Teacher

The increasing urgency to design schools the help students better achieve combined with budget reductions have made it increasingly important to make smart and efficient investments. This Education Resource Strategies report, however, finds that the opposite is occurring. Multiple school districts have practices that perpetuate existing school structures that don’t work and are creating barriers to the development of excellent schools. This guide offers guidance for school districts to fix these severe misalignments so that effective school designs may be implemented. 

This RAND report examines the actions and working conditions experienced by first-year principals and connects these factors to subsequent school achievement and principal retention. By researching the experiences of first-year principals in six districts, the report seeks to understand relationships among student achievement outcomes, new principals’ likelihood of staying at their schools and their reports about school conditions, attitudes, and their own practices.

The New Teacher Project’s case study provides an in-depth look at retention strategies that it first examined in The Irreplaceables and specifically examines how these strategies are being executed in District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS). The paper illustrates how DCPS, by raising expectations and removing consistently low-performing teachers, has progressed toward more effective teacher retention.

This study by The New Teacher Project, which looks at 1.4 million students across four urban school districts, directs its focus on the experiences of some of the highest performing teachers. That is, teachers who have had so much success in boosting student learning that they are essentially “irreplaceable.” The study found that the most successful and unsuccessful teachers exit urban schools at similar rates, as schools rarely make a strong effort to keep the best ones. This leads to about 10,000 “irreplaceables” in the 50 largest districts leaving each year. 

McKinsey draws on its experience of working with school systems in more than 50 countries to produce a report that examines the practice of the top-performing school systems in the world and examines how these countries make recruiting the “top third+” students of their academic cohort a priority, and in return, develop some of the most effective teachers.

This toolbox, prepared for by The New Teacher Project, is a collection of 250 resources garnered from 50 schools and districts. Areas of focus include teacher recruitment, hiring, and retention, and cover topics ranging from using student growth measures and teacher evaluation to instructional planning and professional development. 

The resources in Public Impact’s Competencies for Turnaround Success series are designed to help district officials identify and hire the right leaders and teachers for this demanding role. These resources clarify the most critical competencies—or patterns of thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting—that enable people to be successful in attempts to transform schools from failure to excellence quickly and dramatically. The series includes two guides that describe the most critical turnaround competencies.

Human resources (HR) departments play an important role in the education sector, as they determine crucial decisions by aiding in processes such as hiring qualified teacher candidates or aiding in finding a principal who meets a school’s particular needs. This report, by the Wallace Foundation, highlights the crucial role that HR departments play and discusses how school districts are rethinking the design of HR departments, focusing on Houston, Milwaukee, and San Diego. The report identifies key issues that will help districts make their HR office more efficient and effective.