Partnership expands access to innovative staffing models in California schools

The challenge

Our education system does not reliably deliver quality learning experiences for nearly enough  people, and it systematically underdelivers for students of color and for students from low-income backgrounds. This challenge is exacerbated by teachers leaving the profession while others are choosing not to join the profession. Arizona State University’s Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College has been working with schools and other partners to expand an initiative called Next Education Workforce™. The purpose of this initiative is to 1) provide all students with deeper and personalized learning by building teams of educators with distributed expertise and 2) empower educators by developing better ways to enter the profession, to specialize and advance. Outside of Arizona, this support is best offered in partnership with intermediary organizations with deep local and state-specific knowledge.

The approach

The project, Building California’s Next Education Workforce, is funded by the Silicon Schools Fund and spearheaded by Brent Maddin, executive director of the Next Education Workforce. 

Over the next two years, the funding from this grant will support approximately nine schools as they design, in partnership with MLFTC’s Next Education Workforce initiative, strategic school staffing models. The grant also provides for on-the-ground support for schools from Thrive, a California-based organization that has deep knowledge of the regional context. There are three core components to this proposal:

• Scaled professional learning and support from ASU: MLFTC will facilitate virtual cohorts, provide access to tools and resources, and offer other professional learning opportunities to facilitate system-level leaders, site-based leaders and classroom educators as they explore, plan and launch team-based staffing models.
•  Building intermediary infrastructure in California and beyond: MLFTC’s partnership with Thrive will help inform an intermediary model that will influence a larger national support strategy to enable more school systems across California and the United States to successfully implement strategic school staffing models.
• Local support and coaching: Thrive will provide both virtual and on-site personalized support to each school based on local context. Together with leaders and teachers, Thrive will support schools and school systems as they explore, plan and launch Next Education Workforce team-based staffing models.