This story was originally published by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
By Carly Sitrin | Chalkbeat Philadelphia
Teaching in Pennsylvania is at a breaking point, according to a new report.
The rate of educator attrition is rising, turnover is disproportionately impacting urban and rural districts, and on the ground teachers are reporting feeling burnt out, overworked, and underprepared.
All of this creates an inhospitable environment for student learning, according to new research from PA Needs Teachers, a statewide coalition led by the Teach Plus advocacy group and the National Center on Education and the Economy.
Their solution is to radically reimagine what it means to teach in Pennsylvania schools. The report’s authors, including Philly teacher Trey Smith, are proposing shifting from a traditional one-teacher-in-front-of-one-classroom approach to something that’s more collaborative that would help students as well as educators.
In the various models they propose, small groups of educators and support staff work together to schedule, plan lessons, give constructive feedback on their teaching, and help each other grow.
New teachers would receive mentorship and guidance, experienced teachers would be compensated and recognized in their schools, and paraprofessionals and tutors would pay extra attention to struggling students.
In practice, a group of 100 students may share a team of six educators who get guidance and support from a “lead teacher.” That would replace a model, for example, of four teachers each responsible for their own separate classroom of 25 students with little feedback on their individual teaching styles.
The report authors call it “strategic staffing.” Smith thinks of it as a teaching team. And schools in Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, are primed for this sort of innovation.
“I really want us to think about, how are we honestly accounting for what teachers know and how they can grow?” said Smith, who teaches at Marian Anderson Neighborhood Academy in Southwest Center City. “Teachers are not all the same, so whatever system we design, we can’t treat teachers like widgets or cogs in a big machine.”
Smith said any new teaching model has to “maximize the talent we have,” including teachers with varying levels of experience and classroom management skills.
New teachers with the least classroom experience are often given the most challenging school assignments. Black or Hispanic students and those from low-income families are therefore the least likely to receive the most experienced, qualified teachers in Pennsylvania.
And Philly, which employs less than 20% of the state’s teachers, accounts for 30% of statewide attrition, according to the report.
As a digital literacy teacher, Smith is a specialist. That means when other teachers need coverage, either because they’re absent or trying to find time to plan ahead, he’s often the first to get the call to step in. But what he said he really wants is to be in constant conversation with other teachers to game-plan and get creative about ways lessons can interlock and students can engage with the same ideas across multiple subjects.
“I have no collaborative planning time with my colleagues and my grades because I’m their coverage,” Smith said.
Doylestown middle school teacher Jill Weller-Reilly, another co-author of the report, said if the state wants teachers to stay in the field, schools need to provide educators with opportunities to grow and advance in their careers.
“We don’t lose new teachers because they can’t do the job. We lose them because we don’t help them learn how and set them up for success,” Weller-Reilly said.
According to Teach Plus polling from 2025, 70% of educators nationwide said they “definitely” or “probably” would want their school to adopt such an approach.
The report authors note there are no state-level limits on class size at the K-12 level, and the state does not mandate a specific student-to-teacher ratio. As a local control state, Pennsylvania school districts have a fair amount of autonomy for things like budgeting, teacher time, and compensation. Those factors could make “strategic staffing” easier to implement.
However, union negotiations and limited district resources do mean districts like Philly would have to get buy-in from multiple parties to launch a strategic staffing model.
Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Arthur Steinberg signaled some interest in the idea, saying in an email to Chalkbeat that “districts including ours must be more innovative with resource allocation to improve hiring, retention, and professional support.”
But change can be notoriously hard for educators, administrators, and school communities. And the report’s proposal comes with a cost.
While most strategic staffing models are intended to be budget-neutral after schools have gone through the design process, the Teach Plus advocates said, there are significant up-front costs to getting one of these models off the ground.
Teach Plus wants state lawmakers to establish a grant program and a way to evaluate the effectiveness of Pennsylvania’s programs alongside similar models like North Carolina’s Advanced Teaching Roles program. State evaluations of the North Carolina program are beginning to show promise, with some data demonstrating it helped improve students’ math and science scores and teachers’ perceptions of their jobs. North Carolina’s program costs about $16.5 million to run annually in 17 districts.
Another major hurdle to establishing strategic staffing in classrooms is simple exhaustion with new initiatives. Philadelphia, like other major city school districts, has experimented with innovative teaching and learning models in the past, only to have them fade away or lose funding and attention.
But Smith said if the changes are born from the bottom up, and truly take educators’ ideas into consideration, it could make Philly a prized destination for future teachers.
“I still am hopeful if the approach is such that it really honors what teachers know and think, that’s how the model can work,” he said.
Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.
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