Recruitment and Retention

This report investigates the implementation of new teacher mentoring programs in five states, including Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. The report examines topics including who provides mentoring, what training mentors receive, how mentors are compensated, how much mentoring new teachers receive over time, and barriers to implementing adequate mentoring programs.

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. Based on findings from a similar report published in 2012, NTC concludes that limited progress has been made by states in the intervening period. 

This brief highlights an analysis of the Boston Public Schools Human Capital Initiative (HCI), launched in 2014 to improve teacher quality in city schools. The brief concludes that HCI has enabled schools to recruit a more diverse, highly effective teaching pool, but identifies several areas where change is still needed, including reform of the state tenure law, and greater use of alternative pathways to teacher certification.

Based on the premise that distributing responsibility for developing teachers across a group of talented teachers yields improvements in teaching and learning, this report identifies successful “distributed leadership” models and the five key principles that distributed leadership models share, and outlines best practices for phasing in a successful distributed leadership model. 

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. Teachers with prior experience teaching ELL students and teachers who pursued specific training in ELL instructional strategies achieved positive gains with their ELL mathematics students when compared with non-ELL students. Teachers with years of generic teaching experience did not achieve similar gains.

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—across the United States during a three-year period. The report describes and analyzes key elements of a viable teacher career continuum in sections on design features and enabling conditions.

This report examines key findings from a 2014 California teacher survey. Slightly more than 500 teachers with varying levels of experience responded to the survey, which found that California teachers favor a system of tenure founded on a performance-based professional benchmark and believe that more support is needed to help struggling teachers improve.

Are your states contemplating the next steps for school turnaround, especially for supporting school leaders?.

This report examines promising early results from the Emerging Leaders selective teacher leadership program run by New Leaders; it argues that appropriate preparation strategies and clear expectations must be in place for teacher leaders to be most effective.

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 systems to evaluate and support principals using clear standards. The districts worked on refining their evaluation processes to focus on helping principals improve as instructional leaders by identifying areas of weakness and providing tools to support growth.