The rate of educator attrition in Pennsylvania is rising, turnover is disproportionately impacting urban and rural districts, and teachers report feeling burnt out, overworked, and underprepared, according to an article in Chalkbeat Philadelphia.
New research from PA Needs Teachers recommends radically restructuring what it means to teach in Pennsylvania schools. The report’s authors, including Philadelphia teacher Trey Smith, propose pivoting from the traditional one-teacher-in-front-of-one-classroom model to more collaborative efforts that would help students as well as educators.
Small groups of educators and support staff work together to schedule, plan lessons, give constructive feedback on their teaching, and help each other grow in the various models proposed.
Key highlights:
- New teachers would receive mentorship and guidance;
- Experienced teachers would be compensated and recognized in their schools;
- Paraprofessionals and tutors would pay extra attention to struggling students.
A group of 100 students may share a team of six educators who get guidance and support from a “lead teacher.” This replaces a model of four teachers each responsible for their own separate classroom of 25 students — with little feedback on their individual teaching styles.
Report authors call it “strategic staffing.” Smith thinks of it as a teaching team. He says any new teaching model has to “maximize the talent we have,” including teachers with varying levels of experience and classroom management skills.
Smith is a digital literacy teacher. When other teachers need coverage, either because they’re absent or trying to find time to plan ahead, he’s often the first to get the call to step in. What he really wants is to be in constant conversation with other teachers to game-plan and get creative about ways lessons can interlock and students can engage with the same ideas across multiple subjects.
Doylestown middle school teacher Jill Weller-Reilly, another co-author of the report, says if the state wants teachers to stay in the field, schools need to provide educators with opportunities to grow and advance in their careers.
“We don’t lose new teachers because they can’t do the job. We lose them because we don’t help them learn how and set them up for success,” Weller-Reilly says.
Teach Plus polling from 2025 found that 70% of educators nationwide “definitely” or “probably” would want their school to adopt a teaching team approach.
Pennsylvania school districts have a fair amount of autonomy for issues such as budgeting, teacher time, and compensation. These factors could make “strategic staffing” easier to implement.
But change is often hard for educators, administrators, and school communities. And the report’s proposal comes with a cost.
Most strategic staffing models are intended to be budget-neutral after schools have gone through the design process, the Teach Plus advocates say, but there are significant up-front costs to getting one of these models off the ground.
Teach Plus wants state lawmakers to establish a grant program and evaluate the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s programs compared to similar models like North Carolina’s Advanced Teaching Roles program. State evaluations of the North Carolina program are beginning to show promise, with some data demonstrating it helped improve students’ math and science scores and teachers’ perceptions of their jobs. North Carolina’s program costs about $16.5 million to run annually in 17 districts.
Another major barrier: Philadelphia, like other major city school districts, has experimented with innovative teaching and learning models in the past, only to see them fade away or lose funding and attention.
“I still am hopeful if the approach really honors what teachers know and think, that’s how the model can work,” he says.
Chalkbeat Philadelphia
