Spotlight On Innovation: Strategic Staffing

In our “Spotlight On” interview series, we sit down with nonprofit leaders from across the education sector to dive deeper into how their organizations have unlocked innovation, built evidence, and achieved growth.

Our latest Spotlight On Innovation explores how schools and districts across the country are reimagining the traditional “one teacher, one classroom” model with strategic school staffing. To dive deeper into this concept, Jessica Fredston-Hermann, manager of the Exceptional Educators grantmaking portfolio, sat down with David Rosenberg, a partner at Education Resource Strategies (ERS), which supports school leaders to make transformative shifts in their resources, structures, and practices to improve schools for teachers and students.

Together, Jessica and David discuss the current state of the teaching profession, the benefits and challenges of implementing strategic staffing in schools, and how ERS and other organizations are working to address barriers to staffing innovation.

Research shows that teachers are the most important factor in a student’s education, but several years of pandemic recovery, staffing shortages, and students’ declining social-emotional well-being have placed greater pressure on educators, making the profession increasingly challenging. According to data released by the Pew Research Center, teachers are less satisfied with their jobs than all U.S. workers, and 11 percent said they are very likely to look for a new job for SY 2023-24.

Strategic staffing models aim to alleviate many of the pain points that students and teachers experience throughout the school year by strategically allocating personnel and resources to create more inclusive, supportive, and effective school learning environments. In this flexible, team-oriented approach, adults work collaboratively to respond to the needs of individual students, rather than relying on one teacher to meet the needs of all students in a classroom. In turn, teachers gain increased growth opportunities while extending their impact, and in some instances, leveraging technology to optimize and rethink expectations for their time.

“If we do this work well, if we build teaching to be the kind of profession we want it to be and have the impact we want on students, then teaching becomes significantly more attractive; it’s more sustainable; and it’s more consistently excellent,” said David.

There are several examples of this model already making an impact. The Next Education Workforce (NEW) program, developed by Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, builds teams of educators with distributed expertise, made up of educational leaders, professional educators, community partners, and paraeducators. Early results of an ongoing study of NEW in Mesa, AZ public schools suggest the NEW team-teaching model has the potential to boost teacher retention: Mesa teachers working in teams were nine percentage points more likely than their solo counterparts to say they planned to stay in teaching for the next five years, and were significantly more likely to recommend the teaching profession to a friend.

Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture offers a teacher-leadership model where a teacher with a strong track record of student growth becomes a “multi-classroom leader,” supporting teams of three to eight educators in designing instruction, co-teaching, coaching, and analyzing and responding to data on student learning. Two studies show that, on average, teachers who are part of multi-classroom leader teams shift their students’ learning growth from an average of the 50th percentile to the 77th percentile in reading and math.

But this type of innovation faces barriers, which include school/system leader turnover, policy restrictions, and insufficient funding at the federal, state, and local levels. To further strengthen the conditions for these models to scale, a group of more than 20 nonprofit organizations formed The Coalition to Reimagine the Teaching Role. One coalition member, Teach Plus, is dedicated to training teacher leaders across the country. The organization works to empower experienced teachers at state and federal levels to identify and uplift policies that enable staffing innovation in their states and districts. ERS, also a Coalition member, partners with district, school, and state leaders to help transform how they use funding and staff to create strategic school systems.

“We have to show people the way,” explained David. “A big part of how we do that at ERS is by actually looking at the resource requirements and the resource shifts to say: not only can you do it, but you can do it within existing resource constraints if you’re willing to make certain trade-offs and be thoughtful about all the resources you have.”

Watch the full interview to hear from David and learn more about strategic staffing.