District Leader

This report from The New Teacher Project highlights the problem of experienced and effective teachers who end up leaving the profession. The report claims that the true challenge in retention is retaining the “right teachers.” Factors contributing to losing these teachers include poorly designed evaluation systems, lockstep compensation systems, layoff rules that don’t take effectiveness into account, forced staffing policies, and difficulty dismissing poorly performing teachers. The report considers district-level policy implications for each factor. 

The U.S. Department of Education's Office for  Civil Rights conducts the Civil Rights Data Collection to obtain information on:

• Enrollment demographics
• Prekindergarten
• Math and science courses
• Advanced Placement
• SAT/ACT scores
• Discipline
• School expenditures
• Teacher experience

Users can search for district and school reports to consider patterns and potential barriers to equitable access at a local level.

The Connecticut Teacher Education and Mentoring (TEAM) Program provides differentiated support to beginning teachers based on their individual contexts and needs. It is a collaboration between the state department of education, institutes of higher education, and regional education service centers. The TEAM induction and mentoring program is designed to help teachers transition into the classroom, develop a common language about effective teaching, and provide professional growth opportunities for new teachers based on an action research project.

This brief describes the prevalence of the highest performing teachers in 10 purposely selected districts across seven states. The patterns suggest that students from low-income families have unequal access, on average, to the district’s highest performing teachers at the middle school level but not at the elementary level. The data also indicate that there is variation in the types of inequitable access: Some districts have an underrepresentation of the highest performing teachers in high-poverty elementary and middle schools.

During this interactive session, presenters discussed the use of performance data to support equitable access to great teachers from different perspectives. Researchers described the efforts that districts across the United States are making to address equity gaps in using performance measures, along with the challenges and the opportunities of using value-added models to examine access to great teachers. State-level policies and practices to support this work also were discussed, with Georgia as an example.

Establish opportunities for teacher leadership:

• Provide strong instructional support to teacher leaders.
• Empower teacher leaders to collaborate on curriculum and instructional design.
• Empower teacher leaders to provide constructive feedback to peers.
• Empower teacher leaders to provide induction, mentoring, and other professional development support to develop a strong collaborative school atmosphere. 

Encourage school leaders to use climate and working conditions data to focus and improve their school improvement plans and their own leadership performance. 

Conduct working conditions surveys, focus groups, and interviews among teachers, other instructional staff, and students, and encourage school leaders to use the resulting data to focus and improve their school improvement plans and their own leadership performance. Research continues to show that working conditions influence a teacher’s decision to stay in or leave a school and sometimes the profession. Research also shows that working conditions can affect teacher effectiveness.