The Education Workforce Has Changed: What Forward-Thinking Districts Are Doing About It

Key Takeaways

• 37% of educators consider leaving the profession at least once a month. The pace of work has become unsustainable in a way that compensation alone cannot fix.
• 68% of educators say cutting support staff has the most harmful effect on student achievement, yet these are often the first positions eliminated in budget conversations.
• 78% of paraeducators find their work deeply fulfilling, yet nearly 75% plan to leave within a year. High satisfaction scores are masking a serious retention problem.
• 77% of districts provide no training to substitute teachers beyond basic logistics, despite students spending the equivalent of an entire academic year learning from them by graduation.
• The districts finding success are not just hiring differently. They are redesigning how teams are structured, how support roles are valued, and how the work itself gets done.

For more than a decade, the education workforce conversation has centered on supply. Not enough teachers. Not enough candidates in the pipeline. Not enough people willing to do the work for what the work pays.

Districts built structures that burned through people, then tried to stop the drain. Working with 10,000 schools across the country gives us a vantage point most organizations do not get, and what we are seeing right now confirms it: the strategies that carried districts through the past decade of teacher shortages will not carry them through the next one.

Enrollment is declining. The National Center for Education Statistics projects public school enrollment will fall 5% between 2022 and 2031, from 49.6 million to 46.9 million students. For districts facing the steepest losses, tighter budgets are limiting the very investments that workforce stability requires, and shifting policy priorities at the federal and state levels are adding operational complexity that most districts weren't planning for even two years ago. At the same time, the students who remain are not simpler to serve. Special education demand is growing. Behavioral complexity in classrooms is up. School-based therapy needs are outpacing the available workforce.

The equation is contracting on one side and expanding on the other, and most districts' workforce strategies were designed for neither condition.

"For most of the past decade, education workforce strategy was built around a growth mindset: hire more, fill every vacancy. Declining enrollment changes that assumption fundamentally. The districts pulling ahead right now are asking how the work should be structured and building teams accordingly."

What the data is telling us

The Kelly Education Re:work Report, drawn from responses from more than 2,500 educators and administrators nationwide, puts numbers behind what we've been observing in the field.

37% of educators say they consider leaving the profession at least once a month. Among special education educators, 57% say their caseloads have become unmanageable. And 58% of educators believe that meaningful emotional support would reduce burnout and improve attendance. Leaders are aware of the problem. Sixty-nine percent of administrators say mental health efforts for staff have increased. Only 45% of educators say they've felt those changes in their own buildings.

We've watched this play out across districts of every size and budget level. A leader invests in a new initiative with genuine intention, announces it, and believes the work is being done. Somewhere between the decision and the classroom, the change doesn't land. Educators don't feel it. And when they don't feel it, they stop expecting the next initiative to be any different.

Closing that gap requires treating implementation as seriously as strategy, and showing educators specifically what changed, and why, because of what they said.

What forward-thinking districts are doing

In Charleston County, South Carolina, district leaders partnered with Kelly Education to analyze the substitute staffing market and adjust pay rates to match competing opportunities. Fill rates climbed above 90% within a month. That outcome came from treating a workforce problem as a data problem rather than working harder at the same approach.

I had a conversation with Brent Madden, Executive Director of the Next Education Workforce at Arizona State University, that I keep coming back to. Brent's framing is direct: we don't have a teacher shortage problem. We have a workforce design problem. His team has spent seven years working with more than 150 schools across 50 school systems in 17 states, helping districts move away from the one-teacher, one-classroom model toward teams of educators: lead teachers, content specialists, paraeducators, and substitutes, wrapping around a shared roster of students. The model asks a different starting question: not "who can we hire to fill this role," but "who do these students need in order to thrive?" The answer is rarely a single person.

What strikes me about this work is what happens to substitute teachers inside these models. In a traditional classroom, a substitute walks in alone and is immediately responsible for everything. In a team-based model, they walk in as a member of a team. Their strengths can be matched to a role. A retired educator brings depth. A recent graduate brings a different kind of connection with students. Neither one is expected to be all things at once. Early research on these models shows turnover rates of 12%, compared to 21% in traditional structures. The educators who experience it tend to ask for it to expand.

The support role problem deserves its own attention, because this is where I see the widest gap between what districts say they value and what the data shows they invest in. Across the country, 77% of districts provide no training for substitute teachers beyond basic logistics. At the same time, 78% of paraeducators find their work deeply fulfilling, yet nearly three-quarters plan to leave within a year. High satisfaction and high turnover in the same role tells you something specific: people who care about the work have no pathway to grow in it. When districts define clear competency standards for support roles, create onboarding that reflects real classroom needs, and build visible career pathways, people stay. When they stay, students benefit.

The districts I'm watching most closely

The districts getting this right share a willingness to ask harder questions. Compensation benchmarking is replacing guesswork. Managed substitute programs are building continuity, keeping familiar faces in the same schools rather than rotating strangers through classrooms. Grow-your-own pathways are developing educators from within, which matters more every year as the external hiring pool gets thinner.

Getting smaller in enrollment and budget doesn't have to mean getting weaker. We've seen it generate exactly the kind of clarity that expansion rarely does. It forces districts to decide what matters most. The ones making the best decisions right now are choosing people, on purpose.

"Getting smaller does not have to mean getting weaker. The districts I admire most right now are not the ones with the biggest hiring budgets. They are the ones redesigning how work gets done and building workforce systems that last longer than the next budget cycle."

The instinct when budgets tighten is to pull everything in-house. What the districts navigating this shift well have learned is that partnership carries infrastructure that doesn't shrink with the budget: absence systems, staffing pipelines, compliance requirements. Freeing district leaders from that administrative weight lets them focus on what this moment requires: their people. That's especially true in special education and school-based therapy, where the stakes are highest, and the hiring market is most unforgiving.

We see what the numbers confirm. We also see what the numbers can't capture: the paraeducator who has been with the same students for three years and is two weeks from leaving, the substitute who knows every child in the building but has never once been invited to a staff meeting, the district leader who genuinely wants to close the gap between policy and classroom reality and doesn't know where to start.

That is the work. Workforce stability and student support are the same problem, and that is how we approach it.

Download the Kelly Education Re:work Report here.