At CRPE, we study how the teacher workforce can evolve to meet students’ changing needs and create more sustainable roles for educators. Our research explores new staffing models, including ASU’s Next Education Workforce™, that reimagine how adults collaborate in schools—shifting away from the one-teacher, one-classroom model toward team-based approaches that expand instructional capacity and support. We examine how these innovations can improve teacher retention, elevate the profession, and ensure that students have access to diverse expertise. By analyzing emerging models and their impact, we aim to understand how the education workforce can be redesigned to better serve both students and educators.
One of us (Carole) was recently asked what a world without colleges of education would look like. Carole’s response: “I’m not sure the world would miss us.” And she spoke as the dean of one of the largest colleges of education in the country.
As schools across the nation struggle with teacher shortages, a new study from Richard Ingersoll, Lennon Audrain, and Mary Laski points to a promising solution: redesigning the structure of classrooms and the role of teachers.
Introduction Key Findings Data and Methods Implementation of the Next Education Workforce Elements Teacher Decision-Making Influence Relationship between Team Membership and Decision-Making Influence with Teacher Turnover Conclusion Introduction For over a century, the “egg-crate model of schooling,” which isolates each teacher in an individual classroom, has shaped the teaching profession.
AI has transformed the education landscape, but are teacher preparation programs keeping pace? In CRPE’s latest report, we surveyed leaders from schools of education to understand how their faculty and preservice teachers are engaging with AI, their views on its long-term impact, and how institutions are embedding AI into their curricula.
Concerns about the teacher workforce are rising, with fewer teachers recommending the profession and decreasing interest among students. In response, school systems are redesigning teacher roles to make the job more appealing and sustainable.
Innovative staffing models are promising, but challenging to scale up. What does the work of leading strategic staffing involve, and what could make scaling up easier?
This blog is part of a three-part series on school systems that have been implementing workforce innovations or strategic staffing solutions for several years.
This commentary was originally published by EdSource. Improving literacy instruction is once again in fashion among America’s policy circles. Between 2019 and 2022, state legislatures passed more than 200 bills that sought to push and pull public schools to embrace the “science of reading.” But one year into closely following a big city school district’s effort to remake literacy instruction as part of a project with the Center on Reinventing Public Education, I can’t help but think these well-intended legislative efforts ignore the larger problem: teachers working alone in their classrooms are ill-positioned on their own to provide the support children most need to learn to read.
