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As schools nationwide continue to grapple with severe staffing shortages, the urgency to reimagine the teaching profession is palpable. Teachers yearn for more than just a job—they crave positive work environments that foster support and growth opportunities, all while earning fair compensation.

Recently, TNTP unveiled the Workforce Design Framework, a holistic approach intended to bring together the twin engines of educational progress: academics and talent. The framework empowers school and system leaders to ensure that every educator, especially those from underrepresented communities, can thrive in sustainable, well-compensated, long-term careers—ultimately enabling them to give their absolute best to students.

Collegiate Academies, a charter school network in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is boldly putting the framework into action, placing adult culture at the heart of their talent strategy. Their north star, that the culture among adults is the driving force behind student success, guides every decision related to talent. The success they’ve had is proof positive that a well-thought-out talent strategy, intentionally integrated with academic strategy leads to stronger outcomes for students. 

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Originally from Education Leaders of Color

Young people of all racial, ethnic and cultural backgrounds benefit when they have access to diverse teachers and school leaders. Today, teachers of color make up only 21 percent of the workforce; in fact, 40 percent of US K-12 public schools have no teachers of color. Yet more than 50 percent of the PK-12 public school student population is Black, Hispanic, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Indigenous, or multi-racial. Great school principals and teachers of color can drive profound changes in student achievement and school outcomes, particularly for students of color. Research has shown that Black students are less likely to drop out of high school and more likely to attend college when they have Black teachers. Likewise, attendance among Latino students improves with Latino teachers.

With a new school year underway, the One Million Teachers of Color Campaign is redoubling its commitment to adding a million teachers of color and thirty-thousand leaders of color to the education workforce in the next decade. At the federal level, our plan for achieving this is three-fold:

• Build and expand more diverse educator talent pipelines
• Invest in financial supports and incentives to recruit and retain educators of color
• Make data on teacher and school leader diversity more transparent and actionable

We’ve created a congressional policy brief that contains critical research and actionable efforts for policymakers to join us in championing a stronger, more diverse education workforce in this new school year and beyond. Students, especially those furthest from opportunity, need access to diverse and effective educators more than ever. The presence of teachers and school leaders of color isn’t just about representation; it’s about creating tangible, positive outcomes.

We invite you to join us in paving the way for a brighter future by advocating for inclusive policies and innovative pathways into the teaching profession, and by dismantling barriers that hinder educators of color. The One Million Teachers of Color Campaign—led by TNTP, The Hunt Institute, Center for Black Educator Development, The Education Trust, Latinos for Education, Men of Color in Educational Leadership, New Leaders, and Teach Plus—stands as a call to action.

Join us on this journey toward a more equitable and vibrant learning experience for all students, one educator at a time.

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The science of reading has been a hot topic among educators, academics, and parents over the past few years, as states and school systems rush to find solutions to the country’s reading crisis. And the urgency is real: 37% of fourth graders scored below basic on NAEP reading in 2022, and just a third of fourth graders scored proficient. Additionally, 65 to 70% of students need systematic instruction in foundational skills to become proficient readers.  

At TNTP, we embraced the science of reading movement early on, and have been partnering with states and school systems nationwide to bring the science of reading to life in every classroom. We believe that strong reading instruction should be systematic and robust, covering multiple components and strategies for reading. From educator training to curriculum selection to practical implementation support and coaching, we build leader and educator knowledge about evidence-based instruction and shift long-held mindsets about what works for emerging readers.

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With math proficiency dropping to an all-time low due to nationwide learning disruptions, the start of a new school year is a pivotal time to transform teaching and learning. Fully recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and the countless instructional hurdles educators and students faced well before COVID requires that the education ecosystem of policymakers, leaders, and educators willingly engage in a redesign of core instruction and student wraparound supports.

Simply doing something different during core instruction or intervention is not enough if those “difference-making” practices do not anchor to instructional coherence, students' collective and individual needs, and other evidence-based practices that maximize the student experience and accelerate learning and recovery. When redesigned correctly, systems that align every element of its instructional program and its strategies from core instruction to student supports and interventions with extended instructional time, give students the best chance to catch up with their peers.

TNTP’s Good to Great is a professional learning experience grounded in instructional coherence and change management that puts students at the center of learning and results in teachers and students developing new identities as learners. The program jumpstarts instructional improvement and challenges low expectations, creating opportunities for teachers to try new things and see an immediate impact with students. Because everyone in a school must be on board in true collaboration for coherence models to work, both teachers and administrators learn the strategies and key elements of strong instruction in each subject area together.

We sat down with Bonifacio Sanchez, principal, and Melisa Gemetti, a teacher who is now an instructional coach, at Williams Elementary in the Fresno Unified School District, to discuss how the Good to Great experience has changed the way they learn, lead, and teach using an instructional coherence model and how our partnership ultimately led to students having a new-found “math identity.”
 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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If ever there was a time for school systems to reimagine their workforce and talent strategies, it’s now. Emerging from the pandemic, there’s a sense of urgency to provide pathways to academic, economic, and social mobility for students, but educators are often stretched thin, burned out, or overworked. Our partners in school systems nationwide report the same concerns time and time again: their schools are short-staffed and filling vacancies is their biggest talent challenge.  

Surprisingly, however, most public schools actually employ more teachers than they did before the pandemic, while serving fewer students. And while some school districts have multiple vacant teacher positions, (especially in hard-to-staff subject areas like multilingual, special education, and STEM), it turns out that widespread teacher shortages haven’t come to pass nationally.

So, what’s going on? Why don't the teacher vacancy numbers reflect the capacity challenges and feelings of scarcity that so many districts and schools are experiencing?

As we outline in TNTP’s newly released Workforce Design Framework, data is a powerful way to understand what’s behind the staffing challenges that are so disruptive to students and educators alike. We looked at data from two school districts that reported facing teacher shortages, to learn what other factors might be causing schools to feel short-staffed and students to have disrupted classroom experiences.

We expected to see that disrupted classroom experiences have gone up overall since the start of the pandemic. But we did not expect to discover that most classroom disruptions were not caused by teacher shortages or by vacant teacher positions. The biggest factor in disrupted classroom experiences? Teacher absences.

In the traditional school staffing structure, one teacher is in charge of one classroom, so when that teacher is absent, learning tends to stall. Studies have associated increased teacher absences with lower growth on students’ test scores. In addition, the difference between having a teacher with zero absences and one with 10 days of absences is akin to “the difference between having a novice teacher and a teacher with a bit more experience,” when it comes to average math achievement.

Even before the pandemic, one in four students attended a school where over 40% of teachers were absent for more than 10 days (not including professional development days)—a measure the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights considers “chronically absent.” This same federal data found that between 2012 and 2018, nearly a third of teachers nationwide met the criteria for being chronically absent. Schools with higher levels of teacher absenteeism tended to serve slightly more students experiencing poverty. The schools were less likely to be high achieving and less likely to grow students' achievement over time.

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The Supreme Court’s decision this week ending affirmative action, while expected, is devastating.  

Given the makeup of the Court, it seems apt to bring up the seminal Reagan administration report, A Nation at Risk, which stated, “The twin goals of equity and high-quality schooling have profound and practical meaning...we cannot permit one to yield to the other either in principle or in practice.” 

This decision, some 40 years after that report, will have profound and negative consequences for all Americans, especially students of color. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson underscored in her powerful dissent, “With let-them-eat-cake obliviousness, today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces ‘colorblindness for all’ by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life.” 

The generational harm that is likely to result from this decision is immense. In the nine states where race-based affirmative action was already banned, enrollment of Black, Latinx, and Native American undergraduate students is headed towards a long-term decline. A ban at the national level will lead to diminished social and economic mobility for an unthinkable number of young people, while eroding our country’s ability to build the multiracial democracy we envision. 

This decision is not only devastating, but it also defies common sense. Research shows that all students benefit from racially diverse learning environments. Yet higher education—the place where students are meant to be exposed to new thinking and experiences—will become more homogenous and less vibrant. This is a loss for all of us, as we won't benefit from the ideas, connections, and innovation that multiply in diverse institutions. 

Affirmative action represented one of the necessary ways for children of color to climb over the barriers of enduring oppression for a chance to thrive. This decision likely means fewer graduates of color will be hired into the high-earning or middle-class jobs that lead to economic and social mobility, widening the racial wealth gap. And when higher education institutions, especially elite universities, become more homogenous, so too will legislatures, board rooms, and courts. 

But we cannot allow this broken promise to break our resolve.  

Advancing educational justice, especially in the face of adversity, is why TNTP exists. For 25 years, we have worked in hundreds of schools across nearly every state to counter the impacts of systemic racism in public education.  

That work does not end when a student walks across the stage at their high school graduation. We know what happens in classrooms isn’t enough to ensure success for millions of students of color, especially as 13-year-olds in the U.S. post their worst math and reading scores in decades.  

This ruling only deepens our conviction that the public education system needs to dramatically change and strengthens our resolve in the movement for education to truly be the “great equalizer” we deserve.

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