Publisher’s Note from NASBE

State boards of education have been increasingly concerned about recruiting and retaining effective teachers because of both the outsized impact that quality educators have on student learning and the recent staff shortages in many content areas and hard-to-staff districts. State boards and their fellow state leaders have been casting about for what the research says and what other states are doing to attract new teachers, prepare them well, and increase the effectiveness of existing teachers so they will want to stay in teaching.

For that reason, when approached by longtime research collaborators Conra Gist, professor at the University of Houston, College of Education, and Travis Bristol, associate professor at the University of California–Berkeley School of Education, NASBE welcomed the opportunity to collaborate on this special issue. It is a natural extension into the state policy space of their research on the topic and a natural extension of NASBE’s work to inform state boards on key areas under their purview.

A key strand of the broad research on teacher effectiveness points to the impact on students of having teachers that look like them. Yet the mismatch between the race, gender, and ethnicity of teachers and students remains wide, both nationally and in many states. Even more significant is the research that shows that all students benefit when their teachers reflect a wide variety of demographic characteristics, backgrounds, and circumstances.

As states seek to broaden their teacher pipelines, they confront added difficulties in recruiting and retaining teachers reflective of the student population and the community’s demographics. Some state boards have set goals for increasing teacher diversity and adopted programs geared toward meeting those goals. Others have set goals for increasing the number of teacher candidates generally and for increasing the effectiveness of new teachers and removing barriers to enter the profession generally. Yet many of the programs that states adopt to remove barriers for all candidates—such as grow-your-own programs and apprenticeship programs—have nonetheless succeeded in broadening and deepening the educator workforce in ways that are more reflective of the community makeup.

Gist and Bristol convened teams from four states to examine state data and contexts. The teams consulted education stakeholders within each state before arriving at a set of policy prescriptions appropriate to the context of their respective states for strengthening the teacher workforce. While there are some common concerns and approaches, the briefs from California, Colorado, New York, and Texas differ, too. They do not attempt to solve a national problem but only the state challenge in front of them, respectful of their own state values, priorities, and contexts. Our hope in partnering with the guest editors on this special issue of the Standard is that each state, as it seeks for itself to improve its teacher pipelines and develop the talent it has and needs, is inspired by at least one of the states included in this report.

We thank the state teams, the guest editors, and the state board members who served as reviewers to the overview and state briefs for their efforts to bring policy legs to the important research on teacher effectiveness and diversity.