Districts hoping to expand the reach of their best teachers have moved them into coaching and master teaching positions in which they help colleagues improve their craft, as well as work with students. The models, in theory, lead to more collaboration among teachers and less balkanization of what students learn.
But without planning, these teachers’ roles can be at greater risk during budget downturns, like those occurring now as K-12 enrollment declines, state funding in some places tightens, and federal pandemic relief aid has ended.
“Districts that have been implementing these career ladders or differentiated roles are going to have to be very cautious and deliberate in developing their budgets for the next fiscal year, so as not to lose the gains that they need in terms of strategic staffing,” since federal pandemic aid ended, said Heather Peske of the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Districts expanded their multi-classroom teaching staff—including instructional coaches, interventionists, and master teachers—in an effort to speed learning recovery in the years following the pandemic, largely with support from federal and state aid. By the 2023-24 school year, nearly 60% of public schools had at least one instructional coach.
Staffing models like these provide more instructional flexibility and sometimes give teachers more leadership and bonus opportunities. In schools following the nonprofit Public Impact’s team-teaching Opportunity Culture model, for example, a multi-classroom teacher leads, mentors, and sometimes co-teaches with two or three other educators and several tutors serving a group of students. These lead teachers earn pay bonuses on average 20% higher than the state teacher salary averages.
New staffing arrangements are vulnerable to budget cuts
But these newer teaching roles often prove more vulnerable to budget cuts, said Kevin Dalton, the president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers in Ohio. The district experienced cycles of building up instructional coaching positions in the 2000s before eliminating a majority of them after the 2008 recession.
“When budgets are hit like this from external areas and our management’s forced to make quick decisions, unfortunately the easiest way for them to save money is to start eliminating positions,” Dalton said. It can be harder to justify keeping multi-classroom staff in those situations.
“It’s not like they can say, hey, [this teacher] is working with these 30 kids in that classroom—even though she’s really working with a building of 500 kids because the work she’s doing is impacting every classroom across that building,” he said.
In December, the Toledo school board voted to eliminate 100 staff positions this fiscal year, including 49 of the district’s mentors and instructional coaches, in response to declining enrollment and reductions in state and federal funding.
The district said in a statement that the staff cuts are a “realistic, structured approach to address fiscal imbalance.” But Dalton said eliminating the instructional coaches and mentors was “a huge blow to the classroom teachers” because the roles were developed with the union, and helped more teachers analyze their students’ data and hone instructional practices.
Toledo’s coaches will return to regular classroom teaching rather than being let go entirely, they can lose $7,000-$10,000 in supplemental pay.
“When teachers are encouraged to go into these roles, it requires extra days … It requires nights and weekends and things like that,” Dalton said. “When those positions are cut, so are their supplementals. It does make it difficult to encourage them to take on this work in the future.”
Planning for sustainability
Team teaching and other strategic staffing models have gained ground since the pandemic. More than 1,100 schools across 18 states and the District of Columbia now use two of the most common team-teaching models, Opportunity Culture and the Next Education Workforce, a model devised by Arizona State University, with many others using homegrown models. Research suggests they can improve both student growth and teacher retention.
Bryan Hassel, the co-president of Public Impact, which developed Opportunity Culture, said the number of schools adopting the model has continued to grow and very few schools that adopted strategic staffing have since given it up to cut costs. But districts are becoming more budget-conscious.
“The financial part has typically been [administrators saying] ‘we want to do this within our existing budgets,’” Hassel said. “We now may be moving into an era where more people need to think of how can we save money with different structures.”
For example, rather than a separate position for an interventionist, some districts create hybrid roles in which the educator both teaches and leads a team of other teachers supporting several classrooms’ worth of students. The money saved provides supplemental pay for the lead and team teachers.
“There’s a financial benefit, and from the ecosystem perspective, there’s more of a coherent, straightforward leadership structure,” Hassel said.
When Carlsbad, N.M., public schools adopted Opportunity Culture three years ago, multi-classroom lead teachers continued to have their own classroom of record to comply with state class-size requirements. This can limit lead teachers’ reach and gives teams less flexibility to share responsibility for students, according to Mindy Rogers, who oversees the strategic staffing in the district. But it also makes it easier for the district to pay for the teams out of its normal operating budget.
Carlsbad has added para-professionals to teaching teams; they cost less than a full teacher’s salary but can provide more flexibility by supervising lead teachers’ classes while they are coaching or co-teaching in other classes, Rogers said.
“You really have to rethink who the most highly effective teachers are on your team, about how you can stretch their reach and the impact that they can have on other teachers, and on more students than they would typically be able to reach on their own roster as a classroom teacher of record,” she said.
In the long term, NCTQ recommends districts refocus their pay structure to pay teachers more for taking on these kinds of roles, rather than earning additional degrees and credits—as most teacher salary schedules do.
In Toledo, Dalton said he worries about retaining the specialized teachers who take a pay cut when those additional roles evaporate, as well as the downstream effects on the early career teachers who were working with them.
“We don’t want to see a revolving door in our hard-to-staff buildings,” Dalton said. “The district’s actually losing an investment because we’re spending all that money to train and work with these folks, and then they might take that training and go to a different district.”