Research shows that teachers are the most important factor in a student’s education, and teacher quality and variability across and within schools impacts both short and long-term outcomes, including income level as an adult. But the last few years have put greater pressure on teachers, making the profession increasingly challenging and increasing teacher dissatisfaction with working conditions. In 2022, 60 percent of teachers expressed they were stressed out, and many others said they were considering leaving for the first time ever or already left the profession altogether due to stress.

Though more localized than national, staffing shortages continue to negatively affect educators and the students who are already furthest behind. At the end of 2022, 45 percent of public K-12 schools had at least one teacher vacancy. Without sufficient staff and leadership schools don’t have the capacity to meet the growing and diverse needs of kids, which leads to burnout and lack of coherence in instructional vision. School leaders can have a direct impact on teacher satisfaction by focusing on the right staffing and supports, but nearly half of all principals reported that they are also experiencing burnout.

Instructional resources are a critical in-school factor impacting student achievement. Yet, we know that, often, teachers don’t have the right supports, training, or tools to be most effective in their roles because of a lack of alignment across curricula, professional learning, and assessments. Despite research demonstrating the critical impact of high-quality materials on student success, only 36 percent of teachers report they have the curricular materials needed for effective instruction, with even fewer reporting that they have received training on effective implementation of those materials.

Flexible, team-oriented staffing models disrupt the traditional “one-teacher, one-classroom” approach, providing teachers with increased growth opportunities while extending the impact of effective teachers and in some instances, leveraging technology to rethink expectations for teachers’ time. Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture found that teachers previously performing on average at the 50th percentile produced student learning gains equivalent to teachers in the top quartile in math and nearly that in reading when placed on teams led by multi-classroom leaders with a record of high student learning growth. Next Education Workforce at Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College found that when teachers in the initiative were asked about their career plans five years from now, 62 percent indicated teaching as their plan, compared to 48 percent of teachers not on Next Education Workforce teams.

Eighty-five percent of teachers report that tech tools will play a bigger role in the current school year than they did prior to the pandemic, and almost half of teachers and 42 percent of parents support online learning for instruction at times when school cannot be open in person. Recently, blended delivery models and AI-enabled support enabled Teaching Lab to extend its reach while maintaining the quality of its research-based professional learning. From SY 2020-21 to SY 2022-23, Teaching Lab grew its reach by more than 7,000 educators nationwide, a 176 percent increase.