The idea of improving the teaching job isn’t new. But the standard approach—creating narrow pilot programs in small numbers of schools that work around, rather than alter, system-level policies and practices—rarely creates lasting improvement. To catalyze and sustain change, we must redesign the underlying economic structures of the teaching job with new staffing plans, redistributed schedules, competitive compensation models, and adjusted conceptions of what counts as “learning time.”

Our latest paper outlines actions that build toward longer-term transformation, rather than short-term solutions. We show what this transformational change might look like in the context of five different “catalytic entry points,” or starting points for holistically redesigning educator roles. Our goal is to demonstrate how leaders can fundamentally restructure teaching roles to improve educators’ and students’ day-to-day experiences—without spending money and resources on actions that offer only short-term benefits.