Opportunity Culture Audio
Opportunity Culture Audio
PA Needs Teachers—and Needs Them to Stay
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When a coalition came together to form PA Needs Teachers in 2022, led by Teach Plus Pennsylvania and the National Center on Education and the Economy, it first advocated for policy wins around bringing teachers into the profession, such as student teacher stipends. But Pennsylvania had another problem—teachers got in, but then they got out.
In February, Teach Plus Pennsylvania policy fellows published Reimagining Teaching: How Strategic Staffing Can Empower Teachers & Accelerate Learning in PA, calling for state support for staffing redesign for districts. Having studied strategic staffing models and seen Opportunity Culture® design in action in North Carolina schools, the guests in this Opportunity Culture® Audio piece explain how they envision staffing design making a difference across the commonwealth—for teacher satisfaction, student success, and the economy—and why it gives them hope for a sustainable teaching profession for educators at all stages of their career.
“Educators are deeply committed to students, but the job itself has increasingly become difficult to sustain.”—Jill Weller-Reilly, Teach Plus Pennsylvania senior policy fellow/2024 Policy Fellow of the Year
“We’re losing around 7,000 teachers a year, and we aren’t bringing in that many as newly certified teachers.”—Laura Boyce, Teach Plus Pennsylvania executive director
“It just comes down to the simple truth that many of our problems in teaching right now aren’t just about who is in the classroom, but how the learning environment is actually structured. And don’t get me wrong, like, student teaching stipends are important. Recruitment campaigns are important, multiple career pathways in the profession are important to fill vacancies. But staffing design asks the deeper question of why is the role unsustainable, right?”—Christopher Brown, Teach Plus Pennsylvania policy fellow
“Our educators are the workforce behind the workforce, essentially, and they are the profession that makes all other professions possible.”—Nathan Driskell, National Center on Education and the Economy chief policy officer
Related Links
Transcript: PA Needs Teachers—and Needs Them to Stay
Report: Reimagining Teaching: How Strategic Staffing Can Empower Teachers & Accelerate Learning in PA
May 5, 2026, agenda and written testimony; video: Pennsylvania House Education Committee—Education Workforce Informational Meeting, at which Jill Weller-Reilly was a panelist
Opportunity Culture® Audio: In Mississippi, Responding to a Teacher Retention Crisis