Book Review: The Next Education Workforce – How Team-based Staffing Models Can Support Equity and Improve Learning Outcomes

I received this book as a gift from Carole Basile, who serves as dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (MLFTC) at Arizona State University, by the end of an early February meeting that we had with her.

The book outlines a key part of MLFTC’s vision for the future of the education workforce in the United States. The fifteen main insights and takeaways that I got out of this book after reading it are presented below:

• For a long time, we have known that education would need to change if we were ever going to approach solving inequities and ensure that every learner is successful. Reform effort after reform effort, curriculum shifts, technology innovation, alternative teacher preparation and residencies, and a host of other programs have not moved the needle… Report after report bemoans the fact that disparities continue and that all learners are not being served in the ways that get them to the elusive goals our schools, districts, government agencies, think tanks, and others want them to achieve. We know that we need to address mental health, joyful learning, and quick and customized academic attention, and yet, we struggle and we have struggled. Normal has needed to change for a long time… And then in March of 2020, education did change massively. Cracks in the normal festered and became bigger than we imagined. While we once thought this might be a blip on the screen a lockdown and the pandemic would go away -we now recognize that learners and learning will be impacted for a long time. So, compounded by the pandemic, we hope this is the opportunity we have been waiting for-the kind of fundamental change we desperately need to provide the equitable practices learners need and deserve.’ We believe this change begins with the educators: who they are, how they work together, and how their roles align to serve learners.
• Human capital, the people who make up our education workforce, is at the heart of our learners’ communities. These are the people who are responsible for building relationships and understanding the needs of every individual student; they are expected to know how to solve every learner’s struggles and advance every learner’s achievements. As a field, we have spent the last thirty years worrying about the quality of teachers and leaders and their relationship to the learning of students… As parents, we certainly want our kids to have teachers who have mastered all the competencies that we ask teachers to master. And, we’d probably want to add a bunch of other things to the list. However, as teacher educators, we have serious concerns about the ability of any single teacher to do all of those things well. The job of a teacher as currently designed, which asks each teacher to be all things to all learners, sets both educators and students up for failure. Under this rationale, the authors believe that it is now time to redesign our education workforce.
• The phrase “Next Education Workforce” represents much more than simply the people who will staff schools. It represents a shift in how we design roles, deploy educators, and develop human capital in education. It’s a commitment to building a better education workforce that allows for improved outcomes for educators and students… To help us explore the Next Education Workforce, the authors divided the book into two parts. They set the stage by examining ten currently “normal” ways of today’s education. As it turns out, what passes for normal rests on a lot of assumptions that, when critically questioned, don’t make much sense in the twenty-first century, especially given the inequities associated with today’s educational systems.
• Normal – School, in most places in the country and at most times, looks like school. Students sit in classrooms. Each classroom has one teacher. The teacher is expected to know everything that needs to be taught and to do everything for all students in the room. There are curriculum standards to follow, accountability measures to apply, and processes to assess the students, teachers, and the school itself. We are used to all of this. Regardless of your age, this probably sounds a lot like the school you attended. It is what we call normal. And maybe that consistency of schools makes us feel good and even provides some sense of stability in an uncertain world. However, it shouldn’t.
• Elements of the next education workforce – Teams of educators and distributed expertise: in healthcare, each nurse or doctor isn’t expected to know everything. In law firms, there are teams of lawyers and paralegals who work together to research and provide legal services. Accounting and auditing firms utilize teams with differing expertise. Engineers, social service providers, university administrators, business analysts, technology specialists, and chefs- just about everyone work in teams. But teachers rarely do… You might say that teachers are already working in teams, whether that be in professional learning communities, data teams, co-teaching teams, or departmental or grade-level teams. However, these aren’t the kind of teams we are talking about. Teachers may work together, plan together, and look at data together, but they inevitably go back to their classroom, shut the door, and work by themselves during that critical time when they are working directly with students. Sometimes there’s a paraeducator in the classroom. Sometimes a volunteer, co-teacher, or specialist drops in to help with particular students. But rarely are these relationships truly team based in a way that is both collaborative and coordinated. So every learner needs a collaborative team.
• Elements of the next education workforce – delivering deeper and personalized learning with teams and technology: as students progress through our current education system with one teacher in one classroom, their engagement with school decreases. In a Gallup survey conducted in 2016, ‘74 percent of fifth graders reported being engaged with school, but only 32 percent of eleventh graders reported the same.’ Individuals want learning that is far more learner centered than what the system is offering. They want the learning to be more individualized. They want assessments that are relevant and address the problems that people grapple with every day. They want a much broader set of outcomes. They want opportunities for the student to take a larger role in driving their own learning not just in high school but at every level. None of this is surprising, and these sorts of approaches are well documented in the literature… But in most American schools, this sort of learning is far more likely to be the exception than the rule. Why? Because it is really, really hard to do this well – especially in the normative one-teacher, one-classroom model.
• Elements of the next education workforce – entry, specialization, and advancement in the next education workforce: in the 1980s and 1990s, much was written about the challenges schools face in attracting and retaining teachers. People concerned with the problem examined teacher career ladders, compensation systems, and the factors associated with retaining teachers through advancement. For learners, who their teachers are and how those teachers are retained are imperative. These are the people who we hope know students the best… Mobility leaves learners with no one who knows their strengths, interests, and needs from one year to the next… Unfortunately, not much has improved. With rises in accountability, salary systems have been challenged to compensate based on student performance and levels of professional development, including attainment of advanced degrees. Roles such as teacher-on-special-assignment, department chairs, instructional coaches, or multi-classroom leaders, like those found in Opportunity Culture schools, are still popular in districts.
• Elements of the next education workforce – approaching equity in the next education workforce: we understand that there are no easy fixes in education, especially when it comes to creating more equitable outcomes and environments for learners and teachers. Schools alone cannot overcome all of the societal and family barriers by themselves, but we must do better. It’s hard to imagine doing much better than we are without finding ways to reach individual students in much more effective ways, opening up schools and classrooms to a more permeable relationship with community services and supports, and creating the conditions for people in the community, who know students’ families and cultural contexts, to have a much more meaningful role in teaching. As Next Education Workforce models are built, it will be essential to continually consider the structural and systemic equity implications of this work.
• Context matters when building Next Education Workforce models – what is common about all of representative models considered in the book is that they are employing the design elements of the Next Education Workforce. These schools are providing opportunities for teachers to team, providing protected time to collaborate, and intentionally designing deeper and personalized learning experiences. They are leveraging various human capital resources, such as the community and local teacher preparation programs, to bring more adults around students. Finally, there are clear ways to enter, specialize, and advance in the profession in each model.
• Conditions to launch and sustain the next education workforce – having worked with dozens of schools that have transitioned from one-teacher, one-classroom staffing models to teams with distributed expertise (and, perhaps more importantly, several schools that haven’t), the authors have come to realize that the single biggest factor in successfully navigating that change is the building-level leader… Principals face challenging working conditions and stressful accountability systems. It’s no surprise that turnover among school leaders is high. One 2017 study found that around 18 percent of principals had left their position the previous year. In higher-poverty schools, the rate was 21 percent.’ Such leadership turnover means drastic losses in specific institutional and community knowledge, as well as general leadership skills.
• Transforming teacher preparation and professional learning for teams – teaming is not new. But we have to ask ourselves: Why didn’t teaming stick? The authors believe that one of the key reasons is that neither teacher preparation nor in-service professional development changed to support team-based models. Throwing preservice and in-service teachers into teams without proper training isn’t going to work any more than throwing them into open classrooms, asking them to teach math with manipulatives, or requiring them to implement a new curriculum without preservice preparation and professional learning that is designed for the work we are asking educators to perform… Learning how to be a strong team member, focused on the mission of the organization, student learning, and well-being will be essential from preparation to orientation and induction and throughout their career.
• Human resource systems to support team-based models – one of the most frequent questions that the authors get is, “So, what are all the policy hurdles that get in the way of building team-based staffing models?” As it turns out, at the level of the nation and states, the answer is, “as of now, there aren’t many.” However, policies and, perhaps more importantly, inherited structures and processes at the level of the school system have big impacts on how successful team-based staffing models can be. To see the true power of teams of educators with distributed expertise, we must also transform how human capital management systems (HCMSs) function so that the right people can make strategic and evidence-based human resource (HR) decisions.
• Optimism and systems change – the authors have heard a lot from people in all facets of the system. Many have the desire to move to systems that make sense and achieve the purpose for kids and adults in schools, but there is pessimism about the how. To expect that the solutions to the grand challenges of education will be discovered if we continue to root them in the same one-teacher, one-classroom model that we’ve had for decades is, we argue, inconceivable… There are great things being built: curricular innovation, technological solutions, many products, and programs with real potential. However, many are not feasible or as robust as they could be in the current system. Teachers can’t take on one more thing by themselves. They need a team. They need others with differing skill levels and skill sets that they can lean on, delegate to, and learn from. If we started to think about solutions for teams, personalized and deeper learning, and specializations and advancement, then maybe our solutions would be different -and would actually push the systems to change, to be more equitable, and to be more sustainable in the long run.
• Final message – there is so much to do, and our learners can’t wait. Too few see education as a viable career path and too many are leaving too quickly. Too many students are not getting the education they need or deserve for our economy, democracy, or equitable outcomes. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the Next Education Workforce, and the authors understand completely that context matters. They are not being prescriptive about a model, and they hope they have made that clear through this book. Rather, they are exploring the ways that school systems and schools are building, testing, trying, and changing how educators work together, learn together, and serve students in the best ways with the best practices.
• We all want to fundamentally change the system so that more people see teaching as a viable profession; more parents tell their kids that teaching is a noble, honorable, and enjoyable professional path; and a diversity of people see the profession as a community that is inclusive and welcoming. The educators in the Next Education Workforce will need to be nimble, flexible, and dynamic. Changes to the system have to happen at the speed of trust, but we simply can’t wait any longer. After decades of school reform, the structure or systems of education have changed very little, especially the ways in which teachers function and the roles they play. Technology is upon us like never before, and the world is changing too quickly for the one-teacher, one-classroom model where a teacher needs to know and be able to do everything learners need them to do. It’s just not sustain-able. We need the Next Education Workforce.