School Leader

Empower teacher leaders to collaborate on curriculum and data and to provide constructive feedback to peers. 

Provide nonmonetary incentives (e.g., reduced class size, teacher aides, increased autonomy, career ladders) for teachers who work in high-need schools. 

Provide new teachers with a reduced student load. 

Make part-time teaching or sharing a teacher across several schools an option when FTE positions are not available in some subject areas.

Determine which students have been repeatedly assigned a new teacher; reassign those teachers or students. 

Avoid assigning new teachers to low-performing students or lower tracked classrooms. 

This vignette describes changes that the superintendent of the Nye County School District (Nevada) undertook to recruit a principal for an underperforming school. The school district’s strategy focused on starting early in the candidate search and also strategically searching for candidates who aligned with the vision of the district and school. 

This report from the Institute of Education Sciences examines access that disadvantaged students have to effective teachers in Grade 4–8 classrooms in 29 school districts across the country. The researchers found that the disadvantaged students had less access than advantaged students to effective teachers. Furthermore, this ratio did not change over time, and the unequal access to effective teachers is related to school assignment of teachers and students (i.e., access depends more heavily on the school that students attend than specific classrooms within schools).

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.