Fundamental challenges have arisen with the traditional “one-teacher, one-classroom” model as educators face mounting pressure to support students’ wide-ranging academic, social, and emotional needs—often leading to burnout and attrition. Since 2019, Arizona State University’s (ASU) Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College has worked to rethink outdated school staffing structures through its Next Education Workforce initiative, which brings together teams of educators with distributed expertise, empowering them to work collaboratively to respond to the needs of individual students while improving teacher efficacy and student outcomes.
An Overdeck Family Foundation grantee since 2022, Next Education Workforce experienced rapid growth during its first year, expanding its reach from 33 to 269 teachers—a 715 percent increase—reaching 6,660 students. Having demonstrated promising early indicators of product-market fit from its original model, Next Education Workforce recognized it needed to do further work to understand its financial sustainability, develop a robust scale strategy, and build even more rigorous evidence for its approach.
In addition to general operating support, the Foundation provided a series of intensive capacity-building supports from 2022-24 to help the organization address these key areas.
First, the Next Education Workforce team completed a cost analysis exercise to clarify its programmatic cost and refine its pricing strategy. Then, they shifted attention toward the organization’s business model. The organization had been largely funded by state and federal grants, with approximately 10 percent earned revenue. In 2023, select team members participated in a revenue model workshop series to explore new pathways to revenue diversification with an emphasis on growing its earned revenue.
With a coherent pricing strategy and clear revenue goals, Next Education Workforce then looked to the market to identify growth opportunities. With Foundation-funded third-party support, the team conducted a market scan in 2023, which unlocked key findings that helped define target audiences, understand Next Education Workforce’s value proposition, and identify next steps to achieve scale. One year later, Next Education Workforce grew its reach by 67 percent, reaching over 800 teachers and 20,000 students nationwide. In its most recent fiscal year, Next Education Workforce grew its earned revenue by 225 percent and is currently engaged in support to systematize its program on a larger scale by implementing best practices from patterns emerging in schools.
Throughout its organizational journey, Next Education Workforce has prioritized evidence-building to understand its impact and foster relationships with school and district partners. Through partnerships with Johns Hopkins University and the Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), the organization engaged in two studies that increased its ESSA Tier from 4 to 3, and a partnership with a Strategic Data Project fellow will additionally help build internal data capacity. Based on early evidence, teachers in Next Education Workforce’s models show increased satisfaction and are more likely to stay in the teaching profession compared to non-NEW teachers. Additionally, descriptive analyses found that students served by Next Education Workforce educator teams made 1.4 more months of reading gains than peers in typical classroom settings. The organization continues to focus on building more rigorous evidence of impact. In 2024, the Foundation funded CRPE to conduct a quasi-experimental study designed to estimate the impact of Next Education Workforce on students’ academic achievement, with findings anticipated in 2026.
“Overdeck Family Foundation’s capacity-building supports have been an invaluable resource for our team as we have moved from proof of concept into building a viable business model,” said Kaycee Salmacia, Senior Director of National Networks. “They helped us develop the knowledge, skills, and mindsets we needed during this stage of our business growth.”
These complementary supports, provided over the course of three years, helped Next Education Workforce establish a strong business model showing early indicators of scale while positioning it to pursue more rigorous evidence and sustainable, strategic growth in the years ahead. “We are learning how to walk the walk ourselves and are developing enduring skillsets that will serve our teammates and our work in the long run,” Kaycee added. “Our team is so much more effective and efficient as a result.”
