The one-teacher, one-classroom model means we need to staff 3.5 million classrooms every day. With the U.S. facing shortages of 300,000 teachers and staff at the start of SY 2022-23, this is less sustainable—and impactful—than ever.
Next Education Workforce reimagines the teaching profession and classroom design through teaching models that bring together teams of educators with distributed expertise to deepen and personalize learning for students, while supporting educators with better opportunities to enter, specialize, and advance in the profession.
Next Education Workforce launched in 2019. Within the first year of its work, the organization was able to grow its reach from 33 to 269 teachers—a 715 percent increase—ultimately reaching 6,660 students through classrooms led by teacher teams with distributed expertise. In its second year of operation, Next Education Workforce has increased teacher reach by 97 percent and student reach by more than 1,000 percent, greatly expanding the number of schools and districts that have access to innovative staffing models at a time of unique challenges for the teaching profession.
A 2022 evaluation in partnership with Johns Hopkins University found qualitative and quantitative evidence that supports the hypothesis that team-based staffing models increase satisfaction for educators. Teachers in Next Education Workforce models were statistically significantly more satisfied with their jobs, collaborated more, and had better teacher-student interactions. For example, 75 percent of teachers in Next Education Workforce said they were somewhat or extremely satisfied with their job, compared to 66 percent of traditional classroom teachers in the same district. They also collaborated at double the frequency of traditional classroom models.
Overdeck Family Foundation’s funding has allowed Next Education Workforce to grow its reach, evaluate its impact, and improve its understanding of the cost of delivering programs, which helps position the organization to replicate and scale its model.
