Project: Recruiting and Maintaining Effective Educators

Scope

Through this project, the Region 5 Comprehensive Center (R5CC) team has supported the Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) in refining aspects of their Tennessee Educator Acceleration Model (TEAM) that is used for annual teacher evaluation.This year, the project is focused on retention of educators and in particular, the high variability in teacher vacancy rates across the state of Tennessee.

High-Leverage Problem

TDOE's Office of Human Capital supports districts with work across the educator professional continuum. As noted in TN’s American Rescue Plan (ARP), the state reaffirmed its commitment to assessment while balancing reasonable accountability provisions and teacher evaluation processes for the year. Last year, TDOE requested support in refining their process for approval of off-the-shelf assessment measures for use in teacher evaluation (TEAM). This work is ongoing. Additionally, in January 2022, TDOE requested vacancy data from districts, as required by Board Strategic Compensation Policy 5.600 Sect II part 2(b)3; 50 districts reported zero vacancies and 20 reported >10 vacancies. This year, they requested support with better understanding the wide variability in teacher vacancy rates.

Approach to Capacity-Building Services

To help TDOE improve their off-the-shelf assessment measure review and approval process, R5CC will continue to collaborate with TDOE on updates to process documents and a review rubric to increase efficiency and standardization. To help TDOE better understand the wide variability in teacher vacancy rates across the state, R5CC will conduct a scan of the teacher vacancy literature, and design a plan to collect and analyze qualitative data to summarize the differences in high and low vacancy matched districts across the state. R5CC will use results of the scan and analysis to develop recommendations for next steps and communication briefs.