schools will be able to hire more support staff positions, something educators say is desperately needed amid a continued teacher shortage.

State lawmakers last month approved an amended budget that will direct  toward these school support positions. The appropriations help boost the ratio of allotted support staff per teacher. The funding ratio increased from 21 support positions per 1,000 pupils to 24 per 1,000 pupils — though the older standard was 26 support positions, according to a July  by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

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This funding has been capped for over a decade, following a  in the Great Recession-era budget that was never adjusted. The cap reduction resulted in a $331 million reduction in state education funding last year, according to JLARC.

Some positions limited by the cap include administrative, clerical and operations staff, as well as technology and instructional professionals, according to the  Many education groups say the cap has resulted in the loss of thousands of support staff, even as enrollment grew.

The state’s  provide the foundation for public education, including minimum staffing needs. The standards typically undercalculate how much staff is actually needed, according to JLARC. Elimination of the support cap was a near-term recommendation in the report.

Virginia school divisions receive less K-12 funding per student than the national average, according to JLARC. Other states receive just under $2,000 more per student.

Chad Stewart, the Virginia Education Association’s policy analyst, said the support staff cap was supposed to be temporary.

“An entire generation of kids have gone through their K-12 experience in the state of Virginia with far less support staff for helping their schools function and making sure that teachers weren’t overwhelmed with all these additional duties, and could focus on teaching,” Stewart said.

When there is an inadequate amount of support staff in schools, teachers or other support staff have to fill multiple positions, according to Stewart.

“It takes them [teachers] away from the duties they’re trained to do, which is supporting students in different ways,” Stewart said.

Guidance counselors in particular have fulfilled multiple support positions, such as monitoring cafeterias or doing clerical work in the office, according to Stewart. A  took effect July 1 to ensure counselors spend at least 80% of their time doing direct counseling of students.

Teacher Karl Knoche has worked at Virginia Beach City Public Schools since 2007. He has taught government and economics at First Colonial High School since 2014.

“All the support staff at my school does a great job of helping teachers and students, and I feel that I can go to them with any problems,” Knoche stated in an email.

Knoche has extra duties such as monitoring students between classes, during lunch and before school, which can be “time consuming,” he stated.

Teachers seem to have more responsibilities outside of the classroom than when he first started teaching, according to Knoche.

“We have been fortunate at my school to be fairly well staffed,” Knoche stated. “We have had issues with having enough custodians, but that isn’t due to the lack of jobs, but the lack of interest in the jobs.”

Virginia leaders have grappled with teaching vacancies in recent years. The General Assembly committed to increasing compensation with 5% pay increases over three consecutive fiscal years starting in 2022, according to .

However, the pay increases may not address low or no compensation in previous years, coupled with inflation the past two years, the report stated. Additionally, not every school division could fund the full 5% increases because their locality does not provide enough matching funds “for employees not recognized through the SOQ formula.”

Virginia ranks No. 22 for teacher pay, which is an average salary of about $61,000, according to the .

The state had over 3,500 unfilled teaching positions in the 2022-23 school year. Elementary school teachers accounted for the most vacancies, followed by special education, according to  from the Virginia Department of Education. Special education positions had the highest percentage of unfilled positions, at 5.8%, followed by world language and then elementary school teachers.

The VDOE announced a  in 2022 to improve teacher recruitment and retention. The goals are to make it easier for qualified teachers to be hired, consider more candidates eligible to fulfill open positions and reinforce strategies that maintain a thriving workplace, such as programs focused on teacher retention.

The use of appropriated funds will vary by district, but the intent is that local school divisions will use funds for support staff positions, according to a VDOE email response.

The governor and lawmakers have removed close to “three-quarters of the support positions cap” in the past two sessions, the VDOE stated.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sarah Vogelsong for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Shaheen fled Iraq in 1998 during Saddam Hussein’s regime, made a harrowing escape to Jordan and eventually settled in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Shaheen is now a substitute teacher for the Lincoln public schools, but not without the financial burden of enrolling in courses to meet English language requirements and taking student loans because her Iraqi degree wasn’t recognized.

“It was almost impossible for me to start from the beginning, which is very difficult for someone learning a new language,” Shaheen told ����Ӱ��.

A new program launched by for internationally trained immigrants and refugees who want to become teachers in the U.S. aims to ease the challenges Shaheen faced. 

According to the , more than one in three educators, or 34 percent, are unemployed or not using their degree.

Yet, thousands of teacher vacancies across the country persist — with more than , according to Kansas State University’s College of Education.

“Even as we experience the Great Resignation, which heavily impacted the education sector, there’s still individuals who want to be part of this workforce,” said Mikaela Santos, senior program manager of World Education Services.

“The cultural perspectives and new ideas immigrants and refugees bring to the table becomes wasted talent because of the many regulatory and systemic barriers in the American education system,” she added. 

To combat this problem, three organizations were awarded a $100,000 grant in July 2023 to create pathways for foreign trained teachers to become educators in the U.S.

In the next year, the in Lincoln, Nebraska; the in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and in Chicago, Illinois will place more than 150 teachers trained in their home countries at schools in their communities.

Here is a snapshot of each organization’s effort to help internationally trained teachers and address racial disparities in the classroom.

Asian Community and Cultural Center

Nearly 50% of Nebraska’s school districts had unfilled teacher positions during the 2022-23 school year — with 66% saying there were either unqualified or no applicants, according to the .

Lee Kreimer, the CareerLadder director at the Asian Community and Cultural Center, said the organization is looking to place at least 35 foreign trained teachers into Nebraska’s Lincoln public schools and South Sioux City public schools.

The need for diverse teachers is especially great in rural areas like South Sioux City that have had a high influx of Latino families immigrating partly because of the that has historically relied on foreign-born workers, Kreimer said.

The reported a growing 47.8% Latino population in South Sioux City with more than 63.6% Latino students .

“We see this as a great opportunity to tackle multiple challenges at one time and it’s truly a win-win way to help everybody,” Kreimer told ����Ӱ��.

The organization recently set up programs at schools in both districts for immigrants and refugees to be mentored as they finish up their U.S. teaching licenses.

“Investing in schools by providing teachers that look like their students helps them succeed,” Kreimer said. “And from a racial equity standpoint, children seeing teachers that look like them and have experiences like them helps with retention, staying out of trouble and getting better grades.”

Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity

In Oklahoma, there were nearly 180,000 unfilled teacher positions in 2022 — more than twice the average a decade ago, according to the .

The Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Equity estimates nearly 650 internationally trained teachers in Tulsa have education degrees but don’t work in the field.

Chief resilience officer Krystal Reyes said the city wants to hire at least 65 teachers trained in their home countries — largely from Latino, Afghan and Ukrainian backgrounds to reflect the families immigrating to Tulsa.

“Because we have a diverse student body, we need our teachers to reflect that,” Reyes told ����Ӱ��. “So we know that our immigrant community can help us meet that language and cultural need.”

Programs include expanding job training with ESL courses and creating free courses for those seeking alternative certification.

“We need to do more as a government to make sure that there’s full participation, representation and economic opportunities from all our communities,” Reyes said. “There may be a money barrier or an English barrier, but they’re still trained educators that could be filling a great need in our schools.”

Richard J. Daley College

In Illinois, 73% of districts report teacher shortages — with 30% saying positions remain unfilled or filled with someone less qualified, according to the .

Janine Janosky, president of Richard J. Daley College, said the school aims to connect at least 50 foreign trained teachers to schools across Chicago.

“We’re seeing many immigrants and refugees coming with professional experiences already from their home country,” Janosky told ����Ӱ��, adding how more than 10% have teaching licenses.

Trish Aumann, vice president of academic and student affairs at the college, said the need to hire diverse teachers is especially great because of the influx of immigrant families — particularly Ukrainian refugees.

“We need multicultural and multilingual individuals in positions in our schools,” Aumann told ����Ӱ��. “So it’s that bigger picture of supporting K-12 schools that will in turn help immigrants and refugees with their economic mobility.”

Janosky said the college is creating a pilot program for internationally trained teachers to fill vacancies in Chicago’s schools.

“Within the middle part of the United States, there’s very few of us doing this work,” Janosky said. “That gives us a huge responsibility, but also a huge opportunity, to make a big difference for Chicago, Illinois, and the entire country.”

As pressing as it is to get qualified teachers in classrooms immediately to address shortages, effective policy must also focus on recruiting a well-prepared and diverse pool of candidates, along with retaining effective educators. 

Unfortunately, among high school and college students is at the lowest level it’s been in decades. Nationally, enrollment in preparation programs never quite rebounded after the Great Recession. National , collected by the U.S. Department of Education under Title II of the Higher Education Act since 1999-2000, show that enrollment dropped by about 100,000 candidates between 2012-13 and 2014-15 — a 15% decline. Forty states experienced declines in enrollment during this two-year period. From 2015-16 to 2020-21, total enrollment has remained fairly steady at just under 600,000 nationally, with a dip of about 45,000 candidates in 2018-19 that quickly rebounded in the following year.

But enrollment figures don’t tell the whole story, and, importantly, the number of people completing teacher preparation programs nationwide declined by 20% — about 40,000 — between 2012-13 and 2018-19, with modest increases of about 15,000 between 2018-19 and 2020-21.

While the national picture on enrollment and completion is still concerning, national trends hide considerable differences across states. Our recently published on the state of the

teacher workforce includes recent data on candidate enrollment and completion in teacher preparation programs by state. The Title II data from the most recent five years (2016-17 through 2020-21) show that 27 states have seen ongoing enrollment declines of 5% or more, seven states had relatively flat enrollment numbers and 17 states plus the District of Columbia saw increases of 5% or more. 

To understand this variation in enrollments and completions across states and the range of policies in place, it helps to look at some specific examples; these differences among states may shed important light on policy approaches that may expand the teacher pipeline. 

Washington state posted 17% increases in enrollment and 22% increases in completion over the past five years. Washington has invested in to address teacher recruitment and retention, such as increasing preparing to teach in high-need subject or geographic areas and investing in programs. 

California saw a 2% increase in enrollment and a 27% increase in completion rates over the past five years. The rise in the supply of fully prepared new entrants (and associated decline in hires with emergency-style permits) has coincided with substantial state investments to address teacher shortages, including in a grow-your-own program to support paraprofessionals and other school staff to become teachers, $515 million for who commit to teach in high-need schools and more than $600 million for . These efforts are contributing to a supply of new teachers that is : More than half of California’s newly prepared teachers are people of color. 

By contrast, Louisiana experienced a 25% decline in enrollment and a 23% drop in completion over the past five years, prompting the legislature in 2021 to create charged with studying the issue and providing a road map for recovery.

In Texas, enrollments have increased by 22% over the past five years, Importantly, this , which decreased by 9% — leaving the state with a declining number of fully prepared new teachers. Recognizing this, in 2021, the state began investing in high-retention pathways into teaching through the residency program and grow-your-own initiatives. These research-based approaches align with growing evidence showing that effective preparation, especially , is critical to ensure that beginning teachers are instructionally effective and remain in the classroom. 

The experience in Texas is not unique. across multiple states that candidates from traditional student-teaching programs and residencies are more likely to complete their training and stay in the profession than those from alternative routes that do not provide full preparation before new teachers enter the classroom. 

The wide-ranging differences in state rates of preparation program enrollment and completion also make it clear that addressing shortages is not a futile ambition. Not only is it possible, but it is happening in places with policies that foster long-term investments in affordable and effective pathways. And, with an ongoing focus on , the nation may finally be on the path to ending shortages for good. 

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Nellie Mae Education Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provide financial support to the Learning Policy Institute and ����Ӱ��.

Their has left teachers and warning the teenagers in their lives to steer clear of education as a career path. Fewer prospective educators are .

Keeping teachers from leaving and prospective educators interested means rethinking the role for the 21st century.

During the pandemic, the challenges teachers have confronted for decades magnified. Schools to ensure students could access meals and grappled with a . Districts struggled to close the and provide access to internet and technology devices so students could continue learning. Teachers as they learned new technology-based platforms, pivoted their lesson plans and tried to reach every student.

While these challenges took on a different, more urgent face throughout the pandemic, they weren’t new, and they won’t disperse with the so-called return to normal. The roles of schools and teachers have grown over time. From teaching and learning to nutrition to mental health to digital access and more, schools are essential to communities and a catch-all when it comes to child development and wellness. While we believe it is essential for schools to play this role, the solution cannot be simply to add more and more responsibilities to teachers’ shoulders until they can no longer carry the weight.

The shows that a strong majority of teachers, 87%, agree that they have too many responsibilities to be effective educators. Their role has expanded infinitely and is no longer sustainable. Today, teachers are not only expected to tackle learning gaps, but  — as well as — and to play a central role in delivering on the myriad promises of the public K-12 education system.

This overexpansion of teachers’ roles and responsibilities has put the future of the profession at risk. It’s time to reevaluate the role of educator.

What will it take for schools to be able to develop and implement an approach that meets the needs of the whole child without sacrificing the well-being of the teacher?

First and foremost, it means easing some of these growing pressures and responsibilities and increasing the amount of time in the day dedicated to teachers’ core responsibilities. When respondents were asked in our survey what they needed to help students overcome pandemic induced-learning setbacks, for example, the most desired resource was more support staff, and the most sought-after professional learning support was how to effectively collaborate with those staff members. Schools must be more strategic as they divvy up responsibilities among the adults in the building so each person can do fewer things, but do each of them better, and in collaboration with others. While this sometimes means hiring more staff, it often involves deploying them differently. Organizations like Education Resource Strategies have shared for how to do this.

Next, teachers must be paid the compensation they deserve. Educators continue to earn and are paid based on an inflexible salary schedule, unique to their profession, that ignores working conditions and their impact on student achievement. Too many teachers find they need to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, regardless of their credentials or certifications, adding to an already unsustainable workload. Teachers should be paid more, and their compensation must reflect their quality and their workload.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the importance of supporting the mental health of not just students, but educators. A great first step is saying it out loud: Teachers in our school are struggling, and we must make supporting them a visible part of our vision and culture. This explicit recognition allows educators to feel more comfortable expressing their challenges and seeking help. Additionally, providing mentorship and peer-to-peer growth opportunities and involving teachers in school and district decision making are concrete ways to not only bolster their well-being, but also bolster their effectiveness.

With these changes, teachers will be able to more effectively focus on their primary responsibility: educating the nation’s students. Achieving this will not only address the burden of teachers’ workloads, but show prospective educators that teaching is a sustainable and fulfilling career and, ultimately, support students’ academic achievement and lifelong careers.

Also contributing to this essay: Omar Araiza, fifth grade teacher, Los Angeles; Cory L. Cain, dean of instruction, Chicago; Richard de Meij, K-12 world languages teacher, Hartford, Connecticut; Arthur Everett, high school social studies teacher, Brooklyn; Pamela Femrite, former special education teacher, Minneapolis; Leona S. Fowler, assistant principal, Queens; Daniel Gannon, high school history teacher, Westchester, New York; Shirley Jones-Luke, high school English teacher, Boston; Jennifer López, fifth grade teacher, Sylmar, California; Mark Morrison, fourth grade teacher, Stratford, Connecticut; Dee Nix, impact director, Chicago; Carlotta Pope, 11th grade English teacher, Brooklyn; Susan Providence, third grade teacher, St. Paul; Dr. Winnie Williams-Hall, elementary special education teacher, Chicago.

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, CityFund, Joyce Foundation, Nellie Mae Education Foundation and The Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Educators for Excellence and ����Ӱ��.

Employee turnover rates remain high this year, but schools are more than replacing the people who leave. 

In fact, all the job losses have come from part-time workers. And, once you factor in the number of hours those employees work, schools actually had slightly more staff than they did pre-pandemic. 

These are just some of the findings from the latest national data. Here are five key takeaways:

1. The number of people working in education is still down 

The chart below uses the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics through June 2023. Employment fell immediately as COVID-19 hit, and private-sector employers cut 16% of their workforce in the span of two months. But they have more than bounced back (the gray dotted line). 

Public education’s job losses never got as bad as those in the private sector, but they’ve been slower to recover. At their worst, public K-12 and public higher education were both down about 9% (245,000 and 730,000 employees, respectively). As of the June data, public K-12 is still down 1.2% from its pre-COVID peak, whereas higher ed is still down 2.7%. 

In contrast, private day care providers had a much steeper fall (down 36% in just those first two months) but have made a steady comeback. As of June, private day cares had 49,000 fewer workers than they did pre-pandemic (down 4.6%).  

Note that these numbers represent individual people: a part-time worker and a full-time one are counted the same, no matter how many hours they work.

2. The recovery in K-12 looks a lot like the rest of local government 

As shown above, the private sector looks different than the public sector. But within state and local governments, the pandemic recovery appears very similar. The graph below uses the same data as before, but this time it compares public K-12 employment against all other local government jobs (think  and fire departments, parks, libraries, etc.). 

Education had a rockier recovery path in 2020 and 2021, but the different local government sectors have been on a remarkably similar trajectory throughout 2022 and so far in 2023. 

3. Public K-12 and higher ed are both growing 

The public education sector is expanding, and has been throughout 2021, 2022 and now 2023. It’s a simple function of how many employees leave (which the bureau calls “separations”) versus how many people are hired. The chart below compares these trends across all facets of public education. Unfortunately, K-12 and higher education are lumped together here, but as a reference point, K-12 represents about three-fourths of the total. 

The data for 2023 are projections based on the data through May, but it provides some good news. Whereas employee turnover in education hit in 2022, it looks a bit lower so far this year. Meanwhile, public education hires are tracking slightly higher than for 2022, which was already one of the biggest years on record.

4. Education has a lot more job openings than normal, but it’s filling those openings at decent rates 

There’s been a ton of interest in labor shortages within education, but how does it compare to other sectors? For starters, public education has the lowest job opening rate of any major industry tracked by the bureau. As of the , there were 3.2 job openings for every 100 public education employees. That’s a rate of 3.2%. For comparison, the federal government rate was 5.6%, the private sector as a whole was at 6.1%, and other state and local governments were at 6.2%.

So how is education doing at filling its openings? Not terribly. The graph below shows an estimated fill rate by sector, which is the number of job openings divided by the number of new hires that month. 

These have declined over time, save for a brief surge in summer 2020 when private-sector employers were rehiring workers without posting official job openings. It may not give much comfort, but public education employers (in green) are having an easier time filling their job openings than other state and local government agencies are in filling theirs. 

5. The job losses were all among part-time workers, and total staffing has fully recovered 

The data presented so far looks at individual employees, and when readers think of a typical education employee, they might naturally picture a teacher. But full-time classroom teachers represent only about 40% of the total K-12 workforce. 

As I found earlier this year, public schools actually employ more teachers than they did pre-pandemic. They also had more school psychologists, district administrators, student support staff and guidance counselors. 

So which jobs were lost? Mostly paraprofessionals and support staffers, including janitors, bus drivers and food service workers.

The latest data provides another way to slice it. It shows that public schools employed more full-time instructional and non-instructional staff in March 2022 than they did at the same point in 2019. What changed was a major decline in part-time workers. 

This is why it’s important to look at total staffing rather than counting individual employees. Schools cut back on the number of part-time workers and the number of hours those employees worked. But total staffing levels (in full-time equivalents) are now above where they were coming into the pandemic. 

Given that these data end in March 2022, and employment numbers are showing continued growth since then, it’s quite likely that staffing levels are even higher by now. And, because student enrollment remains depressed, that means student-to-staff ratios continue to fall. 

We’ll have to wait for state and local data for finer-grained data on turnover rates and employment numbers by role. But for now, it’s safe to say that school staffing weathered the COVID dip and is now back above pre-pandemic levels.  

But those days are over. Thinking of quitting in the next few months or years? Think twice. Because odds are you’ll have a tough time finding another education job in the next several years.

That’s because the job market for teachers is about to do a U-turn with the hiring spree of the last few years set to stall out before coming to a screeching halt at the start of the 2024 school year. 

In some areas, the reversal has already started and districts are pulling down their “help wanted” signs.  and  issued a  this spring. , , and Baltimore County .  and Seattle are already doing . And this is just the beginning. Last month, at an education finance training we conducted at Georgetown University, we heard from dozens of school officials from all over the country whose districts were already making similar moves or are poised to in the next year.

What’s behind the flip? In the last few years, the hiring bonanza has been fueled by a flood of federal pandemic relief funds (ESSER). Districts across the country used that money to add staff that they wouldn’t have been able to afford otherwise. Now, that funding is set to disappear by the fall of 2024, which means districts are paying for more employees than they can afford.

​​To make matters worse, during the same time period, districts have been losing students. That means that state and local dollars (which tend to be driven by enrollment counts) are unlikely to make up the gap.

Staffing-enrollment mismatch spells big financial trouble ahead

With all these extra staff in schools and declining enrollment, a rightsizing is coming. These trends aren’t just afflicting large urban districts, either. Rather, in states where we have the data, the patterns are playing out statewide. Over the last decade, districts have grown staffing rolls by 9%, all while student enrollment fell by 8%.

In , staffing is up by 8%, while enrollment is down 7%. Same trend in . Even in , where there’s been enrollment growth of 3%, it won’t be enough to sustain the 20% jump in staffing over the same time period.

True, . So, job seekers might find more opportunities there (though both states offer notoriously low teacher salaries). And just as staffing and enrollment patterns can vary by state, same goes for districts within states, too. Even so, when job openings are down statewide, it means the available candidates are vying for a smaller number of positions. (States or districts wanting to better understand their own staffing and enrollment patterns can use .)

ESSER hangover 

Federal COVID relief funds fed a hiring habit that can’t be sustained.  was once treated as some abstract future threat. But we’re now watching that threat play out in real time as districts work to finalize next year’s budgets this month.  released by schools this spring. 

With last week’s debt limit deal, it’s clear that more federal funding won’t come to districts’ rescue. And states aren’t likely to fill the hole either, as . 

Georgia recently  a one-year drop of 16.5% in net tax collections. Massachusetts had a whopping 31% year-over-year . And 

For educators in high-demand roles, like , there will still be jobs. But for others, it’s likely to get much tougher as districts start to shrink their labor force to align with their new enrollment numbers.

The public discourse about widespread teacher shortages may be confusing to some, particularly when the data show we’ve just finished a period of staffing up our schools. In most regions, however, the new reality is this: Those seeking jobs in schools will soon be facing a job market quite different than what we’ve seen for several years.The upside for districts that are hiring? When there are fewer jobs and more job seekers, districts can afford to be choosier, and the  of new hires rises.

Either one-on-one or in small groups, researchers say tutoring may be among the best approaches for helping youth quickly recoup lost ground. And armed with $190 billion in federal stimulus spending, the nation’s schools now have the resources to invest in new programs.

But launching an effective tutoring initiative requires more than just financial investment. Schools must answer key questions about how to structure the program: Which students will participate? What curricula will they follow? How long will sessions be? Will they take place during school or outside of it? Who will work as the tutors?

Matthew Kraft is an associate professor of education at Brown University and a leading voice on tutoring as an intervention to accelerate students’ learning. In 2021, he published a laying out a blueprint for how schools might effectively scale tutoring programs to help youth catch up after COVID. Finding the right curriculum and structure can lay the foundation for strong results — and can even ease staffing woes, he explained.

“The stronger the tutoring infrastructure,” said Kraft, “the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.”

����Ӱ�� spoke with Kraft over Zoom to find out what school leaders interested in tutoring should consider as they design their interventions and what pitfalls they should avoid.

This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

����Ӱ��: Can you tell me, in brief, why you’ve chosen to focus so much of your research on tutoring? What’s the potential to help students catch up on missed learning from the pandemic?

Kraft: I started studying tutoring as a doctoral student almost 15 years ago. Part of that was motivated because I have worked as both a volunteer and as a paid private tutor. It was a formative experience to be able to work one-on-one with students and see them make rapid gains in their understanding, whether it be algebra or reading. As a classroom teacher, you just don’t have nearly as many opportunities for sustained one-on-one interaction to develop those relationships. So from my own experience, I knew tutoring really had a lot of potential. 

As I began to learn more, it became clear that there’s a huge potential to move the spectrum of how we deliver instruction in public schools so that it’s not only group instruction but also individualized personalized instruction. So I started to study (where leaders had implemented a tutoring model), which led to the thought experiment of saying, ‘Why isn’t this something that we do more broadly? Why is it a service that those who can afford it pay for in the private market, but not something that we offer more widely in our public education system?’

Then the pandemic opened a larger public conversation. It created the opportunity to say, not only has there been huge potential for tutoring, but now we’re facing a moment where there’s an incredible need to support students at a more individualized level and accelerate their learning. So all of that came together to really motivate the work that I am doing right now.

You mentioned tutoring is what wealthy families turn to when their kids fall behind in school, and that resonated because it shows we intuitively know tutoring works. It’s just that not everyone has the resources.

Yes, there’s a lot of intuitive appeal to tutoring. In the antiquities, in Roman and Greek times, that’s how a lot of the privileged class were educated. And that remained the form of private schooling with one-on-one tutors in much of the Elizabethan era and even into the Colonial era. As we expanded access to education, the model moved away from that, to some degree by necessity, but there’s just the sense that one-on-one feedback is the natural way we learn.

Now, to add to that, we have a deep and growing body of evidence examining its efficacy through rigorous experimental research. And when you look at that body of evidence, it is very compelling. That said, it largely is built on evidence of small- to medium-scale programs implemented in person prior to the pandemic under favorable circumstances. And that’s not what we’re doing today, trying to scale tutoring to an entirely new level.

For school leaders trying to roll out new tutoring programs, what factors do you think they should consider when they’re picking out curricula?

The first question districts and schools need to answer is, ‘What is the intended outcome of a tutoring program? What are the goals?’ Because it may be that the goal is to support students belonging in school, their social-emotional development, as much as it is to accelerate their learning. It could be both. By first answering that question, I think that helps the program to backward map onto the type of curriculum that would be best suited to meet those goals. 

Often there’s a bit of a slippage that happens. There’s this notion that tutoring is a good thing writ large and so if we do something individually with tutors and students, that will produce positive outcomes. I think that’s wishful thinking. It requires a lot more purposeful alignment between choosing a curriculum that is both built on strong instructional materials, but that also complements the type of instruction students are receiving in their larger traditional classes. It doesn’t need to be the same curriculum, but it’s less productive to have tutoring use a curriculum that’s completely divorced from what students are doing in the classroom. They should be compliments.

Do you have practical tips for how school leaders can go about doing that? Who’s best suited to make the call on curricula? Maybe department heads?

The reality is there are a wealth of curricular materials designed for trained teachers [in a full classroom]. And then there is a potpourri of one-off materials for tutoring. And so there’s not as rich of a supply of curricular materials available that are designed to be able to be implemented by a tutor who has limited experience working with students. 

A key is to ask whether the tutoring materials could be used effectively by someone with some training and support, but not necessarily a formally trained teacher. When I’m searching for materials, do these materials feel accessible to a wide range of potential tutors?

That means they should be able to be broken down into very explicit instructional steps and should come with a scope and sequence that allow you to do very short formative assessments of students to figure out where to reinforce their knowledge and shore up their foundation. 

Materials also need a clear instructional sequence over the duration of a tutoring period. Some curriculum materials may be designed for a 60-minute class, but tutoring sessions may be for 30 minutes. And so, [leaders] need to map that on to the design of the tutoring program itself. And in every context, I think there is going to be some individualization required. 

So it sounds like I’m hearing that if schools get those structural components right — like finding curricula that align with classroom standards, for example, or designing lessons to match the amount of time for tutoring sessions — they can actually unlock a new pool of possible tutors. Which strikes me as important because teacher burnout is so high right now and staffing has been an issue for some programs.

I think that’s a key observation. The stronger the tutoring infrastructure — to support tutors with strong instructional materials, ongoing coaching and feedback, peer learning networks and a leadership team that will troubleshoot issues that come up like technical problems or attendance challenges — the more success tutors will have and the less the program will rely on the individual skills that a tutor brings with them. And so it really opens up the potential labor supply pool to a much greater degree.

So now in this current moment, we see a lot of districts actually moving to implement tutoring programs to help students catch up on missed learning from COVID. In these last couple years, what have we learned?

A huge advantage of the decentralized nature of public education in the United States is that there’s an amazing amount of innovation and experimentation that happens. A lot of districts are developing tutoring programs on their own and it looks different across a whole bunch of places. Those districts are individually learning a huge amount about what worked, what didn’t work. And if they continue to invest in those programs over time, there will hopefully be continuous improvement.

Where we fall short is in helping districts to share those best practices and [also what they learn about what] practices we should leave on the scrap pile of design improvement. There are efforts at the state and federal levels to build these networks and I think those have a huge role to play. 

At the same time, researchers like myself and a whole host of others are working in partnership with districts to study tutoring programs in dozens of different contexts. But it’s hard to do that while delivering rigorous research designs, which may not always be feasible in these Wild West contexts, at the same time as trying to roll it out as fast as we can. Research can be a slow process and is not always able to inform program design in real time.

We’re starting to see some new evidence coming out that districts are struggling to implement tutoring at scale and deliver the high-dosage model that we think is necessary. Some efforts to contract with 24/7 on-demand tutoring providers has led to . And the uptake has skewed more toward students who may already be having some degree of success in school rather than [serving] students who are struggling most.

When you say the high-dosage model isn’t quite being hit, what exactly does that mean?

Districts are aiming to deliver tutoring on a regular basis to students multiple times per week. And maybe they’re shooting to do that for 1,000 students, but instead they’re only getting 100 students to come with regularity. Maybe that’s because there are transportation problems, communication problems, technology problems, tutor-supply challenges. All of those things are, at least in this initial rollout, expected implementation challenges. Taking an effective program and scaling it is, historically, something that our decentralized education system has always struggled to do well.

To school leaders who are thinking of iterating on these programs or rolling them out if they haven’t launched them yet, anything that, based on your research, they should really try to avoid?

There’s compelling evidence that efforts to scale tutoring by simply adding more kids to a tutoring session — while tempting because it means you can serve more students — is going to quickly lose its efficacy. It just ceases to be personalized and starts to look like group instruction. That’s one common pitfall. 

A second common pitfall is failing to eliminate the barriers to accessing tutoring on a regular basis. If tutoring is moved to after the school day, some kids have other commitments. [If it’s online], some kids may not have the support to troubleshoot technology or may not have the technology itself. The more that we can reduce those access barriers, the more successful schools will be at delivering tutoring at scale and delivering tutoring with the high-dosage frequency that we think is necessary for it to be effective.

I think schools have to be clear-eyed about the trade-offs of different design changes. [They should aim to] scaffold these programs so the program is driving success and tutors can parachute into it and be bolstered by the great infrastructure, with students showing up ready to roll, knowing the routine.