States Have Permission to Reimagine Staffing, but Do They Have a Vision for It?

When the US Department of Education clarified in February 2026 that states can use Title II, Part A funds to support strategic staffing, it did not change the law. But it did offer an opportunity to change the conversation.

State leaders have had the flexibility to rethink how schools organize teaching for a long time. But at a moment when the pressures on educators are increasingly hard to ignore, what the guidance does is bring that flexibility to the fore. For state boards of education, the question is not whether strategic staffing is allowed. It is whether states’ existing policies and approaches to funding and oversight are designed to make it possible.

At its core, strategic staffing is not another program to layer onto existing programs. As my colleagues and I describe in our report, “Realizing Reimagined Teaching,” it is a student-centered, teacher-sustaining approach to organizing people, time, and resources.[1] It shifts schools away from a model where one teacher is solely responsible for a classroom and toward one where teams of educators share responsibility for a common group of students.

That shift matters. The traditional structure of school has remained largely unchanged, even as expectations for teachers have expanded. New responsibilities—differentiation, data use, social-emotional support, technology integration—have been layered onto the same basic design.

Strategic staffing offers a way to redistribute responsibilities so that expertise is shared, roles are differentiated, and support is embedded in daily practice. It challenges the default assumption that one adult ought to be responsible for one group of students in isolation. That model limits opportunities for specialization, makes collaboration difficult to sustain, and places increasing demands on individual teachers.

Reorganizing around teams creates different conditions. Teachers can focus on areas of strength. Novice educators can learn within a team. Leadership roles can expand without requiring educators to leave the classroom. These are structural changes, not programmatic ones. And they do not take hold simply because they are allowed. In most states, the surrounding policy environment still reflects a single-teacher classroom model.

The constraint is accumulated policies that shape how educators are deployed: licensure requirements, definitions of teacher-of-record, class-size rules, and instructional time requirements. Together, these reinforce a default structure that districts rarely deviate from.

As a result, new investments are often layered onto existing models in isolation rather than used to redesign them. Professional learning is planned separately from staffing decisions. Leadership development is not tied to how schools are organized. Collaboration is encouraged but not built into schedules. Without alignment, these efforts can improve individual components without changing the underlying structure of teaching.

State boards do not choose staffing models. But they set the conditions that make those models possible or unlikely. Three actions increase possibilities for adoption of strategic staffing:

Removing structural constraints that lock in the single-teacher model. State policies often define how teachers are assigned to students, how many students they serve, and how time is structured. Updating teacher-of-record definitions, allowing flexibility in class size and student groupings, and revisiting seat-time requirements can enable schools to organize teachers into teams.

Aligning licensure and guidance with differentiated roles. Licensure systems and state guidance signal what roles are recognized and supported. States can create pathways that enable team-based roles, apprenticeships, and shared responsibility for students. They can also ensure that Title II guidance connects professional learning, leadership development, and staffing rather than treating them as separate efforts.

Signaling and supporting coherent use of resources. State boards influence how districts interpret and use Title II funds through state plans, guidance, and accountability expectations. When states frame funding only as a set of allowed activities, districts tend to invest resources as they always have. But when states articulate a vision for workforce redesign, they create incentives for more coherent strategies.

The federal guidance affirms that states can use Title II to fund differentiated roles, job-embedded collaboration, mentoring systems, and leadership development. But it does not determine how those elements come together or whether they do.

Strategic staffing is not a simple shift. It requires careful implementation, attention to local context, and sustained leadership. Not every model will translate across settings, and not every district will move at the same pace. While flexibility at the federal level does not eliminate those challenges, neither does maintaining the current structure resolve them.

Notes

[1] Sophie Zamarripa, David Casalaspi, and Titilayo Tinubu Ali, “Realizing Reimagined Teaching: A Framework for Strategic Staffing Implementation,” report (Bellwether, January 2026).