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. 

Bringing Visibility to the Impacts of Federal Changes on Illinois Education

This month, news dropped that the Illinois Board of Higher Education (IBHE) and at least six universities in our state were suspending a scholarship program that the U.S. Department of Justice called unconstitutional for using race as a qualification.

It was hard to find the name of the program that was suspended – even in the DOJ’s press release – but having confirmed it with a number of credible sources including a program participant, the effort is the Diversifying Higher Education Faculty (DFI) program, an initiative intended to increase the number of minority full-time tenure track faculty and staff at Illinois’ two- and four-year, public and private colleges and universities. 

Decades of research show that when educators share racial and ethnic identities with their students, student academic and non academic outcomes improve. At the college level, student and faculty/staff diversity play a considerable role in underrepresented students’ decision to stay in school. But according to IBHE, ‘the average student attending a public college or university outside the City of Chicago is unlikely to have more than one course with an African American faculty member and unlikely to have even one course with a Latino faculty member during his or her college years.’ This mismatch in representation isn’t unique to Illinois, but plays out in communities across our country and stifles what’s possible for our students and those who seek to teach and mentor them. 

In an effort to ensure that the many and varied impacts of federal changes on education do not go unnoticed or unheard - like the details of the DFI news slipping between the cracks - we are both listening for and actively gathering narratives from students, families, educators, providers, system leaders, and researchers who are living through the effects of education policy changes on their work and lives. But we need your help.

If you are interested in sharing your story for us to uplift on our blog, on social, and our ever-expanding newsletter list of lawmakers, education, researchers, philanthropists, journalists and more, please complete the form linked below. You may use your real name, a pseudonym, or simply list “anonymous.” We only ask that you provide a valid email address so we can follow up with you. 

It is crucial that these experiences are shared so that others may gain awareness and insight into what is happening and how our system, the people who power it, and the people served by it are being affected but also responding to changes. 

COMPLETE THE FORM TODAY → https://bit.ly/3REq97H