Educator Environment

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. 

Improve working conditions to attract, develop, and retain teachers for students from low-income and minority families. 

Ensure that local education agencies focus on supporting instructional leadership in high-need schools to provide teaching staff the working conditions they need to succeed for improved teacher recruitment, development, and retention. 

This report from The Education Trust recommends policy changes that districts and states can consider to address issues of school culture, and how these issues relate to rates of teacher dissatisfaction and turnover in schools that serve students from low-income and minority families.

Ensuring safer schools requires establishing effective indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the United States and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators. This report presents the most recent data available on school crime and student safety, including topics such as victimization, teacher injury, bullying, school conditions, fights, weapons, the availability and student use of drugs and alcohol, and student perceptions of personal safety at school. Indicators of crime and safety are compared across different population subgroups and long term.

This resource provides information to help schools engage families and communities in education.

This presentation from Ellen Behrstock-Sherratt overviews the literature related to the role of school leaders in addressing equity issues.