Strengthening the Teacher Workforce

The challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and amplified longstanding challenges in the teaching profession, and many school districts are struggling more than ever to recruit and retain effective educators, especially those from diverse backgrounds. A comprehensive approach is needed to identify research-based solutions to strengthen the educator workforce.

The approach

“An Evidence-Building Agenda for Reimagining the Teacher Workforce” will evaluate and document systemic factors that allow for new models of teaching to emerge and flourish. The project is led by Lydia Rainey and Bree Dusseault of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, or CRPE, at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. CRPE is uniquely positioned for this work through several complementary initiatives and partnerships that can help identify emerging innovations, including the Education Recovery Hub and the American School District Panel. CRPE’s Evidence Project has also been a central resource for tracking pandemic learnings and discoveries. The research may also be furthered through ASU’s Next Education Workforce initiative and ASU Digital Prep, the university's online K–12 school.

The project’s areas of focus include: 

● Tracking district responses to staffing challenges: CRPE will track districts’ responses to staffing challenges and use this work to shape an overview of current challenges in the teaching profession. 

● Mapping innovations in teacher pipelines and working conditions: CRPE will identify school districts, charter management organizations and out-of-system operators (e.g., pods and microschools) designing transformative solutions to critical challenges in the teaching profession. Results will be published in a publicly searchable database that will complement other CRPE innovation-focused databases. 

● Understanding the impacts of new models of teaching on educators: CRPE will conduct interviews with educators working in new teaching models and summarize these takeaways in a brief. CRPE will also identify opportunities for future public and private investment to support new, more student-centered models of teaching. 

● Identifying the systemic factors that abet or frustrate efforts to reinvent the teaching profession: CRPE will conduct interviews and case studies to identify the barriers (political, regulatory, financial) that keep school districts and charter management organizations from adopting and implementing new, innovative models of teaching. 

● Knowledge hub, thought leadership and sense-making: CRPE is already a go-to resource for information on school systems' responses to the pandemic. This project will build on that by aggregating CRPE's new findings on teacher workforce issues, as well as the findings of others studying the topic, to provide researchers and policymakers with a centralized source of insights.