PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — A coalition to support Pennsylvania teachers has released a report on the efficacy of strategic staffing and its effect on teacher retention and recruitment statewide, amid a teacher staffing shortage.
The report, written by Teach Plus Pennsylvania Policy Fellows and released by PA Needs Teachers, showed some headway has been made around recruitment initiatives to try to get more teachers to enter the pipeline, as they work to address shortages that have become widespread in recent years.
PA Needs Teachers has made progress over the past three years in reducing financial barriers to entering the teaching profession. For example, the coalition has offered $10,000 stipends to student teachers during their internships, according to Teach Plus Pennsylvania executive director Laura Boyce.
“There have been other promising policy initiatives, like the teacher apprenticeship pathway, new youth pathways and paraprofessional pathways into teaching,” she said, “so all of those are really positive, and we are starting to see an uptick in terms of students in teacher preparation programs [and] numbers of certifications.”
However, Boyce added teacher turnover has remained high and recruitment efforts alone can’t solve the teacher shortage crisis. New teacher certificates issued in Pennsylvania fell from 20,000 in 2011 to about 6,200 in 2024.
“We still haven't really tackled the issue of teacher retention, and we still have large numbers of teachers leaving the classroom every year, and really pointing to factors that have to do with the teaching role itself, as to why they're leaving,” she said.
Boyce explained strategic staffing is a set of redesigned roles and supports that, in part, allows teachers to work more collaboratively. Two models examined in the report are called Opportunity Culture and Next Education workforce.
“These are two different approaches or models for redesigning that teacher role, creating these pathways for experienced teachers to take on expanded leadership and extend their reach by leading teams of teachers and supporting the newer teachers,” she said.
“Our argument in this report is that in order to improve teacher retention — which is ultimately going to improve student outcomes — we need to actually reimagine the teaching role and … how we think about the design of the teacher role.”