This is equivalent to one out of every 10 doctor positions going unfilled or going to someone who hasn’t yet completed medical school. We do not stand for that in healthcare, and it should be equally unacceptable for education. 

Every child deserves a qualified teacher, making teacher recruitment essential.

Despite this, the federal government is moving in the opposite direction. The pandemic-era funding to support school districts has expired, and the current administration has canceled $600 million in educator preparation grants and proposed eliminating $2.2 billion in grants that support educator recruitment, retention, and professional development.

This is troubling. Although numerous policies and reforms have been attempted to improve student outcomes, from increased spending per pupil to a longer school day, ample research confirms that to student learning outcomes than any other aspect of schooling.

Ample research has proven that boosting student learning depends on . That includes those who are not only trained and certified, but are innovative, enthusiastic and continually adhere to recommended best practices.

Furthermore, recruiting more teachers is one of the most cost-effective strategies, by far, for improving learning, according to a . For every tax dollar spent on school improvement, teacher recruitment has a higher return on investment in terms of student learning gains than almost anything else. 

Given this finding, anyone who cares about good government, efficient spending and smart policymaking should be advocating for and investing in teacher recruitment initiatives.

Effective teacher recruitment is also good for the economy. One well-trained teacher will influence thousands of students over the course of their career.  

Students who have more effective teachers are  to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in higher-income neighborhoods and save more for retirement. All of this results in GDP growth and more tax revenue. 

Additionally,  that the U.S. will be less economically competitive in the 21st century without a stronger teacher workforce, particularly in math and science.

Even as the federal government ignores the problem, state governments and education nonprofits are recognizing the educational and economic payoffs to teacher recruitment and are advocating for resources and legislation that recruit more teachers.

More than 30 states have invested in financial incentives to recruit teachers, with and leading the way with the most sizable investments. 

Nine state departments of education have partnered with  to launch a statewide teacher recruitment system. TEACH rebrands the teaching profession by dispelling myths and misperceptions and assists prospective teachers in overcoming barriers to entry, such as navigating the training and certification process, finding financial aid and passing certification exams. 

In 17 states,  attracts diverse talent into teaching by giving college students an opportunity to explore the profession through its Teaching Fellowship. Many college students are considering teaching but want more exposure before making a commitment. 

Through a paid, nine-week summer program, Breakthrough’s teaching fellows complete 100-plus hours of training, teaching and mentorship — building real classroom skills and leadership confidence. Breakthrough then partners with graduate schools, other certification programs and TEACH to ensure fellows have clear, supported routes into teaching careers.

These approaches recognize that there are tens of thousands of young people who consider teaching but are stopped by misperception barriers or practical hurdles. The only way we can address the teacher shortage is by proactively identifying these individuals and supporting their path into the field.

This is what the U.S. military does to recruit. This is what Fortune 500 companies do. This is what we need to do for the teaching profession.

Amid the federal rollbacks and growing demand for more teachers, philanthropy can play a significant role here in supporting efforts to recruit teachers. By investing in recruiting teachers — who will go on to inspire and engage their students — we are investing in the educational and economic future of our country in more ways than one.

“While Google’s been offering educational products for 20 years, this is a different moment for us,” said Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager of education.

He called the effort the largest for Google in two decades of working with teachers and students. Phillips didn’t immediately offer a price tag, but said it’s “a sizable investment.”

The training, offered through the ed tech-focused group , will include hands-on experience with Google’s Gemini and NotebookLM tools, offering certificates and digital badges.

“We have just heard so much feedback from teachers that are just saying, ‘We are not prepared,’” said Richard Culatta, ISTE+ASCD’s CEO. “‘We don’t have the training, we don’t have the background that we need for the realities of teaching in an AI world, both teaching in the classroom and also, secondarily, but equally as important, preparing students for the world that they’re going to be in.’”

It’s the latest in a series of large-scale teacher training initiatives over the past few months. In July, the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, announced its own $23 million , partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train up to 400,000 educators.

At the time, AFT President Randi Weingarten said the academy was a way to ensure that teachers, not technology, remain in control of the classroom.

But AFT’s partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic drew sharp criticism from educators and researchers, who questioned whether tech companies with products to sell and market share to protect are the right architects for teacher training. Education technology critic Audrey Watters called AFT’s academy “a gigantic public experiment that no one has asked for,” while ed tech analyst Alex Sarlin said tech companies were in a “land-grab moment.” 

Microsoft has also launched its own community-based platform, Microsoft Elevate for Educators, offering free courses, live training sessions and credentials. 

Google itself in 2024 committed $25 million through its philanthropic arm to several nonprofits, including ISTE+ASCD, 4-H, and aiEDU, with particular attention to reaching underserved communities. Its goal at the time was to reach more than half a million K-12 and college students, as well as educators.

ISTE+ASCD — the group is a combination of two that merged in 2023 — was the beneficiary of $10 million of the $25 million, saying it would collaborate with several other groups, including the National Education Association and the Computer Science Teachers Association.

Though Google has its own AI platform, Culatta insisted that the work won’t be about pushing specific tools, saying that kids need enduring AI skills as the tools change. 

In 2023 ISTE+ASCD introduced its own AI chatbot built on educator-focused content and trained solely on materials developed or approved by the organization. The chabot tapped into curated databases in a bid to give teachers routine access to high-quality research. 

In some ways, efforts like those of AFT and others reflect a lack of leadership at the federal level. The Trump administration, through an , has backed efforts to expand AI in schools, but has also eliminated the Office of Educational Technology, which long focused on making access to technology until Trump last spring.

Culatta, who ran the office under President Obama, said it’s important that organizations like ISTE+ASCD “step up when there are key needs that may not be filled at the federal level. And we just want to make sure that, regardless of where we would like some things to happen, at this point we just have to do all-hands-on-deck and make sure we’re supporting kids and teachers.”

‘Massive undertaking’ or waste of time?

The sheer scale of Monday’s announcement underscores how urgently educators see the need to learn about AI: RAND Corp. last spring found that the number of school districts training teachers on AI from 2023 to 2024, from 23% to 48%. Researchers predicted that as many as three-fourths of districts would be in the AI training business by the end of 2025. 

Robin Lake, director of the at Arizona State University, said the new partnership is “a massive undertaking that is urgently needed right now. I hope it includes a research component so we can learn from it because much more is needed.”

Google’s Phillips said the company has “multiple arms of research happening all around the world” and “will start to produce some of those and share them publicly where we’re doing studies” in classrooms.

“We’ll see how the results land, but ultimately we want to improve learning outcomes,” he said. “We want to help change. We want to bend the curves on proficiency.”

Lake, who has long urged schools to take AI readiness seriously, said school principals, district leaders and teachers-in-training “also need to be AI literate, as do students and families. We can’t rely only on private companies with an interest in AI products to fund and lead AI readiness.”

Others were more sharply critical of the new partnership.

Justin Reich, an associate professor of digital media at MIT and host of the podcast , said industry-sponsored professional development is, at its core, a “customer acquisition” campaign. Since ISTE+ASCD is historically both a membership-driven teacher organization and an industry trade association, he asked, “How can it be an honest broker to those two constituencies, while also launching an enormous initiative that privileges the products of one particular vendor?”

Google’s past educator certification programs, he said, “focused more on tool use and adoption than on learning,” with no substantive evidence that improved student outcomes followed.

Phillips said its research is ongoing, but noted that its app is allowing students to self-pace lessons. “Where they struggle, they can dive deeper and learn more and get more up-to-date,” he said. Among several unpublished findings, Phillips said, is one that found students spend more time on topics they’re struggling with and end up learning these topics more deeply. 

Culatta admitted that Google would of course like to see its products in the hands of teachers. But he said he and his colleagues “want to make sure that if there are products going to schools — and they already are — that they’re being used in ways that are really impactful.”

He added, “If it was going to just be, ‘Here’s how to use Gemini,’ Google actually doesn’t need us. We are coming in because Google is looking for somebody who can say, ‘What are really the best practices for learning with AI, not necessarily learning about AI?’”

Google’s Phillips said teachers and students “can choose other products in the market and so forth, but this program does come with using our products so that we can help teachers really get started, get going.” 

He noted a “super-generous free tier” to make the tools widely accessible, and the training to use it. “But schools, districts, teachers themselves have choice, and I think that’s perfectly fine, but we want to play a role with not just providing tools, giving people access, but actually helping them apply it and use it” to jumpstart “safe, appropriate use of AI.”

MIT’s Reich said his deeper concern is what he said is the near-total absence of evidence underlying AI professional development, either to teach educators how to use AI in their classrooms or simply to teach them how AI and large language models work.

“Literally no one on the planet understands how [AI] works,” he said. “The best computer scientists in the world cannot explain why LLMs generate plausible sounding text in a convincing theoretical framework.”

Reich recounted asking engineers at a Google DeepMind event in November whether they knew how to train junior engineers to use AI tools effectively in their work. “Every single person I talked to said, ‘No,’” he said. “If Google doesn’t know how to effectively use AI to write code, what is this business about teaching people AI literacy? We just don’t know.”

Benjamin Riley, a well-known AI skeptic who founded the think tank , was more blunt, casting the Google partnership as part of an ongoing process making ISTE+ASCD a “shill” for Big Tech.

“I admit I’m fascinated to see the major Big Tech companies competing so vigorously to control ‘the education market,’” Riley said. “OpenAI is giving away their premium model to teachers (until they won’t), and now Google is doing whatever this is.”

In the past, Riley has questioned whether offering teachers and students skills such as “AI literacy” and “AI readiness” are effective, even as many others warn that they’ll be essential.

“I guess I’d credit their clairvoyance a tad more if ISTE+ASCD had not claimed, as recently as just a few years ago, that ‘the future’ would also demand that everyone . Oops!”

Riley, who also founded the cognitive science advocacy and research group , predicted that much of the training will end up wasting teachers’ time, Google’s money and ISTE+ASCD’s relevance. 

“Human beings have evolved to learn from each other in the context of our relationships. This is the superpower of our species, and the kids who’ve grown up in the past 20 years are increasingly disgusted by what tech has done to them personally, and society more broadly. They are not happy about the world we’ve given them, and their voices are growing ever louder.”

Culatta, for his part, said AI “is not going away. Does learning happen with people connected with each other? Sure. It’s not the only way learning happens, but it’s a very important way. And we actually think AI can help make those human-to-human learning experiences much better.”

The Trump administration is authorizing the Department of Education to remove nonprofits from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program if deemed to have “substantial illegal purpose.” This change puts the entire public service ecosystem at risk. At a moment when America desperately needs more teachers, nurses, social workers and legal aid attorneys, we cannot afford to strip away one of the strongest incentives for talented, service-minded people to choose these careers.

Under the new rule, organizations could lose PSLF eligibility based on a vaguely defined “preponderance of evidence” that their work conflicts with administration priorities. Entire institutions could be banned if one department is accused of crossing an undefined line. That means workers who’ve made years of qualifying payments could see their progress erased with no opportunity to respond and no right of appeal.

This is a direct threat to the stability of the public service workforce that holds our communities together.

Consider Equal Justice Works Fellow Cecilia Ballinger, who serves families in rural Alabama. In a region where hospitals and schools are closing and where even basic needs such as transportation or internet access are hard to come by, Cecilia helps children with disabilities secure vital services. Her advocacy extends far beyond individual cases; she is empowering entire communities to push for change. Without PSLF, advocates like Cecilia will be in short supply as fewer students will take on the financial burden of pursuing public service careers entirely.

Public service workers already face financial obstacles that keep too many Americans from pursuing these career paths. For instance, a starting public interest attorney around $69,000 annually — about one-third of what their counterparts at a large private firm can make — while likely carrying six-figure student loan debt. Teachers, nurses, social workers and other public servants face similar choices between lucrative careers and mission-driven ones. These gaps are even starker in rural and underserved communities, where salaries are lowest but the needs are greatest.

PSLF is a critical bridge, ensuring people who want to serve are not priced out of higher education opportunities. Without it, communities risk losing the very professionals they rely on most.

PSLF also establishes a sustainable workforce model. Because workers must make 120 qualifying monthly payments over a decade of service, while employed in government or eligible nonprofits, the program encourages professionals to stay long enough to master complex skills and meaningful community relationships. 

After those 120 payments are received, the remaining balance is forgiven, and those years of consistent service pays dividends. Students thrive under experienced teachers; patients are healthier under consistent care from nurses; and families benefit from social workers and legal advocates who understand their challenges deeply.

The fallout of these loan forgiveness rule changes would be devastating. Underserved communities would feel the brunt of it, with justice deserts widening, health care access shrinking and classrooms left without experienced teachers. Students of color and low-income students who already disproportionate debt loads would face additional barriers to pursuing public service. And clients would lose advocates who reflect their experiences and fight on their behalf.

As if these dire consequences were not enough to make policymakers seriously reconsider hobbling PSLF, there is also a question of whether the department has overstepped. Congress created the program to ensure Americans who dedicate a decade of their lives to public service can do so without being crushed by debt. The Department of Education to rewrite that promise.

As of right now, the rule changes are set to take effect in July 2026 — which means we still have time to change course. Weakening PSLF would push countless professionals out of fields that sustain our democracy and safeguard our future. Policymakers must protect this vital program — not just for the workers who depend on it, but for every community in America that relies on teachers to educate our children, nurses to care for our sick, and lawyers and social workers to protect our most vulnerable.

When public service becomes financially impossible for people to serve their communities, we all lose.

But theory is not always reality. In the case of teachers, research the best way to get better is to actually practice teaching, especially with and mentors, not to sit in a classroom to earn an advanced degree. 

Unfortunately, a flawed theory of teacher development has been baked into a range of state- and district-level policies that encourage or even require teachers to get ever-higher levels of external training. And, instead of working to better understand how to help teachers improve on the job, policymakers continue to rely on credentials to do that work. 

That starts with state control of who gets into the profession, with some states demanding that teachers earn master’s degrees to get or stay in. In California, for example, educators can’t remain in the classroom beyond an initial five-year grace period unless they earn a master’s or become certified. 

Once prospective teachers are licensed by their respective states, most districts use educators’ academic credentials to decide how much money they will earn. Salary schedules typically offer higher pay to teachers with more academic credits, on the theory that extra training should make educators better. 

And, to help teachers pay for all those additional courses, many states, districts and even the federal government have stepped in. 

 As a result, more teachers have master’s degrees than ever before, even though the profession today has than it did in the 1980s and 1990s. As of 2020-21, of all public school teachers had a master’s degree or higher. That makes teachers overall than biochemists, zoologists, mathematicians and statisticians. 

But suggests that relying so heavily on teacher credentialing is misguided. Other than a few potential in high school math and science, teachers with master’s degrees are no better than those without them. A from the Institute of Education Sciences found there was “no statistically significant relationship between student test scores and the content of the teacher’s training, including the number of required hours of math pedagogy, reading/language arts pedagogy or fieldwork.” 

But teachers with a master’s are no worse, in general, than those without, either. So what’s the harm in pushing teachers to pursue more and more higher education credits? 

The most damage is done to teachers themselves. Despite all the government subsidies, the Learning Policy Institute found that 60% of teachers have to to pay for those advanced degrees. Among those who took out loans and completed a master’s in 2020, the average balance owed was $38,230.

In other words, teachers are taking out large loans to earn academic credentials that won’t help them do their jobs better. That’s not a good trade. 

The individual harm to prospective teachers should be enough for policymakers to pay attention. But paying for credentials also costs a lot of money, and those precious resources could be put to better use. According to from the National Council on Teacher Quality, 15 states require districts to offer additional pay for master’s degrees. Those states — Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia — tend to be concentrated in the Bible Belt or upper Midwest. 

But the practice is widespread. NCTQ found that 135 of 148 large districts offered higher pay for master’s degrees. The average premium in 2025 for beginning teachers with a master’s was $3,581 a year. For teachers with 25 years of experience, it ran to $9,315. This adds up to millions of dollars that districts are investing to reward teachers with higher degrees. 

Seattle, for example, pays beginning teachers with a master’s degree almost $13,000 more than those with just a bachelor’s. In Miami, teachers with 10 years of experience make $20,446 more if they have a master’s degree. In Montgomery County, Maryland, a teacher with 25 years of experience makes almost $40,000 more with a master’s. 

As these examples suggest, master’s degrees do pay off handsomely for some individuals. But that’s not the norm for most teachers. Last year, an analysis for the found that master’s degrees in education have low to negative returns on investment, in contrast to master’s degrees in science, engineering and nursing, which offered much greater returns. 

There are better alternatives. States have been ramping up that don’t require much of a front-end investment on the parts of teacher candidates. And a Texas program shows that states can pay teachers more without making the higher salary contingent on a master’s degree. Team-based staffing models demonstrate how schools can reward effectiveness rather than resumes.

But in most parts of the country, state and district policies continue to rely on teacher credentials. That harms educators, who take on debt and never earn much of a return on their investment. And it’s a poor use of taxpayer resources, which go toward a credentialing system that ultimately doesn’t help teachers get better at working with students. 

North Carolina is one of several states that have passed legislation in recent years to align classroom reading instruction with the research on how children learn to read. But ensuring all students have access to research-backed instruction is a marathon, not a sprint, said education leaders and researchers from across the country on

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Though implementation of the state’s reading legislation has been ongoing since 2021, more resources and comprehensive support are needed to ensure teaching practice and reading proficiency are improved, webinar panelists said.

“The goal should be to transition from the science of reading into the science of teaching reading,” said Paola Pilonieta, professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was part of a team that studied North Carolina’s implementation of its

That legislation mandates instruction to be aligned with “the science of reading,” the research that says learning to read involves “the acquisition of language (phonology, syntax, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics), and skills of phonemic awareness, accurate and efficient work identification (fluency), spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension.”

The legislature allocated more than $114 million to train pre-K to fifth grade teachers and other educators in the science of reading through a professional development tool called the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (). More than 44,000 teachers had as of June 2024.

Third graders saw a two-point drop, , in reading proficiency from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 school year on literacy assessments. It was the first decline in this measure since LETRS training began. First graders’ results on formative assessments held steady at 70% proficiency and second graders saw a small increase, from 65% to 66%.

“LETRS was the first step in transforming teacher practice and improving student outcomes,” Pilonieta said. “To continue to make growth in reading, teachers need targeted ongoing support in the form of coaching, for example, to ensure effective implementation of evidence-based literacy instruction.”

Teachers’ feelings on the training

Pilonieta was part of a team at UNC-Charlotte and the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) at UNC-Chapel Hill that studied and districts’ of that training. The team also studied teachers’ knowledge of research-backed literacy practices and in small-group settings after the training.

They asked about these experiences through a survey completed by 4,035 teachers across the state from spring 2023 to winter 2024, and 51 hour-long focus groups with 113 participants.

Requiring training on top of an already stressful job can be a heavy lift, Pilonieta said. LETRS training looked different across districts, the research team found. Some teachers received stipends to complete the training or were compensated with time off, and some were not. Some had opportunities to collaborate with fellow educators during the training; some did not.

“These differences in support influenced whether teachers felt supported during the training, overwhelmed, or ignored,” Pilonieta said.

Teachers did perceive the content of the LETRS training to be helpful in some ways and had concerns in others, according to survey respondents.

Teachers holding various roles found the content valuable in learning about how the brain works, phonics, and comprehension.

They cited issues, however, with the training’s applicability to varied roles, limited differentiation based on teachers’ background knowledge and experience, redundancy, and a general limited amount of time to engage with the training’s content.

Varied support from administrators, coaches

When asking teachers about how implementation worked at their schools, the researchers found that support from administrators and instructional coaches varied widely.

Teachers reported that classroom visits from administrators with a focus on science of reading occurred infrequently. The main support administrators provided, according to the research, was planning time.

“Many teachers felt that higher levels of support from coaches would be valuable to help them implement these reading practices,” Pilonieta said.

Teachers did report shifts in their teaching practice after the training and felt those tweaks had positive outcomes on students.

The team found other conditions impacted teachers’ implementation: schools’ use of curriculum that aligned to the concepts covered in the training, access to materials and resources, and having sufficient planning time.

Some improvement in knowledge and practice

Teachers performed well on assessments after completing the training, but had lower scores on a survey given later by the research team. Pilonieta said this suggests an issue with knowledge retention.

Teachers scored between 95% to 98% across in the LETRS post-training assessment. But in the research team’s survey, scores ranged from 48% to 78%.

Teachers with a reading license scored higher on all knowledge areas addressed in LETRS than teachers who did not.

When the team analyzed teachers’ recorded small-group reading lessons, 73% were considered high-quality. They found consistent use of explicit instruction, which is a key component of the science of reading, as well as evidence-backed strategies related to phonemic awareness and phonics. They found limited implementation of practices on vocabulary and comprehension.

Among the low-quality lessons, more than half were for students reading below grade level. Some “problematic practices” persisted in 17% of analyzed lessons.

What’s next?

The research team formed several recommendations on how to improve reading instruction and reading proficiency.

They said ongoing professional development through education preparation programs and teacher leaders can help teachers translate knowledge to instructional change. Funding is also needed for instructional coaches to help teachers make that jump.

Guides differentiated by grade levels would help different teachers with different needs when it comes to implementing evidence-backed strategies. And the state should incentivize teachers to pursue specialized credentials in reading instruction, the researchers said.

Moving forward, the legislation might need more clarity on mechanisms for sustaining the implementation of the science of reading. The research team suggests a structured evaluation framework that tracks implementation, student impact, and resource distribution to inform the state’s future literacy initiatives.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

These are among key findings of a new into ways to address the continuing turnover and shortage of special education and ESL teachers that has existed for more than three decades. 

The analysis showed that mentorship, teacher and principal preparation standards, tests of reading instruction knowledge, pay and professional development are key to retaining and recruiting these educators.

Students with disabilities and English learners face some of the most persistent academic challenges, partly because of a lack of access to high-quality teachers, said NCTQ President Heather Peske.

“Despite their potential, many of these students are not meeting even really basic thresholds in reading and math, and this is not for any fault of the students themselves,” she said. “It’s really because they don’t have access to the kinds of qualified and effective teachers that they need.”

The report recommends improved state policies to address attrition in these areas:

Teacher mentorship

The analysis found that half of states don’t require prospective educators to complete their student teaching under the supervision of an educator who is certified in the same subject area they are training to work in. Most are in the western United States, including states like Wyoming, Utah, Montana, Idaho and Nevada. 

Having a mentor certified in the same field allows the college students to see what teaching special ed will actually be like and increases their chances of staying in the subject area once they finish their degree, according to the report. The analysis highlighted a study of more than 250 people who completed special education teacher preparation in Massachusetts, which found that those with a supervisor licensed in special education were 12% less likely to leave the workforce.

Teacher preparation standards

Clear state standards for teacher preparation programs ensure that aspiring educators get the skills needed to serve students with disabilities, the report said. Ten states don’t have explicit special education standards for teacher colleges, while 16 lack defined English learner standards.

The analysis highlights Texas, which created for ESL and bilingual education in 2019. These include understanding the foundations of language acquisition and adapting instruction to meet student needs.

Principal preparation standards

Less than half of states require principal preparation programs to address special education in coursework, while only 13 do the same for English learners. Without an understanding of effective ways to serve students with disabilities or English learners, principals are less prepared to improve outcomes for them and retain the teachers who serve them, the report said. 

Research has that principals are a key factor in creating an inclusive environment for special education students. One said that many new school administrators “find themselves suddenly thrust into situations in which they must be the final arbiter on matters related to strange-sounding issues such as IEPs [individual education programs], 504 [disability discrimination] decisions, due-process hearings and IDEA [Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] compliance.”

In Iowa, teacher colleges are to provide evidence that candidates are equipped to address the needs of English learners or students with disabilities, the report said. 

Reading instruction

The analysis found that 17 states require special education teacher candidates to demonstrate their knowledge of literacy instruction using a test the NCTQ deems effective. In 2023, the nonprofit reported that 29 states and the District of Columbia use weak reading instruction tests that aspiring elementary educators must pass to obtain a license. NCTQ studied 25 tests that states use and identified 15 as weak — with only four considered acceptable and six considered strong.

Just five states — California, Idaho, New Mexico, Louisiana and Maryland — require English learner teacher candidates to pass acceptable tests, the report said.

“Wisconsin, for example, uses a strong or acceptable reading licensure test, but they don’t presently require special education teachers to take that test and pass it,” Peske said. “We would say that this is an example of low-hanging fruit when it comes to policymaking.”

The NCTQ reported that 70% of fourth graders with disabilities and 67% who are English learners scored below the basic level in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

English learners are also at an increased risk of being identified for special education because of literacy-related struggles, the report said.

“With so many states right now focused on reading and implementing relatively new reading laws, it was surprising to us to find that states are also not requiring their teachers, especially of students with disabilities, and their English learner teachers to take and pass an acceptable reading licensure test,” Peske said.

Teacher pay

The report said that paying teachers in critical shortage areas more than those in general education can improve retention and recruitment in hard-to-staff areas. But has found that the additional compensation must be at least 7.5% of a teacher’s base salary — about $5,000 — to make a difference.

Only 18 states offer higher salaries or bonuses for special education educators, while eight states do so for English learner teachers.

An annual state-funded $10,000 incentive in Hawaii improved special education teacher shortages. The bonuses, which , reduced by 35% the number of teaching positions that were vacant or filled by an unlicensed teacher.

“Interestingly, it did little to improve retention among current special educators,” the report said. “Instead, the reduction in vacancies was driven almost entirely by general-education teachers — who were presumably dual-certified — transitioning into special education roles.”

The nonprofit said the policy was also successful because of its simplicity. All Hawaii special education teachers were automatically eligible, and there was no application process. 

Professional development

High-quality professional learning can improve retention for special education and English learner teachers, the report said. Currently, 40 states provide professional development for both fields. Oregon, Hawaii, Iowa, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia are the only states that don’t offer professional learning for either position.

The report highlights Rhode Island, which recently adopted guidelines that require professional learning specifically for teachers of multilingual learners.

Peske said each of the above policy areas is equally important for lawmakers to consider. “If a state really wants to build a strong teacher workforce for students with disabilities and English learners, we would advise them to use these fixed [policy] levers together,” she said.

At Teach For America, we have spent the past five years learning what it takes to make tutoring work at scale through our Ignite Fellowship. We have reached over 40 communities, partnered with hundreds of schools and trained more than 5,500 virtual tutors. In the past school year, more than 2,000 college fellows or tutors delivered nearly 200,000 hours of customized learning.

The academic results are compelling: Test scores for middle school math students grew at up to 2.5 times the expected rate, and elementary readers grew up to three times faster than average. But the full story goes beyond scores. Tutoring, if designed with care, can advance student learning, support current teachers and inspire and prepare the next generation of educators. Here’s what we’ve learned:

Lesson 1: Training and Support Must Be Non-Negotiable

Too many tutoring initiatives assume goodwill and enthusiasm are enough. They are not. Without structured preparation, tutors risk becoming an inconsistent add-on rather than a transformative force. Ignite builds training into the model itself. Experienced site leaders at each partner school provide curriculum-aligned onboarding and ongoing coaching. This investment matters. Students report not just better understanding of content, but deeper confidence in their ability to learn. Schools see tutoring as part of their instructional strategy, not a Band-aid.

If policymakers want tutoring to stick, they need to fund programs that take support seriously.

Lesson 2: Technology Should Expand Relationships, Not Replace Them

Ed tech is often pitched as a shortcut to efficiency. But high-dosage, virtual tutoring is not a shortcut. It is relational and strategic. Teach For America Ignite uses technology to make those relationships possible at scale, not to substitute for them. Virtual platforms connect fellows to students and teachers across 43 communities, including rural areas where schools struggle to recruit talent.

At Alliance Marine Innovation & Technology in Los Angeles, eighth graders who were three grade levels behind in math saw a 77-point jump in state assessment scores after a year of TFA Ignite tutoring. The technology enabled access, but human relationships drove the breakthrough. As one student put it: “My Ignite fellow could understand me like no other.”

The lesson? It is possible for students and educators, particularly when both are members of generations who grew up surrounded by rapidly changing technology, to use tech as a tool to build important human relationships that accelerate learning. 

Lesson 3: Tutoring Is a Teacher Pipeline Strategy, Whether We Treat It That Way or Not

Perhaps the most underreported story about tutoring is what it means for the future of teaching. A recent provides the first causal evidence that tutoring can spark interest in teaching careers. Using Teach For America’s tutoring and teacher training programs, the research finds that working as tutor for Ignite nearly triples the likelihood of applying to TFA’s teacher program, with the largest effects among men, people of color, and students who didn’t major in education. That is a breakthrough in a sector facing constant shortages and a workforce that doesn’t reflect the students it serves.

TFA Ignite is living proof of this. Since the program launched, 550 fellows have gone on to join Teach For America’s teaching corps. This year alone, 280 new teachers entered classrooms because they were inspired by the impact they had as tutors. For Destiny Edens, a North Carolina A&T undergrad, tutoring became the bridge to a calling she had not considered before. She began tutoring second graders in literacy and discovered a passion that has now led her to join the TFA corps as a middle school science teacher in Philadelphia.

Education leaders talk endlessly about how to attract this generation to teaching as if the pipeline is broken. Tutoring offers one way to strengthen it, by giving future teachers direct experience, mentorship and proof that they belong in the classroom.

If educators keep treating tutoring as an emergency response, we will miss its long-term potential. Tutoring is not just a path to accelerate learning, it is a path to accelerate leadership. It advances growth for students and jump-starts careers for educators. If we’re all serious about helping students thrive and building the next generation of educators then tutoring must be part of the future of schooling.

Everyday teachers and school counselors are seeing students of all ages grapple with the stress and uncertainty caused by their migration or immigrant experience. How could we reassure them that they belong when the leaders of our country are saying otherwise?

Amid the federal climate of cruelty, billions in possible budget cuts for K-12 education, and threats of mass deportation, we can find some answers to these daily questions close to home. As educators from the City University of New York – Initiative on Immigration and Education (CUNY-IIE) we have created for aspiring and in-service educators in our state. 

These ad-hoc solutions will certainly help when the school year resumes. But they are not enough. With the federal government poised to cancel funding for programs that include support for English learners, it will be up to the states to step in to provide programming and access for all their students. 

Here in New York, we are calling on the state legislature in Albany to enact two bills in the upcoming session that will codify the support for our immigrant students and better prepare educators to meet this moment. 

Currently, educator preparation programs in New York State do not require content on immigration policy and law and their intersection with education. Thus, many educators feel unprepared to teach and support immigrant-origin students effectively. This must change.

Last session, Democratic State Sen. Robert Jackson introduced , with its counterpart bill, A8033, introduced by Democratic Assembly member Gabriella Romero. Both of these bills required colleges to include content on immigration policy and immigrant integration in all of their education programs. Educators would also be instructed on multilingual ways to educate students with immigrant origins.

The second bill, and A8034, introduced by the same lawmakers, required continuing education for teachers and administrators  related to trauma-informed practices to support immigrant students. This legislation aimed to ensure that teachers are regularly updated on best practices to work with students who may be bringing trauma inflicted by immigration into the classroom. 

Although these bills did not pass committee consideration in this recent legislative session, their passage in the upcoming session would ensure that our teachers, administrators, and school counselors are better equipped to serve immigrant students. If these measures are enacted, New York would become one of the first states to mandate immigration as a topic for educators, setting a standard for education programs nationwide. 

In turn, this would signal to other states, particularly those with large immigrant populations, that it’s essential to enact similar measures to ensure educators are fully equipped to teach immigrant-origin students. 

The teaching of immigration and the immigrant experience impacts us all, as the literacies of citizenship are part of the very core of our Constitution, and the mapping of our country’s history. Teaching about U.S. immigration and the immigrant experience is about sustaining and amplifying our democracy, and it is particularly imperative in spaces — in and outside of the classroom — where immigrant voices may not be at the center.

While we wait for New York state lawmakers to do what’s right – and necessary – CUNY-IIE will continue to offer resources to better prepare teachers in preK through 12^th grade. A bilingual third-grade teacher in Washington Heights authored the CUNY-IIE professional development module titled “.” The module can be used by schools across the state so that educators can learn to recognize and respond when immigrant students may have experienced trauma.  

On the higher education level, CUNY-IIE has also produced a guide for professors who prepare teachers. In the fall, our team will release this multimodal immigration-focused resource that higher education faculty can consider for their coursework, regardless of their educational subfield.  

Our program also brought together 10 education faculty members from across the CUNY and SUNY systems. They redesigned their course syllabi to ensure immigration is included, because almost all educators work with immigrant students. The faculty members also developed an immigrant-focused assignment. One instructor is planning to have students research the history of a new or longstanding immigrant group in their region.

This is, of course, all triage. We’re responding as best we can to the daily onslaught of deportations, immigration restrictions, and purposefully cruel measures of this second Trump administration. Because immigrants continue to be a central part of New York state communities, the education of children who were born here to immigrant parents or who recently settled here must be a priority. 

We have already started this work because we see the urgent need. Now it’s time for lawmakers to create systemic changes for our education system to ensure that teachers are prepared and immigrant students are not an afterthought.  

More than 400,000 K-12 educators across the country will get free training in AI through a $23 million partnership between a major teachers union and leading tech companies that is designed to close gaps in the use of technology and provide a national model for AI-integrated curriculum.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The new National Academy for AI Instruction will be based in the downtown Manhattan headquarters of the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, and provide workshops, online courses, and hands-on training sessions. This hub-based model of teacher training was inspired by work of unions like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters that have created similar training centers with industry partners, according to AFT President Randi Weingarten.

“Teachers are facing huge challenges, which include navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely,” Weingarten said at a press conference Tuesday announcing the initiative. “The question was whether we would be chasing it or whether we would be trying to harness it.”

The initiative involves the AFT, UFT, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic.

The Trump administration . More than 50 companies to provide grants, education materials, and technology to invest in AI education.

In the wake of and , Weingarten sees this partnership with private tech companies as a crucial investment in teacher preparation.

“We are actually ensuring that kids have, that teachers have, what they need to deal with the economy of today and tomorrow,” Weingarten said.

The academy will be based in a city where the school system , claiming it would interfere with the development of critical thinking skills. A few months later, then-New York City schools Chancellor David Banks , pledging to help schools smartly incorporate the technology. He said New York City schools would embrace the potential of AI to drive individualized learning. But concrete plans have been limited.

The AFT, meanwhile, has tried to position itself as a leader in the field. Last year, the union and funded pilot programs around the country.

Vincent Plato, New York City Public Schools K-8 educator and UFT Teacher Center director, said the advent of AI reminds him of when teachers first started using word processors.

“We are watching educators transform the way people use technology for work in real time, but with AI it’s on another unbelievable level because it’s just so much more powerful,” he said in a press release announcing the new partnership. “It can be a thought partner when they’re working by themselves, whether that’s late-night lesson planning, looking at student data or filing any types of reports — a tool that’s going to be transformative for teachers and students alike.”

Teachers who frequently use AI tools report saving 5.9 hours a week, according to . These tools are most likely to be used to support instructional planning, such as creating worksheets or modifying material to meet students’ needs. Half of the teachers surveyed stated that they believe AI will reduce teacher workloads.

“Teachers are not only gaining back valuable time, they are also reporting that AI is helping to strengthen the quality of their work,” Stephanie Marken, senior partner for U.S. research at Gallup, said in a press release. “However, a clear gap in AI adoption remains. Schools need to provide the tools, training, and support to make effective AI use possible for every teacher.”

While nearly half of school districts surveyed by the research corporation RAND have reported training teachers in utilizing AI-powered tools by fall 2024, . District leaders across the nation report a scarcity of external experts and resources to provide quality AI training to teachers.

OpenAI, a founding partner of the National Academy for AI Instruction, will contribute $10 million over the next five years. The tech company will provide educators and course developers with technical support to integrate AI into classrooms as well as software applications to build custom, classroom-specific tools.

Tech companies would benefit from this partnership by “co-creating” and improving their products based on feedback and insights from educators, said Gerry Petrella, Microsoft general manager, U.S. public policy, who hopes the initiative will align the needs of educators with the work of developers.

In a sense, the teachers are training AI products just as much as they are being trained, according to Kathleen Day, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. Day emphasized that through this partnership, AI companies would gain access to constant input from educators so they could continually strengthen their models and products.

“Who’s training who?” Day said. “They’re basically saying, we’ll show you how this technology works, and you tell us how you would use it. When you tell us how you would use it, that is a wealth of information.”

Many educators and policymakers are also concerned that introducing AI into the classroom could endanger . Racial bias in grading could also be reinforced by AI programs, according to research by The Learning Agency.

Additionally, Trevor Griffey, a lecturer in labor studies at the University of California Los Angeles, that tech firms could use these deals to market AI tools to students and expand their customer base.

This initiative to expand AI access and training for educators was likened to New Deal efforts in the 1930s to expand equal access to electricity by Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer. By working with teachers and expanding AI training, Lehane hopes the initiative will “democratize” access to AI.

“There’s no better place to do that work than in the classroom,” he said at the Tuesday press conference.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

About are unfilled or occupied by someone who is not fully certified. The numbers are starker in Texas, where were unlicensed. This isn’t just a staffing issue; it’s an educational emergency that demands a fundamental shift in how America regards teaching as a profession.

Unlike other career paths, such as medicine, law or engineering, teaching has never been fully professionalized. It is possible for an individual to walk into a classroom with minimal training and be called a teacher. 

True professionalization of teaching would require significant changes to the system, which features a hodgepodge of quick certification programs and temporary credentials across different states. Instead, every teacher should be required to complete comprehensive preparation that includes professional practice with expert feedback. This preparation period would be both rigorous and standardized — similar to medical residencies or legal clerkships — ensuring that all new teachers enter classrooms with proven skills to go along with their good intentions.

Professional teachers should also engage in continuous learning throughout their careers, which means regularly updating their skills and knowledge as new research emerges about effective educational methods. Schools should also offer clearer pathways for career advancement, making it easier for excellent teachers to take on leadership roles or mentor newcomers.

Outstanding classroom teaching requires sophisticated leadership and communication skills that take years to develop. The relative lack of ongoing training and career development for teachers once they’ve entered the classroom has created a vicious cycle where underprepared educators struggle in classrooms and leave the profession quickly. This creates more vacancies to be filled by people who also haven’t been sufficiently trained. 

Texas’ , signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 4 and taking effect in the fall, attempts to break this cycle by setting specific limits on how many uncertified teachers districts can employ. Starting in the 2026-27 school year, no more than 20% of a district’s teachers would be allowed to work without proper certification in core subjects. That percentage would drop each year until it reached just 5% by 2029-30. The law is a serious step toward treating teaching like the skilled profession it is.

It was critically important that the bill be passed and signed, because the consequences of the current system are devastating for students. 

In Texas, having an unprepared teacher is equivalent to missing over one-third of the school year: research shows that Texas students taught by new, uncertified teachers . Meanwhile, students taught by teachers who recently completed ’s rigorous preparation program . This is equivalent to gaining more than half a school year’s worth of learning in both subjects.

States facing similar shortages of qualified teachers in their classrooms should pay attention to Texas’ experiment and consider their own approaches to professionalizing teaching. The stakes are too high to continue with quick fixes and emergency measures.

Transforming teaching into a true profession would require a coordinated effort from multiple stakeholders. State governments must set and enforce rigorous certification standards while funding comprehensive preparation programs. School districts need to create supportive working environments that treat teachers as valuable professionals rather than interchangeable workers. Universities must redesign teacher preparation to emphasize practical skills and classroom experience. 

And the profession itself must embrace higher standards and accountability. Students deserve teachers who have been thoroughly prepared for the complex and important work of delivering a great education. 

In working with some 115 schools around the country, we’ve seen that PLCs are effective only if they foster a culture of continuous improvement in which educators learn together as a team. As they work through multiple cycles of improvement, they build collective confidence in the belief that they, as a group, are having a positive impact on student learning. 

This process starts with taking a strengths-based approach that focuses on what students know and can do, and how to use those strengths for further development. If a PLC devolves into just another department meeting, its potential to create meaningful change is lost. Rather than focusing on questions such as “What are we going to do about these kids who aren’t paying attention?” a strengths-based PLC might begin by asking, “How are we learning together as a team to engage students?”  

To move the conversation from the abstract to the specific, effective PLCs include one or more — teachers or coaches who have completed training in how to maintain the group’s focus on learning together. By emphasizing the team’s strengths as well as its members’ shared responsibility for student success, activators cultivate a supportive environment that makes teachers feel that they are part of something important, effective and bigger than themselves.

When teams first come together, they tend to set relatively easily attainable goals for themselves, so one of the activator’s roles is to encourage the PLC to establish appropriately challenging aims for the group. The activator monitors how the team works, always with an eye toward getting the most efficient use of the team. As members develop procedures and norms together, they build trust in one another and in the group as a whole, which leads them to set increasingly challenging goals for themselves.

In our work, we’ve seen some PLCs get off to a strong start but become less energized as the year goes along. Teachers, like students, are more engaged when they’re working on something they’re interested in, so the specific teaching challenge that the group addresses can make an enormous difference, as can the length of time spent focusing on it. At in San Diego, where we serve as teacher leaders, our PLCs are teams of six teachers who work in nine-week cycles. During the first cycle of the year, every group focuses on one topic that the entire school has prioritized, such as multilingual learners. To shift from collaboration to innovation, every group meets weekly for the first eight weeks. During the ninth week, all the groups come together to share what they’ve learned. For the second cycle, teachers can propose an area they’re interested in learning more about, and peers who share that interest are free to join a group that’s exploring an issue they care about. 

For teams to maintain their momentum throughout each cycle, teachers need to see and share direct evidence of improvement in their classrooms. Educators in successful PLCs build their agendas by bringing student data to meetings. In our school, we provide matrices for teachers to use to assess their collective learning and impact on students. These resources support them in answering two fundamental questions: “What was the impact that your work had on students?” and “Was the effort worth the results you got?”

A truly effective PLC includes the entire school, not only the six teachers sitting around a table at a meeting every Wednesday afternoon. Those six people may have a strong collective efficacy and develop some innovative practices, but without a forum for them to share what they’re learning, they can’t spread that innovation. The school leaders’ role is to create regular opportunities for teachers to learn from one another, as they do in the ninth week of our PLC cycles. For teachers, knowing that they will be presenting what they’ve learned to their colleagues fosters a sense of accountability and motivation to stay engaged — as do the occasions when they learn something they can use in their own classroom.  

This collaborative learning empowers educators to take risks. A thoughtfully managed PLC provides a framework in which they can gather evidence that some aspect of their teaching has to change and show proof that the change is having the intended effect. When that innovation results in improved learning, the whole school deserves to celebrate what they, as a professional learning community, have learned together.

“I had nothing, no resources,” Defreese said. “I built the curriculum from scratch.” 

Though Defreese was the lead teacher in her 11th- and 12th-grade English classes — designing and delivering lessons, grading student work and offering feedback — she was not operating alone. Technically, she was still an apprentice. Her first year in Beech Grove was part of a partnership with local Marian University, a residency program where she’d agreed to be the “teacher of record” at the school while still receiving training and taking courses to earn her master’s degree in teaching. 

During her first year, Defreese had both a mentor teacher at the high school plus professors at Marian providing her with ongoing coaching and training.

Marian professors said the design of the program, which began in 2019, was intended to increase the skill set of new teachers by exposing them to the research on learning, but also to get teachers “on their feet” and into classrooms sooner. “We have a teacher shortage,” said Karen Wright, director of residencies and clinical experiences at Klipsch Educators College at Marian. The one-year residency, she said, “gives an opportunity for us to truly partner with our community as well as fully train our candidates.”

It covers the $21,000 tuition for a new teacher’s master’s degree, plus provides a living stipend that ranges from $18,000 to $39,000, depending on teacher qualifications.

Local schools and the university see the arrangement as a win/win: understaffed schools get qualified teachers into classrooms quickly, and new teachers get ongoing coaching and support to hone their skills.

Marian University is one of a growing number of programs overhauling how teachers get trained, moving away from short, uneven practical experiences in classrooms to something more closely resembling a medical residency. Residents do more of the day-to-day work of a licensed teacher but in a more junior position, under the supervision of more experienced teachers. 

Apprentice teachers take education courses at night and on weekends while spending their days working directly with students, through tutoring and academic intervention as well as full-time teaching. And unlike traditional programs, apprentice teachers often get paid for their time.

Though the number of residency, apprenticeship and mentorship programs is hard to quantify, experts say the model is not just in university programs, but in non-traditional, alternative certification and “” programs as well. 

Program leaders say longer residencies are happening in part due to the profession’s rising demands and changes in the field. Some residency programs focus on specific targets, like equipping teachers with the research— such as on the science of reading —  to understand how learning works; others look to create a more diverse workforce or address chronic teacher shortages. 

The apprenticeship model has promise, said Suzanne Donovan, executive director of the incubated at the National Research Council. Programs like SERP — the Strategic Education Research Partnership — are looking to add a research element to new teacher residency programs, making early teaching look much more like young doctors training in a research hospital.

“I’m convinced it’s the thing that could make education a system that continuously improves in the way that,” she said. 

New teachers now outnumber any other group

improving student teaching is one of the most efficient ways to strengthen student achievement and teacher retention overall. Over the last 30 years, novice and first-year teachers have grown to make up the of the workforce, researchers say, outnumbering teachers who’ve worked for five, 10 or any other number of years or more.

According to a 2017 analysis, about 7% of all teachers, or 245,000 out of 3.5 million, are either first-year or novice teachers. In 1987, by contrast, those just entering the field made up 3% of the teacher workforce. 

Since new teachers tend to be less effective than experienced ones, and leave in higher numbers, especially the that work in high-poverty schools, the student teaching experience becomes critical to success. Teachers in training who have positive student teaching experiences with effective, experienced mentor teachers to teach. 

But according to a 2023 report from EdResearch for Action, many state regulations come up short, offering bare minimum requirements ranging in quality. Only 27 states require at least 10 weeks of student teaching under a mentor teacher in the building; even fewer, the report says, mandate a student teacher work full-time during those weeks. Few programs set criteria for what student teaching should include. Mentor teachers often receive , and if they are paid at all, receive an average $200 to $250 stipend. 

 “The frequency and quality of support provided to teacher candidates by mentor teachers and field instructors vary significantly and are often inadequate,” researchers wrote.

“People are not paying enough attention to this issue,” Dan Goldhaber, director of the at the American Institutes for Research, told The 74. “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to making student teaching better.” 

Studies have shown, for example, that a for novice teachers reduced teacher attrition within the first few years. 

�ҴDZ���󲹲����’s links mentor teacher quality to how effective new teachers are once they get in front of students. While only about 5% of working teachers volunteer to be mentors, student teachers who do get highly effective mentor teachers perform substantially better once they’re in classrooms. 

“If you work with a very effective, two-standard-deviations-above-average mentor teacher, you end up looking almost like a teacher who has two years of teaching experience instead of a novice,” Goldhaber said.

But several obstacles stand in the way of higher quality training for novices, said Matthew Kraft, an education economist at Brown University. Teacher compensation continues to be a factor, and districts and universities can’t pay for long training periods like in medicine. No such thing exists for educators. 

“It’s alluring to characterize teaching as medicine, but we’re not going to have anything close to that until we have something that even approaches medical pay,” Kraft said. “Those things go together. You train many, many years to become a doctor, not only because it’s necessary, but because there are returns to that multi-year investment in your education.” 

Getting into the nitty-gritty of teaching 

Some new residency and apprenticeship programs are paying more attention to breaking down the steps of teaching. They’re spending more time on research and practical tools in the way new doctors practice the “how” while learning the “why” of treating patients. 

When professors overhauled the student teaching program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in 2020, school of education dean Douglas Cost said they needed better measures to know whether their clinical teacher training was doing a good job preparing teachers for the classroom. Teacher licensure was the bare minimum.

“Accreditation is an important goal,” Cost said. “But it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of teaching. Understanding the science behind learning has given us a real lever to begin thinking about what makes a good teacher.”  

Cost and colleagues adopted , an evidence-based educator curriculum focused on improving student learning. It gives new teachers specific techniques like connecting students’ prior knowledge to what they’re learning, or how to make sure all students are thinking about the material. 

“Our professors gave us a template for designing our lesson plans, based on prior knowledge, gaps in knowledge, how to get students up to speed who might have gaps,” said Sarah Cardoza, a former resident and social studies teacher at Wasilla High School in Wasilla, Alaska. “What do you want students to know, and how do you know if they know it? It takes that simple concept and gives you a roadmap for it.” 

Cardoza said her first year as a resident teacher, her class had eight students with mandated special education support, three English language learners and several Ukrainian refugees  — a lot for a new teacher to handle. 

“I appreciated having a plan for how you are going to handle those situations when everybody’s needs are so different,” she said.

New teachers often don’t have the experience to know how to execute these techniques in a classroom full of students, said Zach Groshell, an independent coach and teacher trainer in Seattle, Washington. Giving them step-by-step specifics — like how to gather students on the rug in an organized way or how to capture attention with a simple arm gesture — might seem basic, but can make the overwhelming first days of teaching much more manageable. 

“The generalities of ‘build relationships,’ ‘have a positive classroom climate,’ ‘plan your lessons effectively,’—they’re just too nebulous and vague for new teachers to act on them,” Groshell said. “You need to get more specific.” 

A  ‘gradual release’ to full teaching responsibility 

Traditional student teaching offers new teachers two stark realities: practice lessons in controlled environments, and then full responsibility in a classroom of students. But residency models emphasize “gradual release” to full independence, especially in hard-to-staff areas like special education. 

“My first year as a teacher, I cried almost every day,” said Geri Guerrero-Summers, a special education teacher at Mariner High School in Everett, Washington. New teachers went from “you’re going to observe” to “jump right in,” she said. “Student teaching was unpaid. … It’s really a rough type of process in becoming a teacher.”

Guerrero-Summers now works as a mentor teacher with the Washington Education Association’s , the first teachers’ union to step into training and licensing teachers. Originally funded with federal pandemic relief money, the union residency launched in 2023 and has recently obtained status as a registered apprenticeship program with the U.S. Department of Labor, which comes with an investment of $3.4 million. 

“We strive to make sure our residents are classroom ready, no matter where they’re placed,” said Jim Meadows, dean and director of educator career pathways center at WEA.

Future educators begin with 18 weeks working as a paid assistant in special education classrooms, often called a paraeducator, followed by seven weeks of classes, finishing with 36 weeks of clinical rounds, slowly taking over responsibilities as full-time teachers. 

Apprentices spend time in a variety of special education settings and age groups. The residency was created to address a specific challenge, an of special education teachers in Washington state. A found that 1.5% of special ed teachers were unqualified to teach, nearly three times the state average for other types of teachers. in the state make up more than all other vacancies—including STEM teachers and English language teachers—combined. 

Gradual release has been critical for learning the detailed skills of a special educator, said current resident Beck Williams. For example, writing, reading and interpreting Individualized Education Programs, which lay out a student’s classroom supports and accommodations and their learning goals, are covered in coursework but look much different when working with families and young people.   

“In special education teacher training, there’s not enough practice with IEPs and parent interaction,” said Williams’ mentor teacher, Angela Salee. Special education teachers often have to play several roles in IEP meetings, advocating for the student’s best interest while explaining accommodations to other teachers, administrators and families. 

In Mississippi, where have a teacher shortage, alternative licensure programs like the Mississippi Teacher Corps offer two-year residencies and accompanying master’s degrees to get more teachers up to speed as quickly as possible. 

Residents jump right into classrooms and start teaching summer school. They plan lessons and figure out classroom management, all under mentors and supervisors, right away. 

“Part of the difficulty of teaching is that you can’t fully prepare someone for the classroom,” said corps director Joseph Sweeney. “So part of it is that experience they need in the classroom. You have to get them on their feet to show them what it’s like.”

But if classroom instruction isn’t improving, we shouldn’t be surprised that test scores are stagnant or dropping. 

How teachers are taught to teach—along with what curriculum materials they use with students and how they use those materials—are the most critical factors for improving student learning. Many state education leaders are doing their part to ensure school districts adopt high-quality curriculum materials and help teachers use them well. The colleges and universities that prepare teachers to enter the profession largely have not. 

Back in 2017, the Council of Chief State School Officers formed a of interested state departments of education – called the High Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network – to put good curriculum into the hands of teachers.

The network is getting its job done: According to and that of the states themselves, more teachers are using curriculum materials for English language arts and mathematics that are aligned with rigorous state standards. More schools are also providing professional development to teachers that is grounded in their curriculum materials. 

Louisiana – a network state that is also for state curriculum reform efforts – was the only state to see gains in fourth-grade reading scores on NAEP since 2017. Louisiana and Mississippi, another network member, were two of only four states that have seen gains in fourth-grade mathematics since 2017.

But one area where we consistently have seen little change is in college and university teacher preparation programs. In surveys every year since 2019, RAND has asked teachers across the nation which approach their teacher preparation program emphasized: 

(a) “how to develop my own lessons and unit plans,” or

(b) “how to skillfully use and modify curricula provided to me.” 

Year over year, only about 10% of U.S. teachers indicate that their program emphasized helping them use curriculum materials. A little less than half say the emphasis was on how to develop their own lessons and unit plans. The balance say their program emphasized both or neither.

These percentages hold regardless of the teacher’s state, whether the teacher is in an elementary or high school; in an urban or rural school; in an English language arts/reading, math or science classroom; or was trained 20 years ago versus in the past five years. 

All teacher preparation programs should show teachers-in-training how to skillfully use the curricula they are given. This is a prerequisite to ensuring that most children meet state academic standards. Think about it: If every teacher uses a school-provided curriculum that is aligned with their state standards, the chances of meeting those standards is better than if teachers are reinventing the wheel by developing their own lessons.

Other data beyond our surveys underscore this point: Teacher preparation is slow to incorporate what we know about good classroom instruction. 

For example, the and confirmed that elementary schoolers need instruction in five key components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Yet, in NCTQ’s 2023 nationwide of the elementary reading course syllabi of nearly 700 teacher preparation programs, they found that only 25% of those programs adequately addressed those five core components of reading instruction. Another 25% didn’t adequately address any of those components. 

The idea that teachers should write their own curriculum is outdated and ill-serving; it’s a holdover from the era before the advent of academic standards in the U.S. and growing knowledge about what makes a good curriculum material. These days, according to a recent RAND American Instructional Resources Survey, encourage teachers to develop their own curriculum. Instead, most principals expect teachers to use their required curriculum materials.

At their best, professional curricula are developed by experts in subject matter and pedagogy, are written to build students’ knowledge over time, and have been endorsed by third party organizations such as that deem the material aligned with state academic standards. 

Adopting a prepared curriculum needn’t turn teachers into robots; it takes considerable skill and subject-matter knowledge to use any materials thoughtfully and productively. Teacher prep programs should give teachers ample, hands-on training on how to use their grade-level curriculum materials and the expertise to make just-in-time adjustments that help students catch up when they are struggling to master those materials. 

States and school districts know that curriculum matters. Many have revamped their policies accordingly. It’s time for teacher preparation programs to do the same.

The new year brought changes to requirements for New Jersey teachers, including a new law eliminating a basic skills test that lawmakers overwhelmingly advanced in both houses.

Gov. Phil Murphy signed the  eliminating the Praxis basic skills test for people seeking teaching certifications in June, and it went into effect Jan. 1. Lawmakers said the legislation aimed to address a l and remove duplicative, costly tests that create barriers to pursuing a career in education.

At the time, it faced little controversy. Just three Republicans voted against it.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

But recent comments from tech mogul Elon Musk have shined a spotlight on the new law. Musk, who owns social media platform X, this week  of an article about the change and questioned if teachers in New Jersey need to “know how to read.” The post has been viewed nearly 20 million times.

Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia (R-Sussex), who supported the bill, said the change to teacher certification requirements has been taken entirely out of context and does not lower the bar for would-be teachers.

“My largest concern was it was an extra expense for teachers just starting out, and for taking a test, actually, that is much easier than the current tests you already have to take,” said Fantasia, who obtained her teaching certificate in 2008 and now works as an administrator at a charter school.

She explained that for teachers to receive certification in New Jersey, they must first graduate from an accredited teacher preparation program with at least a 3.0 grade point average, complete months of student teaching, and pass several exams, depending on the grade level and subject matter being taught.

Those tests can easily amount to hundreds of dollars, and by the time a potential teacher takes the Praxis exam, they’ve already proved their capabilities, she said.

States across the country have removed similar exams in an effort to ease shortages plaguing schools, according to the . Oklahoma enacted a law in 2022 removing the requirement for a general education exam, and Arizona implemented a law allowing educators to begin teaching before graduating from college.

Fantasia did not fault Musk for his confusion about the law and placed some blame on the media — fringe and mainstream — for irresponsible headlines and missing context. The knee-jerk reaction from the public is to be “completely expected,” she said.

And while she noted she’s the loudest Republican voice supporting the legislation, she slammed Democrats for remaining “radio silent” on a bill they supported. The bill sponsors did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

“The teachers of New Jersey are made to look across this country like the village idiots because the Democrat Party who sponsored this bill and the governor who signed it don’t feel it necessary to defend them when the headlines are extraordinarily misleading,” Fantasia said.

Murphy’s office defended the law in a statement to the New Jersey Monitor.

“The Praxis Core requirement was redundant to New Jersey’s other requirements for teacher certification that remain in place, and its removal was a recommendation of our public school staff shortage task force, a group of experts who know more about New Jersey’s education needs than Elon Musk,” said Natalie Hamilton, a Murphy spokeswoman. “The bipartisan legislation that the Governor signed passed by overwhelming margins and we are disappointed by out-of-state agitators that want more red tape.”

Steven Baker, spokesman for teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, said “right-wing blog sites trying to push this story don’t understand the law and definitely do not understand New Jersey’s very rigorous teacher certification standards.”

He stressed that the additional requirement to pass the Praxis following years of other coursework did nothing to elevate the standards and “amounted to a corporate money grab” from college students.

Sen. Joe Pennacchio (R-Morris), who voted against the bill, said he thinks it has indeed lowered standards.

“I think these are the days of dumbing down, and somebody’s got to put their foot down and say, ‘Absolutely not,’” he said. “We should expect more from these kids, not less, and we certainly should expect no less from the teachers that are teaching them.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: info@newjerseymonitor.com.

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.

Diversifying the science, technology, engineering and math fields has long been a top priority of and . of the National Science Foundation, the biggest funder of university-led research and development in the U.S.

Only a handful of teacher training programs are moving quickly enough to equip new K-12 teachers with a grasp of AI fundamentals — and fewer still are helping future teachers grapple with larger issues of ethics and what students need to know to thrive in an economy dominated by the technology.

The , from the , a think tank at Arizona State University, tapped leaders at more than 500 U.S. education schools, asking how their faculty and preservice teachers are learning about AI. Through surveys and interviews, researchers found that just one in four institutions now incorporates training on innovative teaching methods that use AI. Most lack policies on using AI tools, suggesting that they probably won’t be ready to teach future educators about the intricacies of the field anytime soon.

What’s more, few teachers and college faculty say they feel confident using AI themselves, even as it reshapes education worldwide.

“All of this is so new, and it’s been happening so fast,” said Steven Weiner, a CRPE senior research analyst. A lot of coverage of AI in education, he said, “has rightly focused on what are schools and districts doing to support teachers … to get on board with AI?”

While teachers’ workplaces bear a measure of responsibility, he said, college programs should help out K-12 schools and districts. “I just think they should not have to have the whole burden of preparing teachers” to understand and work with AI.

Here are four key takeaways from the findings:

1. Most teachers college faculty are neither ready nor able to embrace AI.

Most teaching faculty are not interested in AI — and some actively avoid it. Just 10% of faculty members surveyed say they feel confident using AI, with many seeing it as a threat. Whether due to confusion or fear, they’re resistant to it, researchers found, limiting its possible integration into curricula and hampering educators’ ability to prepare preservice teachers for “AI-influenced classrooms.” 

Because so few are confident with AI, most don’t use it in their instruction or effectively integrate it into their instructional practices, researchers found.

A few say faculty members remain concerned that AI “might steal their personal data, their intellectual property, or even their jobs.” One education school leader said a lot of faculty are simply “paranoid,” believing that generative AI and other technologies will soon “replace them.” 

Even when faculty members are curious about AI, most are still in the early phases of learning about it. In an interview, Weiner said, “It’s up to people, I think, to learn about [AI] on their own. And if they’re the kind of people who are interested in technology, they might be into it. But the lack of any sort of systemic push for engaging with it has led to some folks just not quite understanding it.” 

2. Programs that integrate AI use it mostly to help teachers prevent plagiarism.

While nearly 59% of programs provide some AI-related instruction to preservice teachers, it mostly takes the form of coursework intended to help them prevent plagiarism. 

Preservice teachers, Weiner said, “are largely being taught about AI in light of the fear of them going into classrooms where students are going to cheat.” But training on plagiarism-detection software, he said, is “super problematic” because recent research has questioned its effectiveness.

Only about 25% of programs surveyed are providing training on ways AI can support new kinds of teaching. Fewer than half of respondents said content on AI bias is offered, either in other courses or on its own.

One education school dean said a lot of faculty resistance is due to “not understanding or being able to comprehend” exactly what AI is. “I think some may look at it as just a cheating tool.”

3. A few teacher training programs show promise in integrating AI into teacher prep. 

While most of the leaders surveyed couldn’t offer promising news about integrating AI into educator preparation, a few did. These institutions haven’t exactly transformed their training programs, but early efforts show promise, researchers found. 

Two programs were noteworthy, they said, and worth highlighting: and Arizona State University’s , which hosts CRPE.

Northern Iowa is developing curricula for an “AI for Educators” graduate certificate. And at ASU, administrators have engaged faculty through a set of voluntary committees and outreach efforts. Actually, CRPE co-leads one of these initiatives, a cross-departmental working group focused on exploring the challenges and opportunities of AI in higher education. ASU is also ChatGPT creator Open AI to bring the capabilities of an of the chatbot into higher education.

The report also notes that the Washington Education Association is incorporating AI into its special education teacher residency program, providing training on AI tools that help track student progress. The union is part of the Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning , a network of higher education institutions pushing to leverage technology in their programs.

4. Teachers colleges need systemic, strategic investments in AI education.

Researchers concluded that the responsibility to integrate more content on AI can’t rest solely on the shoulders of “individual, self-motivated educators.” A fuller commitment to teaching about AI, they said, requires “a concerted effort and strategic action from all those involved in shaping the future of education.” To that end, schools of education should adjust their budgets to offer grants, teaching awards and other forms of recognition to “AI early adopter” faculty.

Education school deans and administrators should rely on AI experts from within their institutions, CRPE said, and look more closely at innovative work happening at other colleges and universities. They should also work with outside groups such as the to spread best practices and new ideas. 

They also urge state policymakers to set clear expectations for teachers’ AI proficiency by revising teaching certification standards to include new competencies.

And funders, they said, should invest in preservice programs that are “already ahead of the curve” on AI, allowing these programs to grow and offer their expertise more broadly. In the meantime, they should also consider alternative training programs such as residencies and micro-credentialing that can help preservice teachers develop AI competencies and specializations.

Alex Kotran, founder of , a nonprofit that offers a free AI literacy curriculum, said the survey is “a great data point that illustrates one of my big anxieties” about the future of the workforce: “How do we point students towards the jobs of the future? I think we need to talk more bluntly about the fact that four-year universities are going to be one of the weakest links in this whole strategy, in this whole process.”

He noted that teachers, as a group, are very unlikely to be replaced by AI in the near future — on par with “plumbers and therapists” in terms of the threat that technology plays in their future careers. So it makes sense that they’d be less than focused on it.

But he said the bigger challenge to new teachers will be to imagine how AI is going to force teacher pedagogy to evolve: “The work of being a teacher and the goals that you set for your kids is going to change, given what we understand about AI and the fact that it’s going to be so disruptive to skills and the workforce.”


The new survey, said CRPE’s Weiner, is just a first look, but he said teachers colleges appear “systemically not suited to shift as quickly as they would need — and not just to embrace AI, but to really get teachers prepared for both the challenges with AI and also the opportunities with it: to help teachers be really well prepared.”

Even if they do begin to take AI more seriously, he said, the technology is bound to change rapidly. “So what we’re really seeing is a moment where these institutions need to figure out how to become way more adaptive, way quicker.”

When Texas lawmakers passed legislation in 2015 that created a pathway for public schools to hire more teachers without formal classroom training, one goal was to make the profession more attractive to individuals from different paths who could offer hands-on learning to students.

Some school administrators made it clear they intended to place these so-called uncertified teachers in positions where they could leverage their fields of expertise and keep them away from core areas like math, reading and special education, which would remain under the care of their most seasoned educators.

That was before the COVID-19 pandemic, which left many longtime educators worried about their health and feeling underappreciated, underresourced and burnt out. They walked out of the classroom in droves, accelerating teacher shortages at a time when students were returning to in-person learning and schools needed them the most.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Now some school districts are hiring uncertified teachers — some to provide instruction in core subjects — at an extraordinary pace.

In almost a decade since the law was passed, the number of uncertified teachers in the state’s public schools ballooned by 29%, according to a Texas Tribune analysis of state data. Uncertified teachers, many of whom are located in rural school districts, accounted for roughly 38% of newly hired instructors last year.

Some academic experts are dubbing the state’s growing reliance on uncertified teachers a crisis. A highlighted that kids lose three to four months of learning when they have a new teacher who is both uncertified and lacks experience working in a public school.

But with fewer people entering the profession through traditional pipelines, school districts are trying to give uncertified instructors the training and support they need to succeed in the classroom. School officials and education advocates are encouraging them to participate in teacher certification programs — and they hope lawmakers will set aside funds next year to help cover the costs.

The ask comes at a time when schools are already starved for a cash infusion. Many districts entered the school year having to spend more money than they are earning, largely because of the state’s rising cost of living and a half-decade of no increases to their base-level funding. Public school leaders remain upset that last year’s legislative sessions ended with no significant base funding increases despite the state having .

“When you have a state where their coffers are full and local school districts where their coffers are empty, or in the process of being empty, you’re going to have to have some state help to make sure that we’re funding these types of programs,” said Mark Henry, who served as Cy-Fair ISD’s superintendent for more than a decade until his retirement last year.

A tool to deal with teacher shortages

Prior to the passage of the 2015 law, known as , teachers would normally enter the profession through traditional college or university routes or via alternative certification programs, which are geared toward people who have a bachelor’s degree in a different field and need classroom training. Both pathways have seen in recent years.

The District of Innovation law was meant to give traditional public schools some of the flexibility that charter schools had long enjoyed, granting them exemptions from mandates on class sizes, school start dates and certification requirements. Before, uncertified educators in Texas could teach core classes only after obtaining and approved by the state education agency on a case-by-case basis.

With a District of Innovation , districts can now create a comprehensive educational program that identifies provisions under Texas law that make it difficult for them to reach their goals and offers ways to address those challenges. The plan must receive public input and gain local school board approval before districts can proceed with any exemptions.

Many districts have sought an exemption from the state’s teacher certification requirements to help combat their teacher shortages.

Texas has no statewide definition for , but one major indicator that points to a significant need for more teachers is the state’s teacher attrition rate, which tracks the percentage of educators who leave the field in any given year.

Since the start of the pandemic, the attrition rate has from roughly 9% to 12%, according to the Texas Education Agency. A historic 13.4% of teachers left the profession between fall 2021 and fall 2022.

The state commissioned a task force two years ago to look into the teacher shortage and make policy recommendations for legislators to address the problem, though not much of the group’s advice has been adopted into state law. The panel of educators and school administrators recommended that the state commit to respecting teachers’ time, improving training and increasing salaries. Texas ranks for average teacher pay, $8,828 less than the national average, according to the National Education Association.

The Texas House of Representatives’ Public Education Committee held a hearing in August to ask questions and gather information on the causes for the rising number of uncertified teachers and the effect on student outcomes. Lawmakers also discussed what many public education advocates see as a growing lack of respect for teachers, which the advocates say is fueling both the teacher shortage and the rise of uncertified teachers.

In recent years, Texas Republican leaders like Gov. and Lt. Gov. have routinely criticized public schools and instructors, accusing them of teaching children “woke” lessons on America’s history of systemic racism and keeping in their libraries reading materials that make inappropriate references to gender and sexuality. All the while, Abbott has been pushing for a program that would allow parents to use tax dollars to pay for their children’s private education, which public education advocates fear will plummet enrollment in public schools and ultimately result in less funding. School districts receive funding based on their average daily attendance.

“No one wants to go into something where they feel like they’re just going to be beat down day to day,” said David Vroonland, former superintendent of Mesquite ISD who now works as executive director of the LEARN. “And I think the political commentary out there right now is doing a lot of harm to bringing more people into the space. Obviously, the other is we need to pay better.”

Getting new teachers ready for the classroom

Educators who testified at last month’s legislative hearing also called on lawmakers to direct more financial resources to help teaching candidates go through high-quality preparation programs.

One such program in Brazosport ISD helped Amanda Garza McIntyre transition from being an administrative assistant at a construction company to becoming an eighth grade science teacher at Freeport Intermediate School.

McIntyre, who has a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, knew what Brazosport ISD does for children: the district helped her first-grade daughter learn how to read at grade level over the course of a semester. But starting a new career while raising her five kids seemed overwhelming, and she needed help.

The Brazosport ISD program allows aspiring teachers to earn a bachelor’s degree, teacher certification or both — at no cost. In return, program participants have to work in the district for at least three years. The program includes a paid residency that pairs candidates with a teacher mentor who works with them in a classroom for a full school year. Brazosport ISD pays for the program using funds from its own budget, grants and local partnerships.

Thanks to the hands-on training and guidance she received over the last year, which included working with some of the same children in her classroom now, McIntyre started as a full-time teacher earlier this month.

“I don’t know that I would have fully committed to going into teaching without knowing that I had that training and that preparedness to walk into a classroom and feel confident,” McIntyre said.

The task force formed to study the root causes of Texas’ teacher shortage included in its recommendations that the state fund certification programs like the one Brazosport ISD is running.

Sam Cofer, chief operating officer of Jubilee Academies, a San Antonio-based charter school district, said it makes sense for the Legislature to help fund programs like Brazosport ISD’s but argued that certification is not the only way to increase the number of capable teachers in Texas classrooms.

Jubilee Academies filled many of its teacher vacancies in the last decade with substitute instructors. The district knew it would be difficult to compete for more experienced teachers with traditional districts that could offer more competitive salaries, Cofer said, so it expanded its pool of applicants to include people with a bachelor’s degree and work experience in other fields but without teaching certification.

Since 2015, Jubilee Academies’ percentage of uncertified teachers has risen from roughly 17% to 66%. During the 2023-24 school year, 60% of new hires at all Texas charter schools were people without formal classroom training.

Cofer said the district relies on instructional coaches to provide their new hires with the support they need to adapt to their new profession. He also said the district encourages certification but doesn’t require it.

Teacher certification does prepare new hires “better in a lot of ways to be a teacher in a public school,” Cofer said. “But I also can’t be dismissive of the skill sets that may come along with people that don’t go through those programs that could also end up being effective teachers with the right amount of coaching and mentoring and guidance.”

Public education advocates are hoping the state and school districts invest in quality teacher preparation, regardless of what avenue they take to get there.

“It’s not serving students to put people in those positions that don’t have the experience they need to be successful,” said Priscilla Aquino-Garza, a former teacher who works as senior director of programs for Educate Texas, an organization focused on increasing academic achievement and educational equity for underserved children.

Shalona McCray, Longview ISD’s assistant superintendent of Human Resources and Community Relations, is grateful for the flexibility the District of Innovation law has granted schools. She said it allowed them to recruit from a more diverse talent pool as veteran educators left the profession in droves at the height of the pandemic. Since the law was passed, the district’s percentage of uncertified hires has skyrocketed from roughly 3% to 67%.

Longview ISD is committed to working with teachers to get them licensed through an alternative certification program or the district’s apprenticeship program, preferably within three years, McCray said. The District of Innovation law is a stepping stone, she said, to getting more people who care about education into the profession.

“I’m gonna have to rely on District of Innovation to go out and find some teachers who are not certified but qualified,” McCray said. “They have a bachelor’s degree, they have a passion, and then we’ll do everything we can to help them.”

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Disclosure: Educate Texas and Texas Tech University have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

Like so many before me, I decided to go into education because of a teacher — in my case, Hillary Hollandsworth, my high school English teacher, who inspired me to wrestle with what sort of positive change I’d like to see in the world and empowered me to dream of what a better world could look like.

I was accepted to the Uncommon Schools Summer Teaching Fellowship program and assigned to teach six high school students world history during summer school in Newark. I always knew I wanted to teach at a school that educates students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, so I was eager to learn more about the curriculum, instruction and classroom management. After seven weeks in the program, I’m fortunate to say that I wasn’t let down.

I had tutored students before, but this was my first experience teaching in a classroom. I was overwhelmed during the first few days. My ice-breakers to get to know the students were a failure, and I was concerned they would think I was too dull and become disengaged. I tried to battle my fear by remembering the practical strategies for effective teaching I had learned in my training, such as how to prepare lessons and respond to students’ mistakes in the moment.

I asked my supervising teacher for guidance. She recommended allowing more time for students to talk with each other in pairs about complex questions that related to my lesson’s content. After making time for more peer-to-peer conversations, as well as having whole-class discussions, I found I was starting to reach the students. I experienced further success after putting in the time to build rapport with students through small acts, like greeting them in the hallway, as well as having lively discussions that gave them a chance to voice their own ideas around the academic content. These discussions were integral to improving student engagement, and it was at those times that I grew the most as a teacher. 

One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is that for whole-class discussions to be productive, students must have a depth of knowledge related to the topic beforehand and have precise guidelines on how to communicate during the discussion. If these prerequisites are met, the insights that emerge from students are surprisingly thoughtful and makes one reassess what young people are capable of understanding.

When students can see the relevance of what they’re learning and connect it to issues they deeply care about, they become passionate and thoughtful. The greatest example I experienced was during a discussion about nonviolent resistance movements and Mahatma Gandhi’s tactics. During the discussion on peaceful resistance, students connected Gandhi’s approach to the current forms of civil resistance that African Americans engage in around police brutality. One student said, “I used to think that violence had to be used. Now I feel like there really is another way.” Another student, reflecting on why Gandhi’s organizing was effective, brought to the attention of the class that “Black people used to be part of a strong community, now Black people are more going solo.” This led to a conversation about the importance of building strong communities and the opportunity to create solidarity among members of different races struggling for justice.

What amazed me even more was that this insightful discussion occurred while I was doing the least amount of speaking, just throwing out a question or occasionally reiterating what students had said. The program had taught me how to enable students to have highly productive discussions, by ensuring they have enough background knowledge and facilitating these conversations to ensure no student is dominating or left out. I gradually grew in my confidence and comfort level in leading the classroom and adding my own flaIr to what I taught. 

I believe that teaching history is part of raising civically minded students. One example was our closing discussion on the Industrial Revolution. After lessons about the horrors of child labor and the abuse of women workers during that period, I asked my students during a discussion about what this history teaches in terms of developing and using technology for social good. To my astonishment, one announced to the class that the inequalities found in the Industrial Revolution occurred because of the lack of democratic input around developing and governing technology. One contemporary parallel they came up with is current issues around cellphones.

It was in moments like this that I felt most connected to my goals around civic education. Over time, as I became more experienced and received feedback from my instructional coach, I was able to help students recognize connections between the past and the present. I also grew in my ability to create a sense of community with my students and to respond to each student’s learning style. For example, some needed multiple verbal recaps of the information, while others needed extra time to read the documents we were studying.

After my training this summer, I am just as committed and proud of how much I have learned to become a better teacher. Now, I can say with pride, that I’m starting to follow in Ms. Hollandsworth’s footsteps.

Oregon teacher colleges and future and current teachers hoping to get hired at public elementary schools in the state could soon be required to demonstrate a much more robust understanding of how to teach reading and writing than is currently required.

Gov. Tina Kotek’s Early Literacy Educator Preparation Council – made up of K-12 and staff from Oregon teacher colleges, as well as literacy experts, an indigenous language expert and bipartisan state legislators – shared its last week  for overhauling literacy training for elementary teachers in the state.

Nationwide, the reading ability of kids in the U.S. has not improved in decades, due in part to the teaching of flawed reading methods. About 40% of Oregon fourth graders and one-third of Oregon eighth graders scored “below basic” on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the “nation’s report card.” That means they struggle to read and understand simple words.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The council recommends that officials at the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission – which licenses teachers in Oregon – adopt a much more comprehensive set of literacy standards than currently exists. The council also recommended the agency ensure the new standards are met in the process of approving literacy curriculum at Oregon’s 15 teacher colleges, which happens every seven years, and in the process of licensing new teachers or doing license renewals. If adopted, the changes could go into effect by the fall of 2026.

Kotek called the recommendations “a significant step forward” in a news release. She is reviewing the standards, and to be adopted, they need approval by the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission.

Raising the bar

The new standards would require that college educator preparation programs ensure their curriculum and instruction are based on the large body of cognitive and neuroscience research on how the brain learns to read and how childrens’ brains make connections among sounds, language symbols and content, often called the “science of reading.” Colleges would need to help future elementary school teachers develop a mastery of written and oral language rules, foundational reading skills such as phonics and word decoding and teach them reading instructional skills that align with standards for teaching kids with Dyslexia.

Up to 60% of kids struggle with some of the same reading challenges that kids with dyslexia struggle with, such as learning to decode written words by mapping sounds to letters and letter combinations, or phonics. Many kids benefit from instruction in the earliest grades that is similar to the more direct and systematic phonics instruction that kids with dyslexia often need.

In 2017, the state Legislature passed to ensure teacher colleges and Oregon schools teach educators about dyslexia and methods for teaching kids according to international dyslexia standards of instruction. According to Anca Matica, a Kotek spokesperson, that bill was mostly designed to teach school staff to screen for dyslexia. The council’s recommendations carry that forward by calling for incorporating dyslexia instructional reading standards into general literacy standards, she said.

Ronda Fritz, co-chair of the council and an associate professor at Eastern Oregon University’s teacher colleges, said in a news release that the new standards, if adopted, will improve student outcomes and produce better teachers.

“I believe these standards will give educator preparation programs a clear roadmap for designing courses and programs that will produce teachers with the essential knowledge and skills to create proficient readers and writers,” she said.

A reading movement

Most Oregon teacher preparation programs have received failing grades for reading instruction from the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality, which has convened panels of experts to review programs since 2013. Until September of 2021, the exam to get certified as a reading specialist in Oregon included testing teachers on a skill broadly criticized today: “Cueing” involves getting students to guess at words and use pictures. By including it in the exam, it essentially ensured Oregon teachers were taught the flawed method.

To correct these longstanding instructional gaps, Kotek established the Early Literacy Educator Preparation Council via executive order in May 2023 as part of a larger , involving a $120 million investment to improve reading instruction among Oregon teachers and reading ability among Oregon students. In May, as part of the initiative, state education officials distributed to more than 250 schools to hire more teachers, literacy experts and coaches and pay for new curriculum aligned with the science of reading.

The educator preparation council is focused on improving how teachers are trained. The recommendations would apply to people teaching kindergarten through fifth grade and to those pursuing a degree in elementary education and special education. They also would apply to teachers who earn state endorsements as a reading interventionist, to teach English to speakers of other languages and to anyone seeking an administrative license.

To help colleges make major changes in how reading instruction is taught, Kotek’s council recommended the state offer grants to help defer new or increased costs, and provide state literacy experts to go to Oregon colleges to assess and aid in updating curriculum and class instruction.

“Some or all Oregon educator preparation programs are likely to undergo significant change in order to meet the new standards,” the council members wrote in the report to Kotek.

“Why,” she asks, “are so many of America’s brightest students apparently interested in teaching but not availing themselves of the training their school has to offer?”

A decade later, Harvard Graduate School of Education lecturer Zid Mancenido continues to study these same questions. As a former high school social sciences teacher in Canberra, Australia, the educator and researcher says in some ways his work is autobiographical. When he was an undergraduate student deciding to become a teacher, he said he heard his peers say, “I’d love to be a teacher but…” He now wants to better understand this apprehension.

“Often when we talk about teacher recruitment we only talk about things like how much teachers are paid or this amorphous thing like teachers aren’t prestigious enough … All of those extrinsic motivators [do matter],”, Mancenido said, “but there’s a lot of subtle, more social drivers around those things that really need to be paid attention to.”

Mancenido first began exploring these questions as part of his doctoral research at Harvard, when he collected the stories of over 100 college seniors or recent graduates to gain a greater understanding of what differentiates people who are categorically uninterested in teaching, those who are interested in teaching but ultimately pursue another career and those who are committed to teaching. 

Recently, he spoke with The 74’s Amanda Geduld about his work and why, despite permeating defeatism about how to improve the education system, he ultimately remains hopeful. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: Can you share an overview of your “How High Achievers Learn That They Should Not Become Teachers,” and some key findings?

Zid Mancenido: This paper tries to get a little deeper into the questions of “What makes someone want to become a teacher?” or “What makes someone not want to become a teacher?” Often in the news or in public media, people talk about, “Well, it’s just about pay” or “It’s about pathways,” or “It’s about, you know, schools being really messy.” There are just lots of ideas about what it could be for why people want to or don’t want to become teachers …

What I found is that high achievers aren’t born knowing that they want to become teachers or they’re not born knowing that teaching isn’t an appropriate career path for them. They learn it and they relearn it through a number of signals that are built into their interactions with family and friends. They learn it through others’ expectations of them and their careers. They learn it through observing the career trajectories of their role models and their peers. And it really emphasizes that these sort of negative conceptions of teaching that we all sort of generally know but can’t really land entirely. They’re really fostered and reinforced by all the social signals that are around us.

So if we really want more people — more academic high achievers — to become teachers, we need to work on that social discourse. We can’t just be thinking about the individual’s choice in becoming a teacher. We have to think about how everyone perceives and thinks about teaching and how that influences people’s decision making.

What are some of those signals that high achievers are receiving? 

A lot of people might think that these signals are explicit. They’re things like parents and friends responding to you when you say, “Oh I think I’m becoming a teacher,” and those parents and friends say, “No, don’t become a teacher. You shouldn’t do that. You’re too smart for that,” or something like that. And that’s something I did hear amongst my participants. Many of my participants did mention explicit signals like that.

But rather what most participants reported was that it’s much more subtle. It’s things like going to career fairs and seeing that everyone is milling around corporate, high-flying jobs — legal pathways, medical pathways — but very few people standing around the teaching pathways, the sort of social, public service career pathways. It’s in lots of people coming into college and saying they’re really interested in social-impact careers, but then all of them taking pre-med, pre-law, economics, business, all of those sorts of majors.

It’s in the really, really subtle way that as one of my participants, Amanda, mentions that when she says that she’s interested in becoming a lawyer or a diplomat or something like that, people light up and go, “That’s a really exciting career. I’m so excited for you.” But then when she says something like, “Oh, I’m interested in becoming a teacher,” they go, “Oh, that’s really nice.” And then change the subject.

Part 1: Students are exposed to messaging — both explicit and subtle — that teaching is not a desirable career. Harvard’s Zid Mancenido wants to fix that

I know this is a question that you’ve been asked before, but what made you focus specifically on high-achieving students and how do you define what a high-achieving student is?

This is a really messy and challenging thing because truthfully there’s so many ways to be a high achiever in the world … And often because of the sort of standard, conventional ideas of what makes someone a high achiever, we’re really limited and we box kids into saying, “Oh, you’re an achiever or not.”

So I recognize that it’s a really complex social environment with these sorts of identifying figures. I wanted to step back and go — who do we want in the profession? We want smart, talented, funny, committed people, passionate people who are interested in what they’re doing.

And when I looked to the literature and the recent work around what kinds of teachers lead to more academic outcomes in schools, I found there’s a bit of a mismatch there of like, well, we want these kinds of people to be teachers, but we’re not really measuring that. 

What we are measuring in the research is academic achievement. And what we do find is high academic achievement amongst intending teachers does predict future improvements in student outcomes …

Would increasing pay be effective? How necessary is the social component? And how do you see this playing out on the ground, from a policy perspective?

What my research suggests is exactly what the research really has continued to affirm over the past few decades: There’s no silver bullet to getting more academic high achievers into teaching. 

What is particularly interesting about all of the work on offering financial incentives at career entry — scholarships, loan forgiveness or alternative certification pathways — all that research generally finds those policies to be effective, but some of the research finds that it’s only effective for individuals who are already interested in teaching. So if you’re interested in teaching, but you’re on the edge of, “Do I do teaching or not?” scholarships, loan forgiveness, all of that makes you more likely to want to become a teacher.

What that’s missing, though, is that whole other pool: people who aren’t interested in teaching because they haven’t been exposed to it as a career, because they don’t have the signals around them to encourage them to even consider teaching in the first place. And that’s a much larger pool of people who we really could have a lot of leverage on if we just had more structured pathways into exploring teaching as a career, encouraging people to be thinking about teaching, supporting them socially to want to become teachers …

Part 2: Students are exposed to messaging — both explicit and subtle — that teaching is not a desirable career. Harvard’s Zid Mancenido wants to fix that

Can you talk a little bit about what an example of that might look like?

It can be as simple as school systems or colleges collaborating to identify and raise the profile of alumni who have become teachers … Some of my participants talked about wanting to make sure that their degree was worth it. And so in elevating alumni who are teaching, who are in education pathways, is one way to say, “Actually, yeah, this is something that’s worth it because it gets these sorts of outcomes.”

We could also do things like elite colleges could be providing various summer internships or term time options where they are working in schools for course credit, trying to get students to explore what it looks and sounds like when you’re in a K –12 setting …

Or it can be sort of more broad: It can be things like school systems finding ways to go beyond the sort of teacher appreciation days and actually go into a, “What does it take in order to run a school system?” days where we really build up our collective understanding, peak behind the curtain of schools and really understand what does it take in order to create a healthy flourishing system? …

What I’m hearing you say is that by introducing that to a larger body of students, you’re perhaps opening the door for more students to become interested in this career path in the first place rather than just communicating with students who are already considering it.

That’s correct. Recently I’ve talked to some of my friends who are teachers, and I asked them questions like, “When was the last time that you said to one of your high-achieving students, ‘You should become a doctor’ or ‘Have you thought about becoming a lawyer’ or ‘Have you thought about going to this elite college?’” And every single one of them says, “I say that every time. It’s so important to be supporting your kids’ aspirations.”

And I go, “When was the last time you told one of your high-achieving students that they should consider becoming a teacher?” And so few of them say yes. That’s a small switch for teachers to make. Us turning around to high-achieving students and going, “Have you ever thought about becoming a teacher? I was a teacher once and it was a really incredible career that could potentially change the game.”

Well, one thing that strikes me there is then how much of that is about teacher satisfaction? 

Right.

So, are teachers not telling students to become teachers because they are not personally satisfied with their careers?

What I found really interesting in my research was that if you had parents who were teachers, the influence could go both ways. Some participants said, “My parents were teachers, and they lived such great lives and they got to do such important stuff. And so I want to become a teacher as well.” And then you have some people whose parents were teachers who said, “I watched my parents every day. I really learned through that what teaching was and I would never want to do that.” 

Some of my research was trying to find out how much of this was just people’s partial view of teaching. If they had seen a different part of teaching would their minds have changed? While I don’t have the data to suggest one way or another, what I do have is a lot of really strong participant beliefs that what they saw and observed were really pivotal in influencing how they ended up wanting to become a teacher or not …

It’s about creating the environment that allows for parents and teachers to want to encourage students to become teachers themselves. 

For this paper, you collected the stories of over 100 college seniors or recent graduates. Was there one perspective teacher’s story that stood out to you?

… Graham was a student who had gone to an urban charter school on the West Coast, and his mother was a teacher in that school. He had asked himself all the time while he was going through high school, “Why is my education like this and other people’s education like that?” 

He was really, really committed to education and had written about it in his college admissions essay, but then went to an elite college in the Northeast. [Once he was there] all of his friends who had said that they were [also] interested in education were voting with their feet and ended up majoring in business or economics or computer science. And when they would talk about their interest in education, they would always be doing it as a volunteering opportunity or an extracurricular.

When I probed him on why he was doing that, what were the underlying assumptions, he said to me that many of his other peers felt like — given the sorts of education they had — they couldn’t do work that was more technical or “front line” [like teaching]. They really wanted things that were more broad, high level or working in policy or in the strategic area. 

He reflected on how these codes that high achievers use — “front line,” “technical versus high-level policy having more of an impact” — were language games. They were delineations of occupational prestige and status that were masked otherwise as personal preference. 

And so it was a really interesting conversation that really illuminated how there’s no malice here, there’s no talking down about teaching. Everyone thinks teaching and education are really incredible, important careers. But in terms of the choices that we make in terms of the language that we use, it’s incredibly subtle but really streams people away from wanting to become teachers.

So where is he now? Did he end up in the classroom or did he stay in management consulting?

It was years later that he ended up going into the classroom, but there was a sort of personal realization about a number of all of these different things and a return to what really mattered to him.

And that’s what was also really exciting about undertaking this — that it told me that people can have these trajectories, but these trajectories aren’t path-dependent, these things can change. And our social environments can change and the support that we get to encourage people to want to become teachers can change and get people to make that choice in the end.

All isn’t lost, basically, when it comes to encouraging more people to become teachers.

All the while, many of their most gifted educators sit patiently in their classrooms, waiting to be called on but overlooked in favor of individuals outside their school doors.

Instead of focusing on external recruitment to hire talent, districts need to look within to identify those educators who aspire to the next level and to invest in the training needed to help them get there.

Not only do these efforts signal to staff they are valued and respected, but they cultivate talent at a time of seemingly never-ending turnover.

For 20 years, I worked as an educator in New York City Public Schools, where aspiring leadership programs are deeply embedded. When I transitioned to a superintendent role in a small suburban district, my eyes were opened to the reality that most districts lack professional advancement programs to help educators thrive at each step in their careers. 

Because promoting and hiring leaders is a significant investment of time and resources, the team at Uniondale Union Free School District wanted to ensure our educators were happy, successful and around for a long time. And the only way to do that was to provide support at every step of the leadership ladder. To achieve our goal, we applied a three-point theory of action to professional development.

The first focuses on teacher assistants, who play a — particularly post-pandemic — as students need significant support with literacy, math and social-emotional learning. However, many of these experienced education professionals were frustrated over being relegated primarily to administrative tasks. That was a missed opportunity we couldn’t afford to waste.

Over the past three years, we’ve allocated a portion of our CARES Act funding toward a program called the Teacher Assistant Learning Lab that offers instructional sessions led by contracted staff development experts and in-district teacher leaders. Topics are tailored specifically to TAs and include classroom management, how to read individualized lesson plans, literacy instruction and effective use of small-group teaching.  

The program, which takes place over four Saturday sessions and a three-day summer institute, also helps provide a pathway for TAs to move into teaching. Since 2022, three TAs have become teachers in our district.

Creating an effective teacher-to-administrator route required us to deconstruct the traditional pipeline. Rather than focus our efforts solely on individuals ready to step into a new role, we put the call out for any educators who were thinking about administration, but unsure if it was the right fit. 

Our Aspiring Leader Program consists of an educational cohort made up of teachers from across the district who were nominated by their principals because of their leadership potential. The program is facilitated and run by Matthew Ritter, assistant superintendent of data, assessment and accountability, and focuses on understanding various leadership styles, improving school systems and facilitating change. Teachers are expected to meet with their principals regularly to develop a project for their school that impacts student learning or well-being. The last session of the program includes presentations of these projects to senior leadership staff.

One has already been hired as an assistant principal in September 2023, and having completed six months of preparation, walked in fully prepared for the challenges ahead.Last year, we had 12 participants in the program, and this year we have nine.

The program allows assistant superintendents and other senior leaders to locate the innovators in their district and provide teachers with a platform to advocate for and pursue their career goals.

Still, leadership can be lonely, with overwhelming demands and an expectation to never show weakness. After witnessing the stress our administrative staff has endured since the pandemic, we wanted to construct a districtwide network of support.

Our Administrator Development Series provides every new assistant principal, principal and dean of students with external professional coaching to ease the transition. What makes the model so successful is our commitment to confidentiality. Because their coaches are not employed by the district, participants are encouraged to be completely transparent when discussing their challenges and mistakes, knowing they won’t be shared with their supervisors. In turn, they receive objective and unbiased feedback to help them navigate a new path forward.

In addition to one-on-one coaching, administrators connect and support each other through monthly meetings to discuss problems of practice and a book discussion focused on leadership.

Our theory of action is that developing leaders will help our schools become centers of excellence and innovation, where all students will receive an education that prepares them for college and careers. This has worked well for two essential reasons. First, our school board members are supportive of our financial investment in professional development, knowing that the upfront expense of nurturing leaders internally is minimal compared with the cost of continual turnover. Second, as the program has evolved, we’ve relied on feedback from TAs, teachers and new administrators to identify learning gaps and tailor programming to their specific professional needs.

With all the talent embedded in our district, providing educators with an equitable opportunity to share their gifts has been incredibly beneficial. Our district’s chronic absenteeism rate has decreased by 5% in the last two years, and participation in Advanced Placement classes has increased by 14% in the last three years. We’re not only able to watch qualified professionals rise through the ranks, we’re able to maximize their skills to launch new initiatives that help strengthen our schools overall.

As the nation faces a teacher shortage that has reached an — with at least — why not tap into a talented pool of educators who could help close that gap? The Mississippi Department of Education created a to do just that, and the results are encouraging. Students assigned to teaching candidates participating in the pilot performed just as well on average as peers taught by traditionally certified teachers on state standardized tests, and even outperformed them in math.  

A few years ago, the department asked district leaders and principals how it could help them address teacher vacancies. School leaders lamented that they had outstanding paraprofessionals and other staffers who wanted to be teachers, wanted to continue to live and work in their communities and had fulfilled every prerequisite to becoming a teacher except the licensure test. If only there were a way for these educator candidates to demonstrate their subject matter knowledge and pedagogy in a performance-based manner. If only there were an alternative pathway to get them into teaching positions. 

The department responded by launching the three-year pilot in fall 2019. It was designed for school employees who had a bachelor’s degree and classroom experience as a long-term substitute, paraprofessional or emergency-licensed teacher. Nominated by their principals, 126 staff members from eight school districts participated, serving as teachers on a special, non-renewable license established specifically for the pilot. The program utilized performance-based measures to determine candidates’ readiness for licensure, including their students’ achievement and growth on standardized tests such as the Mississippi Academic Assessment Program.

The department partnered with , to conduct an external evaluation of the pilot. Laski examined how the candidates’ students performed on state standardized tests compared with students of traditionally certified teachers selected at the outset of the pilot; students of teachers in other classrooms in the same school, grade and subject; and students of teachers holding emergency licenses. The was designed so observed differences in test scores between pilot candidates and teachers in the first and second groups could be attributed to the pilot candidates themselves, not simply to differences in student assignment. The third group was included because, if not for the pilot program, most of these vacancies would be filled with emergency-certified teachers. 

When looking at average scores across all standardized test subjects, students assigned to pilot group candidates performed just as well on state standardized tests as those taught by educators in each comparison group. And, in both the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years, students assigned to pilot candidates scored roughly 0.2 standard deviations higher on the state’s standardized math tests than peers in the same grade and subject in their school. This translates to roughly six months of learning — a significant and impressive increase. Additionally, and importantly, the research found that the pilot candidates were more likely to continue teaching in their district in subsequent years than teachers in comparison groups.

In November 2023, buoyed by these results and positive stakeholder feedback, the Mississippi State Board of Education approved the department’s recommendation to officially create a . This new pathway will initially be available to candidates teaching a state-tested subject in grades 5 through 8 so the department can continue to examine student academic growth data.

As policymakers and state, district and school leaders explore ways to address teacher shortages, they should take note of Mississippi’s willingness to try something new and its methodical, phased approach. After all, the current reliance on licensure testing alone isn’t cutting it. Students — and schools — would be better served by licensure pathways based on an individual’s demonstrated ability to help students learn. The country has an enormous opportunity to tap a talented pipeline of educators who are being kept out of the classroom. What are we waiting for? 

The Louisiana Department of Education announced Thursday a new workgroup that will seek solutions to problems deemed classroom disruptions.

“One of the best ways we can value teaching professionals is by simply protecting their time to do the important work entrusted to them,” Cade Brumley, state superintendent of education, said in the news release.

The department announced the Let Teachers Teach workgroup to find solutions to certain problems that take up teachers’ time. The news release specifically listed excessive training and paperwork, scripted lessons and student discipline as some of the problems they plan to address with the workgroup.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The goal of the workgroup is to limit these disruptions so that teachers have more time to devote to classroom instruction.

The group will be made up of pre-kindergarten through high school teachers, but its members have not been chosen yet. Kylie Altier, Louisiana’s 2024 Teacher of the Year and a first-grade instructor in Baton Rouge, was named chair of the workgroup.

The workgroup was formed based on feedback Brumley received through engagement, including classroom visits and the Teacher Advisory Council, a group of 22 classroom leaders from throughout the state.

The goals of the workgroup align with recommendations from one of Gov. Jeff Landry’s transition councils. The K-12 Education Policy Council , released last month, highlighted several issues, including teacher recruitment and retention.

The report recommends legislative action to reduce time-consuming mandates and “examine unnecessary licensure burden… understanding that professional experiences can be more valuable than licensure processes in many cases.”

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: .