Our recent paper, Investing in Educators, compared teacher and nurse union contracts on pay bonuses for hard-to-staff jobs. Nursing and teaching are both professional fields, yet nursing pays substantial, reliable money to fill hard-to-staff shifts and specialties. Despite research documenting the effectiveness of differential pay in high-poverty schools and in STEM, special education, and bilingual classrooms, staffing models for teaching have largely avoided this approach.
Paying educators more for hard-to-fill jobs is overdue, but nursing also deploys other well-tested ways to reshape the job’s responsibilities and roles. Building the infrastructure to test and refine new staffing models is critical, and an education R&D agenda specifically for teaching staffing models could fund:
- Regional labs partnering with districts to pilot multi-classroom-leader and team-teaching structures, with outside evaluators tracking growth, retention, and cost against matched schools;
- Grants for districts to build and validate a “classroom acuity” index from data they already collect, the way nursing groups validated classification tools before hospitals adopted them;
- Data-sharing agreements, tested first in a few states, letting rural systems pool specialist teachers as North Carolina’s districts now do; and
- Pilot projects on a nursing-style timeline: pilot, measure, refine, scale, rather than mandating a model before anyone checks whether it works.
Deploying these R&D methods is a way to test and validate new staffing models in schools. In particular, they could be used to test education staffing models that the nursing field has already tested, refined, and proven. These include:
- Team-based care. Hospitals rarely ask one RN to do everything for a patient; they build a team of RNs, licensed practical nurses, and aides working at the top of their license, customized to specific specialties and settings. Schools mostly ask one teacher to be the sole adult responsible for twenty-five to thirty children’s needs. Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture is one initiative that shows how a team teaching model could work: Multi-classroom leaders coach four to six teachers while still teaching part-time, “team reach” teachers serve more students for more pay without larger classes, and paraprofessionals become “reach associates” leading small groups. Schools using these models are up to three times more likely to exceed growth expectations, with students gaining an extra half-year of growth, on average. This flexibility also crosses district lines. In rural North Carolina, two districts three hours apart now share a remotely located multi-classroom leader.
- Acuity-based nursing staffing. Validated classification tools score each patient’s condition and assign nurses to match: A neonatal ICU may run close to one nurse per patient, while a stable rehab floor runs one to six, with scores reassessed every few hours. Research shows this model works to improve safety and outcomes. Schools staff the opposite way, with a fixed number of adults per classroom, set once a year regardless of how that group of students is doing this month. An acuity-based analogue, a more intensive version of multi-tiered systems of support, would put early-warning data to real use, flagging which classrooms need extra help and letting principals shift co-teachers or interventionists there in real time, rather than waiting for next year’s formula.
- Flexible deployment. Hospitals move nurses across shifts, units, and facilities using per-diem pools, float pools, and travel nurses to meet demand without waiting years for a pipeline to mature. Districts, by contrast, still staff school-by-school and year-by-year, with vacancies in rural areas, high-poverty schools, and specialties like special education and STEM chronically under-filled or staffed by underqualified teachers and long-term substitutes.
- Career ladders. A nurse can enter through an associate degree, a bachelor’s, or a bridge program, and later become a nurse practitioner, a certified registered nurse anesthetist, or a clinical specialist. Each of these rungs has distinct pay and scope, and keeps the person at the bedside if they choose. In education, a teacher who wants more pay usually has one path: leaving the classroom for administration.
None of these nursing models arrived fully formed; all have been developed and refined over time, and none would translate cleanly into schools without the testing nursing has done for decades. For instance, hospitals innovate on staffing partly because margins and financial incentives demand it; schools don’t operate under that kind of profit pressure, nor should they. Further, a hospital patient mostly needs competent, in-the-moment care; students benefit from teachers who know them over time.
Flexible staffing still has something to offer education, but the goal isn’t to make teachers interchangeable. It’s to build more rungs and support around a teacher who stays with their students by doing the work of testing which staffing structures hold up.
Given that roughly 80 percent of K-12 spending goes toward people, the limited representation of staffing and human capital research in the field’s reform agenda is a significant gap. Fix that, and the payoff compounds. Every dollar spent validating a classroom acuity tool or piloting a multi-classroom-leader model de-risks the next hundred districts that adopt it. Every rural specialist-sharing pilot tested in one state becomes a template others can borrow instead of reinventing.
By investing in education R&D and funding rigorous pilots, the federal government can unlock needed solutions and give the next generation of teachers the career, not just the paycheck, that they deserve, while better serving our students.
