May 23, 2023
States, schools, and districts around the country are coming up with new ways to grow and sustain the teacher workforce, from ensuring new teachers have teacher mentors to reevaluating how teachers are certified. The current shortage represents a significant opportunity for policymakers to adjust and reform teacher compensation systems.
This Spotlight features resources designed to support state, school, and district systems to increase teacher compensation, improve working conditions, and utilize evidence-based practices for recruiting and retaining teachers.
Increasing Compensation
WestEd launched the Teacher Compensation Initiative in November 2022 with a Washington, DC, roundtable of experts in policy, practice, and research who met to discuss education funding, teacher compensation, and teacher shortages.
The Initiative aims to provide resources for changing the systems governing how teachers are compensated. Visit the Initiative’s website to read the four-part blog series, Money Matters: Conversations About Teacher Compensation, and watch short interviews with experts on the subject.
Addressing Workplace Conditions
REL Northwest is supporting the Lower Kuskokwim School District in Alaska to improve teacher retention in the district through the Alaska Improving Teacher Retention and Recruitment in Rural Schools partnership. To ground the work, REL Northwest gathered existing research that examined the relationship between teacher working conditions and teacher retention.
From the studies, they created a downloadable fact sheet that identifies eight categories of working conditions that may influence a teacher’s decision to stay or leave:
- Engaging with Families and Communities
- School Leadership
- Managing Student Conduct
- Teacher Leadership
- School Facilities and Resources
- Instructional Practices and Support
- Use of Time
- Professional Development
Download the REL Northwest fact sheet.
Using Evidence-Based Practices
While teacher recruitment and retention issues are prevalent nationwide, REL West has been working within the West Region to understand the issues at a local level and identify ways to work with our partners to bring evidence-based resources and couple them with the local contexts of each state to identify ways to apply data use and applied research to inform strategies at the state and district levels. Through needs sensing with partners at the Utah State Board of Education (USBE), teacher retention and early career attrition were identified as issues for which the state seeks to make evidence-informed changes.
In response, REL West and USBE have launched the Utah Early Career Teacher Retention Partnership to learn more about the root causes of early career attrition across the state and to identify evidence-based strategies that districts can use to address them.
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