Teachers are essential to fostering positive student experiences. They motivate students, enable them to advance academically, even support their holistic wellness. To be effective, teachers need rewarding, collaborative, and sustainable jobs that offer various career pathways and professional growth opportunities.

Our Approach to Designing Effective Staffing Models

Analyze Teacher Turnover Rates and Causes

We conduct teacher surveys and analyze multiple years of employment data to map teacher hiring, assignment, and retention patterns across the district. These findings surface opportunities to improve the teacher value proposition—including investing in hard-to-staff schools or subjects, retaining teachers at key career milestones, and increasing support for residents or novices.

The Goal: Pinpoint what’s causing turnover and identify strategies to hire and retain highly effective teachers.

Redesign Teacher Compensation and Career Pathways

We help shift teacher compensation models toward dynamic systems that accelerate pay at points where teacher turnover is the highest. Transformed models vary compensation for educators with differentiated roles and reward teachers for their contributions, such as taking on instructional leadership roles or working in priority subjects, schools, or grade levels.

The Goal: Establish differentiated career opportunities and salary schedules.

Redesign Staffing and Scheduling Models

We partner with school and district leaders to adjust teacher assignment practices, workloads, and schedules to improve the teaching job. We focus on increasing support for novice teachers, extending effective teachers’ reach, and expanding time for team collaboration and job-embedded professional learning.

The Goal: Ensure teachers and students get the right support and opportunities at the right time.

Organize to Enhance and Increase Teacher Professional Development

We focus on holistically restructuring school schedules and student groupings to free up teachers’ time for teaming, planning, and professional development. We also help school leaders redistribute school time throughout the week to create more opportunities for professional learning and collaboration without adding onto teachers’ schedules or substantially increasing costs.

The Goal: Create structures that give teachers time to plan, collaborate, and better serve students.

How We Partner With School Systems

Giving educators the support they need—and solving today’s recruitment and retention challenges—requires us to take strategic and transformative steps that improve the teaching experience and better support educators at all stages of their careers. We help states and districts identify and implement these strategic moves to reimagine the teaching job and best support their teachers.

The Opportunity

Los Angeles’ Alliance College-Ready Public Schools needed to rework school schedules strategically to give teachers more concerted planning and collaboration time. This would enable them to reduce levels of burnout among teachers, enable educators to better serve their students, and improve overall student outcomes. 

The Redesign Process

Knowing that teachers are the most important in-school factor for student success, Alliance leaders empowered educators with more planning, prep, and collaboration time. They made strategic investments and tradeoffs to establish scheduling pilot models in three Alliance schools that nearly doubled teacher planning time and boosted students’ access to dual-enrollment courses, high-impact electives, and math intervention. 

In year one of the initiative ERS experts helped Alliance design three scheduling models to achieve these goals. And in subsequent years, the combined team led three school cohorts in deeply engaging teachers in each school and selecting the schedule type that works best for their community. 

The Results

As a result of the program, 91% of teachers reported having more time to reflect on scholar data and an improved ability to deliver engaging lessons. Teacher retention grew to 82% at one pilot school and 92% at another, and 84% of teachers across the pilot said they now have better work-life balance. 

Most importantly, giving teachers more time to plan and collaborate helped improve student outcomes significantly. Students experienced:

• A 21% increase in grade-level math proficiency at two schools
• A 16% increase in ELA proficiency at one pilot school and a 17% increase at another
• A 5%, 6%, and 2% decline in chronic absenteeism at each pilot school, respectively

The successful pilot models and impressive results data laid the groundwork for scaling the initiative to three additional schools in the 2024-25 school year. By resisting outdated scheduling structures and creating more innovative models, the network is on a path toward generating improving teacher experiences and student outcomes in all Alliance schools. 

Other Teaching Job Partners

Let’s Work Together

Fill out the form below to take the first step towards a more rewarding, collaborative, and sustainable teaching job.