The Imperative to Support Early Career Teachers

The first year of a job in any career is challenging: new responsibilities, new colleagues, figuring out how to add more toner to the printer. Teaching and supporting students is no exception. Ask any teacher or clinician about their first year in the role - you might hear words like "tough," "overwhelming," and "draining." 
 
Fortunately, challenging environments are where new professionals, including new educators, grow. Research shows that on key measures of teacher effectiveness—like impact on student test scores—the most pronounced growth happens in the first five years. 
 
Unfortunately, sometimes the difficulties new educators face goes beyond what is fair or reasonable. As the figure below shows, teachers are most likely to leave the profession in those first five years, with particularly high rates of attrition for Black early career teachers. By evidence of their entering the profession, educators are deeply committed to students, and most see their teaching as having a positive impact. But when they experience poor working conditions, including relationships with leadership, compensation, and safety, they leave. Black teachers are more likely to teach in underfunded and high turnover schools, which likely drives some of the racial disparities in rates of attrition.  

Why Early Career Retention Matters 

You might now ask yourself: isn’t some turnover just inevitable in any job? Indeed, data suggests that educators are either as or less likely than other professionals to leave their employer. It might be tempting to say that to address challenges like teacher shortages and diversity we ought to just focus on getting a robust pipeline of new people who can fill roles when they turnover and forget about retention. 

 
But early career retention matters in its own right, too. Research tells us that access to highly effective teachers is a vital ingredient for student success. Students should not always or only be taught by those still in that early period of growth - but the reality is that students in the highest poverty districts in Illinois are twice as likely as those in lower poverty environments to be taught by novice educators. Furthermore, attrition is not always about leaving the profession but also educator movement from more challenging under-resourced environments to more well-resourced schools. If we want new teachers and clinicians to remain in the profession to develop into highly skilled tenured educators, we need to focus on facilitating opportunities for growth in the first 5 years while addressing the challenges novice educators face, particularly in chronically high-turnover environments. 

What Illinois is Doing About It – And What’s at Risk 
Illinois has taken important steps to support early career educators. Alongside the myriad other investments that the state is making to address challenges in the educator pipeline from recruitment to veteran educator retention and leadership, it is making investments in its new educators. Illinois has set aside ESSER dollars to fund a state mentoring and coaching program that pairs new teachers and clinicians with peers who can help orient them to a new school and make connections with veteran educators across the system who can offer content area specific coaching that builds new educators' skills. This strategy is a sound one: research demonstrates that well designed mentoring programs improve teacher effectiveness and retention. 
 
Here's the problem: the state's mentoring and coaching program is not on track to continue — proposed budgets for FY26 so far make no mention of this crucial program. The program was funded through federal stimulus dollars (ESSER) that were recently clawed back by the federal government (but were regardless planned to be used up by the end of the year). While the General Assembly did transition some ESSER funded programs to the state budget last year, this program was notably absent. This budget season, despite the importance of supporting early career educators, mentoring is once again not a part of the Governor's proposed budget. 
 
My team spends a lot of time looking at what the state is doing to address each facet of the educator pipeline, from early recruitment to pathways into leadership. There are an impressive array of programs addressing the challenges at each step of the pipeline, with investments in FY25 totaling over $80M. But when it comes to our early career educators, there is notably only one program specifically focused on supporting them: our state's new teacher and clinician mentoring and coaching program. Ending this program would leave a gaping hole in an otherwise robust educator pipeline strategy. 
 
When we don't do everything we can to cultivate a strong and diverse educator pipeline, it's our students who pay the price. Looking forward to a proposed budget in FY26, I hope legislators recognize that and do everything in their power to keep investing in the supports that early career teachers and clinicians need to grow into the educators they - and we - dream them to be. 

Mercedes Wentworth-Nice is a Senior Policy Associate for Advance Illinois. 

Using Data to Better Understand the Educator Workforce

The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) has been sharing a snapshot of the supply, demand, and educator shortages in Illinois for roughly twenty years. This past December, they released their latest version of the triennial Educator and Supply Report, featuring an ambitious and expanded scope. The report analyzes a wide set of metrics, using employment data from teachers, administrators, and support staff. 

There’s a great deal to dig into. For my part, having released a report this past fall on how the state has been doing in growing, preparing and retaining its educator workforce, especially amidst COVID, I found certain data points of particular interest. This included updated educator retention data from SY22-23, which suggest that teacher and principal retention has largely returned to pre-pandemic levels after a temporary 'boost' during the early pandemic years (though what these trends look like can depend on how you define ‘retention’). Interestingly, ISBE’s analysis also shows that the number of former educators returning to the profession, which decreased in the first year of the pandemic, still hasn’t bounced back. 

While these overall numbers are important, anyone who lives in Illinois knows that there are significant differences in educator supply and demand across communities and schools throughout the state. The most recent report embraces this geographic diversity, demonstrating how retention varies from region to region. 

There are real regional disparities across certain metrics. Yet ISBE’s analysis also makes clear that some challenges are consistent across the state. While the racial composition of public school students varies from place to place, every region in the state sees a profound gap between the percentage of students of color and percentage of teachers of color. It is both intuitive and substantially research-backed that a racially and ethnically diverse teacher workforce matters. Still, no matter where in Illinois you look, you’ll see a workforce that is far from representative of local students. 

Finally, the report reminds us that reality does not always reflect our expectations. For example, we know that there is high demand for bilingual and foreign language teachers. That said, data from the last three years show that rates at which completers of educator preparation programs were hired into Illinois public schools within one year of completion were lower for educators with bilingual and foreign language endorsements compared to educators endorsed in most other areas. 

To me, this exemplifies why reports—and data—like this matter; our assumptions about trends and challenges may not align with reality. On its own, data cannot fix what ails Illinois’ educator workforce. But it’s a critical tool for understanding where the real challenges actually are, how they manifest, and what it will take to address them. If we don’t accurately understand the problem, we may propose or invest in misguided solutions. ISBE’s report, in combination with other recent or upcoming research and analyses, is not only illuminating and important, but should help guide efforts to build out and support the educator workforce this coming legislative session and beyond. 

Mercedes Wentworth-Nice is a Senior Policy Associate for Advance Illinois.