Last week, the national education policy nonprofit TNTP released a report on recent efforts to strengthen the Arkansas teacher pipeline. Click here to check out the report titled “Moving Up: Promising Strategies to Address Teacher Shortages in Arkansas.”
TNTP highlights the many ongoing efforts to establish and expand high-quality pathways into teaching, increase teacher pay and provide other incentive programs, and address subject and geographic shortages. We are excited about all of the promising activity around the Arkansas teacher pipeline and encourage you to check the report out for yourself.
We are also excited to be a contributor to many of these efforts. The TNTP report highlights several of our contributions, including:
- The Arkansas Teacher Corps – an alternative pathway into teaching that focuses on supporting Arkansans in becoming teachers in high-needs areas; and
- Our partnership with the Arkansas Department of Education’s Office of Educator Effectiveness and Licensure to provide data and research support and evidence-based policy advice. You can find much of our work on our Teacher Pipeline page, including analyses of teacher retention and salary changes in response to the LEARNS Act.
We appreciate TNTP’s final recommendation, which we have quoted below, and we are fully committed to supporting the Department of Education and other stakeholders in their efforts to help all Arkansas’s students reach their full potential.
As the state continues to implement initiatives aimed at teacher recruitment and retention, it is critical for the Arkansas Department of Education to continue to leverage its robust K-12 data warehouse and partnership with the University of Arkansas Office of Education Policy to (1) report at least annually on how the policies and programs described herein are being used by aspiring and current teachers and (2) identify targeted opportunities for continuous improvement in a data informed manner.