The State Leader’s Role in Reimagining the Teaching Job
The student experience today looks very different than it did even a decade ago. School system leaders are adapting to a post-pandemic environment, while teachers are rethinking lessons to attend to students’ new and increasing needs.
Yet despite this rapid change, the basic structure of how we organize schools has remained stagnant for decades—particularly when we look at the teaching role. Teachers are students’ most important resource, but the teaching job itself is in crisis, with districts across the country facing enduring staff shortages and persistently high turnover—especially in the highest-poverty schools—that are negatively impacting student experiences.
Fortunately, school system leaders are in a position to move beyond traditional recruitment and retention efforts to address the root cause of these shortages: a one-size-fits-all teaching job that remains rigid and isolated.
But they can’t do it alone. State education leaders have a critical role to play in supporting district leaders and ensuring the teaching job is dynamic, rewarding, collaborative, sustainable, and diverse.
What Does It Mean to Reimagine the Teaching Job?
For students to have the best possible educational experiences and outcomes, they need teachers who work within structures (e.g., workloads and career pathways) that allow them to thrive in their roles long-term.
Creating more supportive and sustainable conditions for teachers requires school system leaders to redesign the teaching job altogether. Differentiated roles and supports enable teachers at every experience level to thrive: Incoming teachers benefit from shelter-and-develop models that smooth their transition into the profession, while the most effective and experienced educators can extend their impact through leadership roles. All teachers—regardless of level—should earn competitive compensations and have sustainable workloads, collaboration time, and professional learning opportunities.
Learn more about our full vision for a reimagined teaching job here.
How States Can Create the Conditions for a Reimagined Teaching Job
To create these structures, school system leaders need to examine, challenge, and iterate on the structure of the teaching model to develop a better, more sustainable and dynamic role. In their capacity to provide district leaders with more resources, time, and flexibility, state leaders can play a critical role in enabling this innovation.
Here are three ways that state leaders can and should create the enabling conditions that help school system leaders drive change.
Use Policies (Guidance and Accountability) to Encourage and Support Research-Based Redesign
Statewide policies—in the form of legislation, guidance, accountability, or monitoring—often set both the floor (the minimum standard required) and ceiling (caps on opportunities for flexibility) for district innovation.
Adjusting policies to allow for more flexibility can be a key enabler for district leaders looking to implement new strategies, such as reducing teaching loads for rookie teachers by increasing class sizes for highly effective teachers or for electives and/or advanced classes.
Some important ways to create flexibility to support a reimagined teaching job include:
- Evolving teacher-of-record requirements to enable teaming structures that allow for more flexibility and innovation in serving students.
- Adjusting class-size-maximum rules so they are flexible enough to enable schools to vary class sizes based on subject, student need, lesson type, and teacher expertise.
- Allowing for school and district leaders to use student and teacher time in new ways without being constrained by rigid time requirements.
State leaders need to balance policy flexibility with accountability to ensure students are still receiving rigorous educational experiences in these new models. These leaders can set standards for which metrics must be tracked to determine whether the innovations and flexibilities are having the desired impact.
Policies are only effective if leaders can easily interpret them, so it’s critical for state leaders to provide guidance that consistently and clearly communicates the flexibilities and guardrails that school and district leaders must operate within.
Create Incentives and Provide Support to Foster District Innovation
Legacy structures and funding systems aren’t always set up to allow district leaders to sustainably transition to more innovative models without needing additional support. Incentives and supports—such as grant programs, special designations, technical assistance offerings, and start-up funds—can help create that space and enable leaders to prioritize strategic thinking and implementation around the teaching job. State leaders can:
- Build school and system leader capacity by providing dedicated resources and technical assistance, such as scheduling and staffing tools that support the implementation of new structures.
- Create new funding structures that increase teacher salaries in strategic ways. Texas’ Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), for example, provides state funding to enable district leaders to increase teacher salaries for the most effective teachers, especially in schools with low socioeconomic status and in rural areas.
- Implement “innovation zones”—schools or groups of schools with less restrictive rules or accountability—and share learnings from those innovative practices, such as Massachusetts has done with its Innovation Schools initiative.
Use Statewide Data to Support Decision-Making
By leveraging data to set their priorities, district leaders can make more informed decisions and develop more targeted and effective implementation plans. These leaders often have access to key data within their own systems, but state leaders can use statewide data systems to offer a more thorough assessment of teachers’ working conditions to support decision-making. State leaders can systematically track data to promote a deeper understanding of:
- Where shortages exist based on turnover patterns and unfilled positions, such as Colorado has done with their educator shortage survey.
- Whether districts have enough new teachers coming into the profession.
- How the workforce is distributed across the state to give all students access to effective, qualified, and diverse teachers. North Carolina, for example, has structured their reports within their Strategic Dashboard Monitoring Tool to identify teacher effectiveness across the state.
Statewide data paints a stronger picture of where students and teachers are most impacted by the current teaching conditions, allowing district leaders to more strategically focus their priorities and initiatives.
For more information about the policy flexibilities, statewide data tools, and incentives that state leaders can provide districts to support innovation, see our diagnostic.
What State Education Agency Leaders Can Do Now
Prioritizing and reimagining the teaching job—a key strategy for addressing critical issues like teacher retention and shortages—requires support from state leaders. While policy change might take time to implement, here are actions state education agency leaders can take today to start providing that support:
- Emphasize the importance of designing a more dynamic, rewarding, collaborative, sustainable, and diverse teaching job—and how states and districts can work together to do so—by:
- Using their platform to make a compelling case for how reimagining the teaching role can help tackle pressing issues like teacher recruitment and retention.
- Encouraging and engendering support from and initiatives with other partners to broaden support.
- Convening and elevating school and system leaders who are currently implementing aspects of this reimagined vision to further inspire action and spread change.
- Use our self-assessment to assess constraints and opportunities within their state, as well as explore three levers that can promote innovation: data, policy, and incentives and support. State leaders can use their results to understand how they can and should enhance data-sharing processes, evolve policies, and organize partnerships, incentives, and technical assistance to support district needs.
- Find ways to immediately support districts that are already interested in redesigning the teaching role by providing funding, partnering with organizations that support implementation, or creating cohorts for technical assistance. Participating districts can serve as learning labs of innovation, helping spread ideas to other districts in the state. Read our case studies for more information about what state leaders have done to support a reimagined teaching job in their contexts.
The teacher workforce is the most important resource available for creating stronger student outcomes. While approaches to reimagining the teaching job will vary from district to district, state leaders play a critical role in supporting this innovative work. By working together, state and district leaders can create more positive outcomes for our nation’s teachers and, ultimately, their students.
Examples From the Field
Creating a More Sustainable Teaching Job in Texas
Learn how Texas leaders developed the Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA) to make the teaching job more appealing and sustainable, particularly in rural areas and in areas with a high concentration of economically disadvantaged students.
The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future
Read about how district and state leaders created the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a transformative piece of legislation that aims to ensure that every student in every school has access to a high-quality education.
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Assess Your State’s Conditions for Reimagining the Teaching Job
Reimagining the teaching role requires state and district leaders to have enabling conditions in place that support bold improvements to the job. This diagnostic is designed to help state leaders clarify which enabling conditions are and aren’t in place in their state and establish priority focus areas that support schools and districts in improving the teaching job.