Getting to the Root of Illinois Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Recognition

James Coylott & Lois Kimmel, 2024

Despite funded initiatives to attract, hire, and retain teachers, Illinois continues to struggle with teacher shortages, particularly in hiring diverse teaching staff to reflect communities served by public school districts. In conversations with the Region 9 Comprehensive Center (R9CC) about the challenge, Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) Department of Teaching and Learning staff raised the need for additional geographical and disaggregated evidence, resources, and support to better understand teacher shortages and how to strengthen recruitment and retention efforts.

Year 1: Understanding the Data

To develop a more holistic understanding of the teacher shortage challenge, R9CC worked with ISBE to use available data to analyze the loss of potential teachers from college through the first 5 years of teaching. R9CC staff brought in subject matter experts from the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders (GTL Center), a former federally funded content center now operated by the American Institutes for Research® (AIR®). GTL Center staff provided the Teacher Shortage Tool, which uses available data to analyze the loss of potential teachers by multiple characteristics. Resulting visualizations, like Exhibit 1: Illinois—Race Gaps in Teacher Retention Rates, were key supports for the next steps in the Illinois Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Recognition partnership.

R9CC and ISBE staff used the data visualizations in a collaborative data review process to understand and prioritize problems, discuss deeper conceptualizations, and elevate more effective plans and solutions. This collaborative data review led ISBE to identify seven components of the shortage related to attracting students to the profession; preparing candidates; and developing, supporting, and retaining teachers. These components were key to guiding ISBE’s next steps toward aligning evidence-based strategies with the state’s unique issues in strengthening the teacher workforce.

The Teaching Pipeline

Data visualizations produced through GTL’s Teacher Shortage Tool showed where potential candidates diverged from the route to teaching between high school graduation and 5 years of teaching. ISBE staff said the visualizations drove home the fact that the staffing process was a “pipeline.” This realization helped ISBE staff shift their thinking about strategies: 

If it's a pipeline, then you need to attend to the health of the pipeline at various points in various different ways, as opposed to just having a set of retention strategies or a set of recruitment strategies.

ISBE staff

Shortage Components in the Illinois Teacher Pipeline

The GTL Center’s Talent Development Framework outlined ways that state- and district-level policy makers could systematically improve educator quality and address teacher shortages. In working with the Talent Development Framework, ISBE identified components of the shortage in Illinois.

Equitable Access for All Students

Attract

• Illinois experiences disproportionately low enrollment of students of color in college educator preparation programs.
• In 2019, schools in rural Illinois experienced the highest rate of unfilled teaching positions compared with urban and suburban schools.

Prepare

• Illinois experienced 1,858 unfilled teaching positions in 2019, with special education, STEM, elementary education, and bilingual education accounting for 72% of them.
• Illinois experiences a lack of local educator preparation program options for students in the northwestern and southeastern regions.

Develop, Support, Retain

• A disproportionate number of newly certified individuals of color are not becoming first-year public school teachers in Illinois.
• Illinois experiences decreasing retention rates for teachers in their first 4 years (first year: 86.6%; second year: 76.8%; third year: 68.4%; fourth year: 61.1%).
• Illinois experiences low school-level teacher retention rates in low-income schools (50%) and low-performing schools (42%).
• Illinois experienced higher attrition rates for teachers of color that White teachers throughout their first 4 years of teaching, with Black teachers leaving the state educator workforce at the highest rate: Black (57%), Latinx (43%), and White (39%).

Year 3: Planning With Stakeholder Voices

R9CC coordinated a strategy session with statewide stakeholder groups. The session was designed to “pressure test” the identified shortage components and the aligned evidence-based practices against programs to address pipeline issues currently available to stakeholders. The 23 stakeholders represented rural schools, institutions of higher education, and Grow Your Own organizations, among others. The discussion uncovered gaps, overlaps, and misalignments in existing programs and practices, setting the stage for ISBE’s development of evidence-based, stakeholder-informed policy decisions.

ISBE compared the strategies included in the research briefs with current initiatives and stakeholders’ perspectives on solutions to pipeline problems in conversations with R9CC as a thought partner. Through this process, R9CC and ISBE built on understandings developed through data collection, stakeholder feedback, and the alignment between existing initiatives and evidence-based practices. This was done in support of ISBE’s planning process to identify initiatives that would effectively target workforce pipeline issues. One ISBE staff member explained that the “quick wins” made possible by the work, like effectively targeting grant funding to districts to address retention, would directly affect students in those schools.

Year 5: Planning for Sustainability

After spending a year gathering input from stakeholders, we identified priority categories related to the teacher workforce that would make up the data visualized in the GIS maps. We found common themes within these categories and designed two essential questions that would help stakeholders make decisions and monitor progress: 

• Essential Question 1: What is the status of student, teacher, and administrator diversity in Illinois school districts compared to that of new teacher licensees?  
• Essential Question 2: What are the relationships between educator shortage rates, retention rates, and school district financial status?

Each essential question addresses some aspect of the teacher workforce that stakeholders and ISBE are trying to understand better.  

Data  

In Year 5, R9CC focused on identifying and accessing available data related to the essential questions. R9CC relied on publicly available data and carefully deliberated strategies for visualizing these variables through layers on a GIS map. The team identified, collected, and cleaned the data, and then developed the GIS map. In partnership with ISBE, the R9CC team methodically considered approaches to displaying each variable so that it would provide meaningful insights for stakeholders at the school, district, and state levels. The GIS data layering features enabled us to map multiple variables at the same unit of analysis for a more in-depth and nuanced picture of the regional teacher workforce in Illinois. 

Sustainability  

Knowing that the project would be coming to a close in Year 5, a major theme of this year has been sustainability. R9CC and ISBE have spent significant time determining the best ways to keep data in the GIS maps up to date so that they have longevity. ISBE and R9CC are working together to integrate the maps into ISBE’s systems and structures, and R9CC is working to build ISBE’s technical knowledge of and skill with the GIS platform through personalized coaching.

Communications  

Finally, R9CC and ISBE know that the maps are beneficial only if stakeholders use them to inform decision making. Therefore, in partnership with ISBE, R9CC is hosting workshops and coaching sessions on how to disseminate and communicate the maps to the right audiences through the right platforms. 

Looking Forward: Vision for the Future

In the future, when ISBE, districts, and other stakeholders want to make decisions about strategies to address inequitable access to effective and diverse teachers, they can use the GIS map to visualize the data they use to make decisions. Teacher shortages and diversifying the teacher workforce are not addressed by blanket strategies that affect the whole state; instead, strategies are targeted to the districts and schools that need them most.

In continuing partnership, R9CC will support ISBE’s goal of using an effective continuous improvement process to address teacher pipeline shortages. In the long term, ISBE’s and Illinois stakeholders’ ability to select evidence-based strategies to address teacher pipeline issues specific to Illinois will also address equity and diversity gaps in the teacher workforce.