Recruitment and Retention

Teacher Leader Model Standards

There is a growing acceptance, indeed enthusiasm, among policymakers and education leaders for a heightened teacher role in leading a stronger profession. More than 60 colleges now offer master’s programs in teacher leadership. Smart, dynamic, motivated teachers fear stagnating in their growth, and teacher leadership positions provide avenues to pursue new skills and interests while remaining in the classroom.

School Design: Leveraging Talent, Time, and Money, Online Self-Assessment

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. 

First-Year Principals in Urban Districts: How Actions and Working Conditions Relate to Outcomes

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.

Re-Imagining State Policy: A Guide to Building Systems That Support Effective Principals

New Leaders assembled a guide to the state’s role in each of the policy areas that affect school leadership—specifically principals. The paper identifies opportunities available for state leaders to improve policies designed to attract and ultimately retain and empower the best school leaders who will drive students toward success. The document advocates for the adoption of high-quality principal performance standards, which would align the vision across the entire human capital system from pipeline development to reward or dismissal. 

Keeping Irreplaceables in D.C. Public Schools

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.

The Irreplaceables

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. 

Shooting for Stars: Cross-Sector Lessons for Retaining High-Performing Educators

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 applying these strategies right now. The four key strategies organizations successfully use to boost high-performer retention are as follows:

Closing the Talent Gap

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.

State Policy Database

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 recruitment, retention, induction, and tenure. 

Importing Leaders for School Turnarounds: Lessons and Opportunities

One of the biggest challenges in education today is identifying talented candidates to successfully lead turnarounds of persistently low-achieving schools. Evidence suggests that the traditional principal pool is already stretched to capacity and cannot supply enough leaders to fix failing schools. But potentially thousands of leaders capable of managing successful turnarounds work outside education, in nonprofit and health organizations, the military, and the private sector.

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