National Landscape Snapshot

Class Size

While well-intended, class size and student-teacher ratio laws can be a barrier to implementing strategic staffing models because they can be overly restrictive. In some scenarios, these policies may not allow for more than one adult in the same classroom to be assigned to support students, or they may prohibit a highly effective teacher from taking on additional students, even with additional support and pay.

In Oklahoma, the law states that students in Kindergarten through six grade “shall not be assigned to a teacher or class that includes more than 20 students.” In grades seven through twelve, teachers are limited to no more than 140 students on any given 6-hour school day.¹ Oklahoma has no waiver option for districts, making it challenging for teachers and staff to explore different ways of meeting student needs.

Teachers as Observers

Creating meaningful leadership opportunities requires flexibility for teachers to serve as team leaders. As a team leader, teachers need the ability to observe and guide their teams, which may consist of teachers, residents, and paraprofessionals. When policy restricts the ability of teachers to be formal observers², it limits career pathways for teachers who do not want to be administrators yet want to serve in a leadership capacity. As team leaders, teachers can provide content-specific, consistent, ongoing, and meaningful feedback—filling a void that often exists in most current structures.

In Arkansas, teachers are prohibited from observing and evaluating other teachers. To do observations, you have to be licensed by the State Board as an administrator designated as the person responsible for evaluating teachers, school-building leaders, or district-level leaders, and who is an employee of the educational entity in which the evaluations are performed. This effectively dictates administrators as the only ones who can be observers.

Team Outcomes

States have an interest in tracking student progress and linking it to specific teachers to effectively measure and assess student growth. In many strategic staffing models, state policy may need to be flexible to allow local districts to create team-based accountability, where teachers are held accountable for team outcomes. At present, 30 states include student growth as one measure in teacher evaluation.

Arizona mandates that “the total of school/grade/classroom-level data elements accounts for 33% of the evaluation outcome.” The evaluator and teacher decide what goals to include, with classroom-level data accounting for at least 20% of the evaluation outcomes. This provides flexibility at the school level for other team outcomes while maintaining accountability for each teacher to the students they work with.

Restrictions of the Use of Support Staff and Time

When state policy restricts the roles of paraprofessionals, residents, and other support staff, it limits how schools can think creatively about using all the adults in the building to best meet student needs. Collaborative teams are another core principle of many strategic staffing models. When state policy limits the time teachers have to collaborate, it could impede team-based approaches to instruction.

Nebraska restricts the use of teacher aides (support staff) to non-instructional activities by saying, “Such teacher aides may not assume any teaching responsibilities. A teacher aide may be assigned duties which are non-teaching in nature.” This means Nebraska schools could not, for example, train paraprofessionals to deliver high-quality reading tutoring to small groups of students under the direction of a fully licensed teacher. Missouri reinforces teachers working alone by mandating that they must have “adequate self-directed planning time, at least 250 minutes per week,” potentially limiting their ability to work together as a team.