It’s often been noted that schools don’t do a great job developing talent or offering pathways for their most motivated educators. Studies have shown that it isn’t “low pay” that drives great practitioners from classrooms but rather the limited professional opportunities the classroom presents. When you add in user-hostile hiring practices and the tradition of handing the most difficult assignments to the least experienced teachers it’s no wonder that, when the job market is strong, districts have a tough time attracting and keeping the best people.

That’s bad for educators and for kids, but not only for them. As the largest employer of adults in our economy (bigger than the health care or fast-food industries), schools don’t just prepare people for “the workplace”, they often are the workplace. Employees, students, and families, and the larger community would greatly benefit if districts were engines of talent development if like the best modern employers they were always engaged in preparing employees for the next job. Ironically, the operational and economic damage wrought by the pandemic can help make that possible.

In other words, the ways that people work in and with schools are just beginning to reflect modern workplace expectations: flexible roles, adaptation to the unexpected, and continuous collaboration inside and outside the organization. To make this stick, however, will require the kinds of policies and supports that other sectors take for granted:

  • Talent development models that take advantage of data and embrace flexibility.
  • Flexible, data-rich systems, so that each organization has the information it needs to carry out and monitor its own work and to work well with others.
  • New funding models. 
  • New compensation models. 

Read the full article about talent development by Steven Hodas at Getting Smart.