How States Can Attract and Sustain Teachers
Marley Arechiga in conversation with Caitlin Beatson and Kate Wright
Kate Wright:
If we can’t build an educator workforce, then we are not going to be effective in solving any of these other problems closing the achievement gap, effective instruction, all these other pieces.
Marley Arechiga:
Welcome to Leading Voices, a podcast brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. This podcast highlights WestEd’s leading voices shaping innovations and applying rigorous research in ways that help reduce opportunity gaps and build communities where all can thrive. I’m Marley Arechiga, filling in for Danny Torres.
Today’s topic, teacher working conditions. You’ve seen it in headlines, you’ve probably talked about it with your colleagues. Teachers are leaving the workforce in droves. The trend has been ongoing for years, but like many challenges in education, it was intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. So, why are teachers leaving and what are some ways state leaders can help districts retain them and attract new teachers? Today, I’m joined by Kate Wright and Caitlin Beatson to explore these questions. Kate is the director of the Region 15 Comprehensive Center at WestEd. That’s a federally funded center that provides technical assistance to state education agencies in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Utah. Caitlin is a deputy director of the Region 2 Comprehensive Center, which supports state education agencies in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island. Kate and Caitlin, it’s great to have you on the program.
Kate Wright:
Thank you, Marley. It’s good to be here.
Caitlin Beatson:
Thanks for having us.
Marley Arechiga:
Let’s start right at the heart of it. Why are teachers choosing to leave?
Caitlin Beatson:
Well, Marley, the short answer is it’s complicated. There are so many reasons teachers leave the classroom. McKinsey & Company released a report earlier this year about why K–12 teachers are quitting, and it actually indicates the top factor driving them is not surprisingly inadequate compensation, but a lot of other factors are at play too. And those include unreasonable expectations and workload and also a lack of support for their own well-being.
Kate Wright:
Yes, Caitlin, I couldn’t agree more. I think the fact that you’re highlighting at the very start the complexity is critical. There’s not one answer here. There’s not one solution. It’s complex and it’s layered. And I think on top of that, it’s impacted by local context. So, what might work in one state won’t work in all states. We know salary matters, but working conditions cannot be undervalued as an impact on educators, and working conditions get flagged consistently at the top of concerns.
According to the Learning Policy Institute, many teachers leave because they’re not adequately prepared for the job. They don’t know all the pieces that are going to come to play as soon as they walk through the door of a classroom full time. They’re not supported in their roles. And often you’ll hear teachers say that they’re frustrated by the wage gap between educators and other professionals with comparable education and training.
Marley Arechiga:
With so many challenges beyond teacher salary at play, how can leaders at the state level organize their efforts to help local education agencies attract and keep teachers?
Kate Wright:
As Regional Comprehensive Centers, we are thinking a lot about how we can support our state partners in order for them to help local education agencies, or LEAs, with effectively recruiting and sustaining teachers. It’s hard work. And we’ve identified some roles specifically that state leaders might play, and we call them the four C’s: communicators, conveners, content experts, and coordinators.
Caitlin Beatson:
And I can share some examples of what those roles might look like. As communicators, states can share educator workforce data. For example, through a user-friendly dashboard, they can disseminate guidance and frequently asked questions to support data use at the local level. They can serve as conveners by bringing together districts and schools grappling with common educator workforce challenges to engage in peer learning, highlight bright spots, and form partnerships. They can also serve as content experts. They can efficiently provide LEAs with the resources, tools, and training related to recruiting and sustaining teachers. It could also broker that expertise through third-party providers, if necessary. And when multiple entities are working on various aspects of a shared strategy, states can coordinate those efforts. For example, SEAs are really well-suited to pull together representatives from both labor and education sectors to support registered apprenticeship programs for teachers.
Marley Arechiga:
What promising approaches are you seeing states supporting and having success with?
Caitlin Beatson:
Well, some approaches, particularly those focused on recruitment, have absolutely yielded quick wins, like changes to teacher certification policies. One example is expanding reciprocity, which allows teachers who have a valid out-of-state license to earn a license in a receiving state without meeting additional requirements like passing certain exams or completing more coursework. Connecticut and Nevada are two of the states that have already seen increases in the number of teachers becoming fully certified and joining the profession as a result of updating their policies. The Connecticut State Department of Education has actually already approved roughly 1,000 out-of-state teachers’ applications for certification since updating their policies just last year.
With other approaches, though, it’s harder to say at this point whether they’ve been successful, especially if they aim to address the longer-term health of the workforce. It’s really more difficult to point to newer approaches like registered apprenticeship programs for teachers as successful, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be. We just won’t see the widespread effects of those approaches as quickly.
Kate Wright:
And we are seeing promise with residency programs in Arizona and California. To Caitlin’s point, those aren’t immediate wins. They’re not our quick wins, but they’re a long-term investment. And both of these states have invested, Arizona ESSER dollars and California state-legislated dollars, to this approach of using residency programs to fill the teacher pipeline. We’ve also seen promise with differentiated staffing, which is an approach where a classroom is led and taught by a team, a team-based model, which is multiple teachers working with the same set of students in a single classroom based on the teachers’ strengths and skills. There is positive momentum with differentiated staffing practices. They allow for differentiated or distributed leadership. They help to solve some of the challenges we’ve seen around substitute teachers because there are multiple teachers already in place working with the same roster of students.
And it also helps with including multiple levels of experience. So teachers, both new teachers, which we call sometimes associate teachers or novice teachers, and experienced teachers are sharing a roster and bringing different levels of expertise to the team. We’ve worked through our Comp Center with a program called the Next Education Workforce Model that’s being led and driven by Arizona State University in partnership with the Arizona Department of Ed, who has a teacher leadership approach to really sort of streamline these approaches to make sure that teachers have access to these opportunities.
The teacher pipeline has also been improved to some degree in Arizona with an Arizona Teacher’s Academy Scholarship. That’s not something that’s been created by the Arizona Department of Ed, but it is legislatively funded. It’s an approach that a state can take and that the state education agency can support through administration. And this scholarship program pays two years of tuition, and actually has been extended in their appropriation to at least three years of tuition with any of the three in-state universities, with the promise that the graduate will then teach in a public school for the same number of years of which they received a scholarship.
And in 2023, roughly 3,300 teachers were taking advantage of this, or students, future teachers, were taking advantage of this program with over $26 million of state money being used to support this. And these are teachers who then are new teachers in our classrooms in Arizona filling classrooms that could be vacant otherwise. And it’s an investment that the state’s making to ensure that there is a teacher pipeline that continues to support the future needs of the state.
Marley Arechiga:
Kate, where can listeners find more information about this work?
Kate Wright:
Well, there are a couple of things I’m thinking about. One, WestEd in the last several months did a blog post called “Differentiated Staffing in the Classroom.” That blog post really talks about this approach broadly, including information on the Next Education Workforce model. That’s a great place to start. WestEd also has a series of E-bulletins that talks about the teacher workforce where we spotlight work like what happened in Arizona as well as the other states that Caitlin touched on and our Comprehensive Centers more broadly, our work around teacher workforce. And that can be found on WestEd.org. And if listeners are interested in specific information on the Next Education Workforce, that can be found at ASU’s website as well.
Marley Arechiga:
Thank you, Kate. And we’ll drop links in the show notes for this episode. So Kate and Caitlin, as experts working out of two Regional Comprehensive Centers, Regions 2 and 15, can you tell us about the roles these centers play in supporting state education agencies?
Kate Wright:
Yeah, the Regional Comprehensive Centers are federally funded, and we’re funded to provide technical assistance to states in order to improve educational outcomes for all students. And that includes really big topics like closing the achievement gaps and improving the quality of instruction. We collaborate with state education agencies, meaning we work with them, not for them, in a variety of ways to support their selection and implementation of what we refer to as evidence-based practices.
And these are things that we know work. There’s evidence in place, and we can support that by collaborating across the region, across the state education agencies within our region, and oftentimes across our Comprehensive Centers. So Region 2 working with Region 15. We synthesize research. We facilitate professional learning for our state partners. And we share content expertise, which means we share our content expertise as a Center as well as we help them do peer-to-peer learning, where they can share their content expertise with other state education agencies who are trying to solve similar problems.
And through that work and those processes, oftentimes we’re able to help them by developing tools and resources that they can use internally with their states, or we can share across our states to support multiple efforts. It really varies based on what states need, but we do this work by developing deep relationships within our states because we started by talking about how local context really matters. We have to understand the context of the state to understand their problems and really know what solutions we can best support them with.
Caitlin Beatson:
And specific to this context, our Regional Comprehensive Centers have helped states take on the four C’s roles to strengthen the educator workforce. So as an example, one indicator of a strong educator workforce is ethnic and racial representation among teachers that better reflect student demographics. So, we’ve worked with both Region 2 and Region 15 states to increase educator diversity. Our Region 2 teams supported the departments of education in Connecticut and Rhode Island to provide guidance and training to LEAs around equitable hiring and selection practices. And in those instances, the departments played the communicator and content expert roles. And then in Region 15, the team supported the California Department of Education to play the convener role. So they facilitated a community of practice, and in that community of practice, regional and local education agencies were able to meet and problem-solve together.
Marley Arechiga:
What’s been the impact of this work so far?
Caitlin Beatson:
So in Connecticut, we’ve seen an increase in the number of teachers of color in five of the districts that participated in the project led by the Region 2 Comprehensive Center. Those increases range from 15 all the way to over 70%.
Marley Arechiga:
It sounds like the Centers are coaches, cheerleaders, and a whole lot in between for state education agencies. Do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share with our listeners today?
Kate Wright:
I would say you cannot underemphasize the problem at hand. The educator workforce is one of the greatest challenges facing education broadly of our time. As a former teacher of over a decade, I recognize the challenges of being in a classroom, of serving as a teacher. And those challenges have been amplified through COVID, through lots of challenges that have been in real time, just pushing on the ability for states and local education agencies to classrooms, teachers who are excited and want to be there and feel valued and compensated and all the pieces we started with, the complexity pieces. And I just think that the role of the CC, to your point, Marley, the cheerleader, the advocate, the supporter, the convener, all those pieces, the Comp Centers are really uniquely positioned to help SEA’s see that role, embrace the unique and critical space in which they can help identify and implement solutions.
And it’s really been exciting that in this work, R 2 and R 15 have found meaningful ways to support this work with each of our state partners. Because really, if we can’t build an educator workforce, then we are not going to be effective in solving any of these other problems, closing the achievement gap, effective instruction, all these other pieces.
Caitlin Beatson:
And Marley, I’ll say it again. We started the episode indicating that this is a very complicated issue. Teacher workforce problems are complex and nuanced. We’ve said it multiple times, but it can’t be emphasized enough that the solutions to these problems have to be equally complex and nuanced.
So I often point to this analogy. With medical conditions, we start with testing to determine underlying causes and risk factors. That’s essential for proper diagnosis and treatment. And then adequate treatment is typically multifaceted. So, while the goal of treatment is often most immediately symptom relief, longer term the goal is sustained good health. So the gist is education decision-makers should think beyond stopgap measures and focus efforts not only on cultivating but also sustaining the long-term health of the teacher workforce that students need. And every decision aimed at improving both the short- and long-term health of the educator workforce should really be driven by data specific to individual districts’ and schools’ context.
Marley Arechiga:
That’s a great analogy, Caitlin. It’s not just about treating the symptoms, it’s about preventative care and getting to the root of the issues. And with that, thank you Kate and Caitlin for being on the program.
Kate Wright:
Thank you, Marley. It’s been wonderful to have this conversation, and it’s a pleasure to be able to spend some time today talking about this important issue.
Caitlin Beatson:
We really appreciate the time to be here. Thanks, Marley.
Marley Arechiga:
Thank you, thank you. And thank you also to our listeners for joining us. The resources we mentioned in this episode are available online at WestEd.org/leadingvoicespodcast, or in the show notes on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Pandora, and Spotify. For technical assistance and more information about what state leaders can do to help improve working conditions for teachers, visit the Regional Comprehensive Center website at compcenternetwork.org, and click the Regional Comprehensive Centers tab.
This podcast is brought to you by WestEd, a national nonprofit, nonpartisan research, development, and service agency. At WestEd, we believe that learning changes lives. Every day we partner with schools and communities across the country to improve outcomes for children, youth, and adults of all ages. Today’s episode focused on just one important facet of WestEd’s work, and I encourage you to visit us at WestEd.org to learn more. Special thanks to host Danny Torres and to Gretchen Wright for editorial support on this episode. And to Sanjay Pardanani, our audio producer. Thank you for joining us. Until next time.