Retaining
Strong retention strategies include providing paid career paths that keep great teachers in the classroom, giving teachers and leaders appropriate autonomy over their work, and offering multiple opportunities to continue to improve and excel. The Innovation Station’s resources for retaining include the following:
- General resources, such as publications and multimedia sources on keeping high-performing educators in the classroom, state policy guidelines on supporting effective principals, and a state policy database.
- Career pathways and tiered certification publications and websites on creating career paths that provide multiple opportunities for excellent teachers, using evaluations to drive excellence, and rethinking certification standards.
- Motivation 3.0, with a publication and multimedia presentations on tapping into teachers’ and leaders’ motivation at each stage of their careers by encouraging them to make real contributions, have appropriate autonomy over their work, and strive for mastery.
General Resources
Broad
This report from the Learning Policy Institute uses federal databases to analyze current trends in teacher shortages and to project future shortage trends.
This guide offers tools to assist district leaders in the development of policies to ensure that all students have equitable access to excellent teachers.
Fourth in a series of reports by Wallace Foundation on principalship, this report examines the progress districts participating in the Principal Pipeline Initiative have made in implementing... Read more »
This brief summarizes findings from Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative, where six urban school districts collaborated with universities to offer principal preparation programs,... Read more »
This report presents an analysis of teacher characteristics and learning experiences and describes how they can affect English language learner (ELL) student outcomes in mathematics.
This report looks at 10 school districts and the key policy decisions they have made to redesign their teacher compensation systems.
This paper reviews 30 studies from the past 15 years on the effect teaching experience has on student outcomes and concludes that teaching experience is positively associated with student gains,... Read more »
This brief from The Education Trust presents ideas for states to consider when developing a state plan to ensure that all students, particularly disadvantaged students, have access to effective... Read more »
Teachers and students are using electronic instructional and learning materials with ever-increasing frequency. This report examines how pixel-based media are changing modern learning both in and... Read more »
This report examines how five school districts in Texas, Tennessee, Oregon, Georgia, and Louisiana implemented new educator evaluation and support systems and lessons learned along the way.
This report outlines the methods used by four successful charter networks to recruit and develop principals, and offers recommendations for expanding these practices to schools across the country... Read more »
This report from NCTQ and the Brookings Institution examines why diversity in the teacher workforce matters so much, and the challenges associated with recruiting teachers who reflect the... Read more »
This report investigates the implementation of new teacher mentoring programs in five states, including Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

Teachers and leaders can find examples, strategies, and resources to strengthen their district’s teacher evaluation system to support professional learning.
This three-volume report describes the “SAM” process, which is intended help principals spend more time on improving classroom instruction and less time on administrative and managerial tasks.
This brief from the Learning Policy Institute examines the effectiveness of state efforts to recruit, employ, and retain minority K-12 teachers. Results are based on a study of teacher recruitment... Read more »
This brief from the Education Commission of the States focuses on alternative certification as a strategy for recruiting teachers.
This brief from the Education Commission of the States focuses on teacher evaluation and feedback as a strategy for retaining teachers.
This brief from the Education Commission of the States examines teacher induction and mentorship as a strategy for retaining teachers.
This report investigates why professional development strategies are failing in their goal to effectively support teachers and promote growth.
This report from Deans for Impact focuses on the application of “deliberate practice,” or activities based on research-based principles that are purposeful and designed to maximize improvement, to... Read more »
This report examines states’ preservice teacher preparation programs and their efforts to prepare teachers for literacy instruction.

This study examines how principals in public schools spend their time, using data from the 2011-12 National Center for Education Statistics’ Schools and Staffing Survey.

This report on the impact of teacher experience on student outcomes bases its findings on a new methodological model designed to limit bias.
Developed by a consortium of national school leader organizations, this publication takes a new look at the education leadership landscape and presents new professional standards to guide... Read more »
This federal report presents data on teacher attrition and mobility from a longitudinal study following teachers who began teaching in 2007–08.
This brief, written by the Education Commission of the States, examines the necessity of strong school leadership and lists steps states can take to ensure that all schools have effective leaders... Read more »
This report by Public Impact identifies four common strategies employed by other sectors to disproportionately retain high performers and discusses how committed education leaders could begin... Read more »
This report from the Center for American Progress calls for the expansion of supported entry programs for new teachers.
The Education Commission of the States’ database—updated weekly—tracks legislation, rules/regulations, and executive orders on a variety of education issues, including teacher and leadership... Read more »
Based on survey feedback from its American School Leader Panel, a nationally representative sample of principals in small, medium, and large school districts, the RAND corporation investigated the... Read more »
This report from the New Teacher Center (NTC) reviews state policies designed to support new teachers and the mentors working alongside them in their first years in the classroom.
Learn about policies that can support building a strong, sustainable school leadership pipeline.
This report seeks to identify the components of a sustainable, effective teacher career continuum by studying eight varied school districts—high-poverty, low-poverty, urban, suburban, and rural—... Read more »
Explore how states are addressing talent development policies for coaches, mentors, instructional specialists, and teacher leaders.

This paper presents findings from an analysis using student-level data over ten years to investigate the long-term impact of students having teachers of the same race in elementary grades. ... Read more »
In this report, TNTP looks at challenges in the area of teacher improvement, and finds that large investments have been made by school districts and systems across the country in recent years in... Read more »
This report examines the progress made in recent years in increasing teacher diversity in public schools.
This brief by the Center for American Progress highlights how some states use funding through Title II, Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to strengthen the teacher pipeline by... Read more »
This report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) summarizes the findings of a 108-school district survey focused on human capital systems.
Based on data collected from six urban school districts that participated in The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative, this report from the Rand Corporation examines the resources... Read more »
Targeted

Learn three human capital management policies for supporting career and technical education (CTE) teachers: certification, performance evaluation, and... Read more »
This case study focuses on an innovative teacher contract approved and implemented in Baltimore in 2012 under Dr. Andres Alonso, the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools.
This brief examines the CLASS project, an Oregon initiative intended to close the achievement gap by improving teacher quality by expanding career paths for teachers, and improving evaluations,... Read more »
This study examines what Boston charter schools are doing to achieve consistently strong student outcomes.
This CALDER study uses longitudinal data to examine gaps in teacher quality over time between advantaged and disadvantaged students in North Carolina and Washington.
This report examines key findings from a 2014 California teacher survey.
This report by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research finds that Chicago Public Schools teachers with low-end scores on Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago’s Students (REACH... Read more »
In an analysis of state-level data, this study on teacher retention in Kentucky found that teachers under the age of 31 and over the age of 50 are more likely to leave the profession than teachers... Read more »

This paper analyzes the impact of the Florida Critical Teacher Shortage Program (FCTSP), which is aimed at increasing recruitment and stemming attrition of teachers in subject areas with shortages... Read more »
In California, seven out of 10 of the state’s fastest growing occupations are in STEM fields.
This study by the Fordham Institute investigated whether districts are able to dismiss ineffective teachers who have tenure or veteran status.

This report outlines findings from a study of the 2010 cohort of Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) Program grantees in their third year of implementation.