Since 2019, student academic achievement has fallen rapidly. This may feel like an unprecedented and impossible shift to recover from, but there is one clear way to recover the learning loss: Get and keep talented teachers and leaders for our students.

Like other fields, the educator talent pipeline has taken a hit. Some estimates show the school year started with more than 30,000 teacher roles open and more than 100,000 roles filled by uncertified staff.

Our educator workforce may never return to pre-pandemic conditions. Too much has happened to make talented educators change professions or leave the workforce altogether — stress related to the pandemic, divisive politics invading our schools, and students getting further and further behind.

Research and data, though, show where we go from here. Management researchers like Brooks Holtom have studied “job embeddedness” for decades. This concept is simply all the things that help get employees embedded into an organization, making it more difficult for them to choose to leave.

Three forces are behind job embeddedness: fit, links and sacrifice. For example, if you have friends at work, you may think twice before leaving for a job with people you don’t know. This is an example of links.

Alternatively, if you find a similar job with similar intrinsic rewards but for a lot more money, you may be willing to leap to a new organization. That is sacrifice.

Holtom and others identified ways organizations can change their practice to help facilitate this embeddedness. They include providing quality training or leadership programs to build skills, giving employees opportunities to weigh in on decisions and/or time to know their colleagues, and supporting employees with child and elder care.

Growing evidence helps us understand how we get, support and keep talented teachers. For example, matching educators to their schools based on their student teaching experience make teachers more effective. This may help increase fit. And we know that teachers who have networks they feel comfortable consulting when implementing new teacher standards are significantly related to student achievement. This is a way to create links.

I surveyed 62 Texas teachers in urban school districts to see what they said would make them stay in their roles longer. There are limitations with this data, given the small and limited sample size, and it should be interpreted carefully. That said, the data is interesting, especially when interpreted with the job embeddedness theory lens.

I am a former teacher and was embedded in that role from day one because I fit the role and felt links to my students and the teachers I taught beside. To date, my biggest professional accomplishments include things like teaching struggling middle schoolers to love reading. I have had amazing jobs since leaving the classroom, but not one hooked me that deeply from day one.

The survey data reflects this phenomenon of fit and links. Even with all that is happening, about half of the survey respondents reported being satisfied with their position. And 76 percent agreed they are a good match for their school and role.

While the education field has a leg up regarding fit and links, this is different when it comes to sacrifice. Seventy-one percent of survey takers agreed they frequently explore other job opportunities, and only 34 percent agreed it would be very difficult to leave their current jobs.

So how can we design a system that gives teachers such strong benefits and support that it would be a sacrifice for them to leave? According to those surveyed, we should do three things immediately:

First and unsurprisingly, pay teachers more and give them better benefits.

Second, give teachers more control over how and when they do their jobs. Eighty-eight percent agreed they’d stay longer if they had more autonomy. And 81 percent agreed a more flexible schedule would entice them to stay longer, as some districts have figured out how to do.

Third, provide teachers with more support. All but two teachers agreed they would stay longer if they had more support with student behavior. And 74 percent would stay if they had more support with parent or community challenges.

Talent is our most limited resource and critical to improving outcomes for students in schools. Investing in our teachers is a surefire way of gaining what we’ve lost over the last two years.

Eva Chiang is the managing director of leadership and programming at the George W. Bush Institute. A longer version of this essay originally appeared in The Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute. This is distributed by InsideSources.com.

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