City Teaching Alliance FY24-FY27 Strategic Plan by City Teaching Alliance

CITY TEACHING ALLIANCE FY24-FY27 STRATEGIC PLAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION

MISSION AND VISION

VALUES THAT FUEL OUR MISSION

THEORY OF CHANGE

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

THE PATH FORWARD

OUR COMMITMENT

As we reflect on the past four years, our country has faced a set of challenges of which we are only starting to realize the magnitude of impact on our children and our school communities. Our partners at 228Accelerator state that society has undergone “twin pandemics” - the global spread of COVID-19, and the simultaneous amplification, reification, and recurring trauma of persistent and long-standing racial and socioeconomic inequities. In this transformed landscape, our organization also wrestled with a complex set of challenges and calls to action, ranging from responding to new situational constraints around recruitment and finances to revisiting our values in light of evolving community needs, to mourning and honoring the devastating loss of loved ones in our families and neighborhoods. The staggering confluence of challenges and needs at work and at home has often manifested in professional struggles and personal grief across our team, yet we have never lost sight of our why. While caring for our program and one another, our commitment to our mission and vision has never wavered. This steady focus has not always been easy to maintain or enact in a tumultuous and traumatizing time, and we are proud to say that through mutual support and ongoing learning, collaboration, and investment, we have achieved numerous remarkable milestones during the COVID-19 pandemic with tangible impact for our stakeholders - including: Seamlessly sustaining our distinctive programmatic combination of clinical residency, master’s degree coursework, coaching, and community connection for all incoming teacher candidates throughout the pandemic by nimbly pivoting to virtual and hybrid modalities, building a leading virtual teacher coaching framework, and deepening our whole-teacher wraparound supports to meet crucial personal and professional needs Solidifying a new partnership with the American University School of Education to efficiently and effectively deliver our customized master’s degree program coursework and deepen our approach to anti-racist pedagogy Expanding to our fourth program site in Philadelphia, serving children across Mastery Charter Schools and the School District of Philadelphia Building out a landmark initiative alongside UNCF to support hundreds of Black educators into and throughout our program via a $25M catalytic investment from Ballmer Group

Embarking on new collaborations with Mariner Financial Wellness (formerly “Spring”) and PeopleJoy to provide financial advisory services, resulting in millions of dollars in current and future savings for our teachers and colleagues Receiving two of the largest-ever direct investments in our organization - a $10M+ multi-year U.S. Department of Education “Supporting Effective Educator Development” grant and a $20M private grant through the generosity of Mackenzie Scott to fuel our impact depth and growth Beyond all of these accomplishments, recruiting and supporting nearly 1,000 new aspiring teachers over the last four years is surely the most powerful measure of our impact for our communities. We see impact not only through data but in the feedback from our community. Crystal Owens, Principal at HS Thompson in Dallas, recently spoke with us about a City Teaching Alliance teacher Samantha Childs - HS Thompson Teacher of the Year. Owens stated, “[Ms. Childs] is a game changer, she embraces the challenges that are here. She moves at an accelerated rate, and she has an open mindset… She is a role model for the new staff members that are here and she’s changing the game each and every day.” The common thread through all these accomplishments, as well as our efforts across more than a decade of program delivery and engagement in our communities, is that we don’t do this work alone or in isolation. This dynamic network of partners collaborating toward common goals is what our children need, it’s what they deserve, it’s what is essential to disrupt systemic inequities and, it is perhaps the highest-leverage resource we have to build a sustained lattice of supports, expertise, and accountability within our education system to fully develop and amplify the assets in every one of our students. Leaning into the power of partnership, we officially rebranded Urban Teachers as City Teaching Alliance in summer 2023 to better reflect our belief that we are, in fact, better together. As an “alliance,” we aim to create, lead, and invite current and new partners into a movement fueled by aligned values, learning-driven action, and investment to enact our mission. Through these collective efforts, we are poised to double down on our leading teacher development pathway and our sharp focus on generational change in urban communities to meet both the challenges and opportunities of the present moment. And this moment brings its own set of challenges – from rising inflation to acute teacher pipeline declines, to post-pandemic school-level constraints marked by pupil decreases and fiscal cliffs. However, this moment also brings clear calls to action to address heightened learning disparities and opportunity gaps, respond to the lingering (and too often, compounding) trauma of the “twin pandemics,” and recenter and nurture joy in our work and classrooms as we reach toward our shared goals.

City Teaching Alliance will meet this moment with an aspirational and actionable 4-year strategic plan centered around three principles: deepen our focus, elevate teacher voice, and extend our reach. We welcome you to join us on the next chapter of this journey and in this generational movement to improve the educational and life outcomes for our systematically marginalized - and ever-brilliant and deserving - public school students.

With gratitude and optimism,

Sekou Biddle

Peter Shulman Sekou Biddle, Board Chair Peter Shulman, Chief Executive Officer

OUR MISSION AND VISION

City Teaching Alliance’s mission is to improve educational and life outcomes of children in urban schools by preparing culturally responsive, effective career educators who accelerate student achievement and disrupt systems of racial and socioeconomic inequity.

When the pandemic first hit in 2020, triggering a chaotic crescendo of program and fiscal questions and needs, our Chief Academic Officer (our most tenured staff member and key program architect) Roxanne White calmly and deliberately stated,

“Our mission has not changed.” Directionally, this remains as true today as it was in 2020 - and indeed, in 2010 when we welcomed our inaugural teaching residents into our brand-new program.

What has evolved with our mission is a new emphasis on career educators. This intentional shift from “teachers” to “educators” embraces the various educational and instructional leadership journeys our alumni have taken over the last decade to utilize their deep classroom-level expertise and drive improved experiences and outcomes for students. While we remain steadfastly committed to preparing everyone who comes through our program with the skills and knowledge to be an effective career teacher and will continue to focus on this core career pathway for change, we have seen the transformational power of lifelong educators firsthand in our own alumni network - whether they lead from the classroom or move into other high-leverage instructionally-focused roles, such as instructional coaches, department leads, deans, principals, and more. And, we see the opportunity to more deeply invest in that power by enhancing the ways we support, connect, and mobilize this impressive and growing group of changemakers.

All aspiring teachers who join City Teaching Alliance will still complete a residency year and three subsequent years of teaching as the teacher of record in their classroom. This 4-year commitment is foundational to our approach.

At this juncture in our evolution, with nine classes of stellar teachers now proudly graduated, we are excited to introduce and design new alumni support for all teachers in the final year of their commitment and beyond. Having City Teaching Alliance as their alma mater will provide them with important connections, resources, and wraparound support whether they continue as a classroom teacher or thoughtfully pursue a career in public education outside of the classroom that capitalizes on the practical and comprehensive instructional expertise built through our program. At City Teaching Alliance, our commitment to effective, equitable education is demonstrated in how our teachers proactively integrate and honor diverse cultural backgrounds in Prek-12 classrooms. While cultural competence involves understanding individuals from different cultural backgrounds, cultural responsiveness goes further.

Culturally responsive teaching leverages the unique cultural knowledge, experiences, and perspectives of all students while affirming students’ racial and cultural identities in order to foster successful academic outcomes and empower students as change agents. This shift in emphasis from mere competence to active responsiveness underscores our vision for clinically-grounded teacher development that is not just about theory but is deeply rooted in the realities of our classrooms and communities.

City Teaching Alliance’s vision is for every student in the United States to be taught by committed, well-prepared, culturally responsive teachers. Today’s public school teachers are prepared and certified to teach in our classrooms through a vast spectrum of pathways. Too often, this preparation is neither rigorous nor proximate to the schools where they eventually become full-time teachers

In one 2018 Temple University study, 72% of new Philadelphia teachers reported they did not feel fully 1 prepared to teach in our urban classrooms. Moreover, there is rarely a continuity of support provided for aspiring teachers as they become novice teachers and, eventually, veteran teachers. Unlike almost any other profession, this myriad of avenues to become a teacher - with minimal preparation and follow-on support still the widelyaccepted norm - has resulted in uneven quality and quantity of teachers across our country’s millions of public school classrooms. The results have been cited over and over again in analyses of teacher recruitment and retention: the least prepared and experienced teachers are more likely to be placed in the least systemically supported urban and rural communities. Almost half of all public-school teacher turnover takes place in just one quarter of the population of public schools.

The data show that high-poverty, high-minority, urban, and rural public schools have among the highest rates of turnover. 2 Additionally, these teachers are more likely to leave the profession thereafter. In general, teachers with little preparation and support are two to three times more likely to leave the profession, and turnover leads to negative schoolwide academic effects.3 In direct response, our philosophy and program are built around rigor, cultural responsiveness, individualized support, and immersion in our teacher placement communities because we know this is a better way to serve our students. This approach is also a better way to serve all students. As an emerging pacesetter in this work, we aspire to show the entire profession how our sustained early-career teacher development model - not just point-of-entry teacher preparation - can be a sustainable and impactful approach for all to emulate.

To amplify the potential for this powerful modeling to take root, we will both continue to focus on the efficacy and depth of our direct work with teachers, schools, and students, and also seek opportunities to be more vocal and active in local, state, and federal advocacy to push for policies that support programs like ours - and those that support all teachers. As City Teaching Alliance, we know this work is best done together, leveraging the breadth of expertise and voice of our school partners, philanthropic partners, staff and alumni, and our peer organizations to address the vast span of structures that impact teaching and learning.

We will continue our pursuit of better pay and working conditions for all teachers, clearer transparency and accountability for all teacher preparation programs, and stronger support for aspiring Black and Latinx teachers. Teaching is the most essential and important profession we have in our country, yet educators and students are being systematically failed in the manner teachers are currently prepared, supported and grown. We have seen firsthand that this can (and must) change for the better. Our Vision conveys our firm belief that this change is possible and achievable, and our aligned actions and investments over the past 10 years have positioned us to accelerate progress toward it through our impact and influence.

VALUES THAT FUEL OUR MISSION

As a values-driven organization, we recognize that values are aspirational and opportunities for inquiry cycles and generative learning. In 2019, we adopted the following values to support our work. WE SERVE CHILDREN

WE ARE AN ANTI-RACIST ORGANIZATION

We are committed to ongoing knowledge-seeking, reflection, and action to deliberately oppose racism. We are an inclusive organization that values the diversity of people, backgrounds, and perspectives. We are active allies who pursue justice in the communities in which we live and work.

Children are the center of our work. We rely on the communities we serve to guide and inform the decisions we make about our curriculum, program and practice.

WE ARE LIFE-LONG LEARNERS

WE VALUE EACH OTHER

We are dedicated to continuous improvement, innovation and excellence.

We value each other as whole people. We are servant leaders who foster a supportive working environment that is empathetic and caring, and values direct, constructive feedback.

We strive to be on the forefront of what is best for teacher education and students based on research and practice

VALUES THAT FUEL OUR MISSION

Each of these values remains constant in our work today, and in our next chapter, we will further define how these values show up in everything we do - programmatically, structurally, culturally, and interpersonally.

We recognize that while there is foundational agreement in the philosophy underscoring each of our values, the manner in which each is internalized can vary significantly across our organization, as well as across the numerous external organizations we partner with. We will continue to start with ourselves with a charge to uplift all voices, engage in dialogue across differences, and develop a productive - and by design, sometimes uncomfortable environment in which we cultivate and work to live these values. As we build upon our people and culture work, we are particularly looking forward to hiring our first-ever Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism (DEIA) “Scholar in Residence” to engage in deep inquiry and collaborate toward amplified - and consistently operationalized - collective growth and learning. The goal of living our values in this work is not to reach agreement on everything - and in fact, we believe that through thoughtful disagreement, better outcomes can be achieved. By maintaining our agreed-upon values and celebrating our diversity while investing in more shared protocols and processes as tools to accelerate equity and alignment, our values will more clearly be reflected in all that we do.

THEORY OF CHANGE

effective, culturally responsive professionals who go on to have fulfilling careers and lives in our communities and create life-altering impact for our children. This impact begins at the classroom level and over time - with deep and continuous investments - multiplies to the school level and eventually to the community as a whole.

Through our mission, vision, values, and aligned work, we aim to transform outcomes for two core stakeholder groups:

Children in underserved communities:

Through this classroom-to-school-tocommunity impact journey, we ultimately aspire to systemic change.

All children regardless of identity, and especially Black and Brown children, as we work to disrupt systems of racial and socioeconomic inequity.

With methodical and intentional growth in our annual program enrollment, City Teaching Alliance aims to be both a model in developing teachers and a pacesetter in this work. By proving that scale, impact, and sustainability are all possible within a program as comprehensive and rigorous as ours, we aspire to be at the leading edge of the movement to improve how all novice teachers are prepared and supported in our country. By recruiting and retaining a growing cadre of teachers that reflect the identities of their communities, we can model and champion antidotes to the structural barriers around diversifying the teaching profession that have too often been normalized and treated as intractable in the sector. We want to inspire others to follow our lead, and concurrently improve the local, state, and federal policies to foster more programs like ours. Our teachers and students deserve nothing less than the concerted, sustained investments we are championing.

Teachers working in often under-resourced urban schools:

All teachers are committed to closing opportunity gaps for our students, and especially those teachers who share identities and experiences with the communities we serve. Our teachers and students both benefit when teachers receive more support and preparation in their earliest years in the profession. More specifically, research and experience tell us that if we deeply invest in community-embedded induction, scaffolded clinical experience, practice-focused and student-centric preparation, professional learning with an unwavering equity lens, and whole-educator support leading up to and during the earliest years of teaching, we can increase the number and diversity of educators in our communities who are effective, culturally responsive, and committed to a long-term career impacting local PreK-12 students and schools. In turn, this can directly improve and accelerate the educational and life outcomes of children in our communities over time.

Our ability to drive this change is grounded in the people, programs, and resources that comprise our inputs and enable our activities.

Our leading teacher development model provides a unique pathway to prepare, support and develop our teachers into

These include things like: Hiring the best staff and faculty to sustain and align our capacity Maintaining a strong financial model and meeting sustainability goals Delivering expert teacher coaching at scale and on time Ensuring our educators are maximizing the financial tools afforded to them Tracking and maximizing the yield of our marketing and recruiting efforts

THEORY OF CHANGE

The people, programs, and resources that comprise our inputs, enable our activities, and drive outcomes for our teachers and students:

In turn, the confluence of these inputs and activities enables us to achieve crucial outputs and outcomes related to the persistence, performance, and livelihoods of our teachers and their students. Such measures are tied directly to our mission statement: to improve the educational and life outcomes of children in urban schools by preparing culturally responsive, effective career educators who accelerate student achievement and disrupt systems of racial and socioeconomic inequity.

Life Outcomes Increase the number of Black and Latinx teachers we recruit and retain in similar proportion to the growing population of students being served in each of our four cities Having even one same-race teacher improves test scores, graduation rates, attendance, and behavioral outcomes for Black and Latinx students 4 Black students tend to benefit not only from having Black teachers in their own classrooms but even from having a Black teacher in their grade level when their own teacher is white 5

All of these outputs and outcomes, as well as our aspirations to accelerate our vision, are predicated on ensuring we attract enough teachers to meet the growing demands of our school partners, and more important the deserving students.

Effective Culturally Representative Teaching

While accounting for external conditions and never compromising on quality, City Teaching Alliance will aim to significantly, but methodically, increase our resident cohort size over the next four years with a dedicated focus on mirroring our applicants' identities with those of the students in our communities.

Increase the proportion of our teachers who achieve proficiency in their effective, culturally responsive teaching practice as measured by our proprietary Teacher Practice Rubric Culturally responsive teaching increases students’ motivation, interest in content, and the perception of themselves as capable students, among other benefits Teaching that makes school relevant to students helps them succeed both in terms of quantitative measures such as high test scores, and more qualitative measures such as becoming life-long learners able to ask critical questions about the world around 7 them

Accelerate Student Achievement Our teachers’ students demonstrate higher achievement in math and reading standardized test scores than their peers. Increases in test scores are correlated with increased lifetime earnings (e.g. standard deviation rise in 8th grade math achievement is associated with an 8 percent rise in adult’s earned income) 8

Career Educators

Recruit at least 1,400 diverse aspiring teachers across our operating

Increase the proportion of our teachers who complete our 4-year program and commitment pathway and are still working in PreK-12 education at the 8-year mark in our placement cities.

sites over the course of our strategic plan Grow to a cohort that has

Teachers’ effectiveness at improving their students’ test scores usually increases significantly through their first several years on the job (Henry, Fortner, & Bastian, 2012; Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2006). Beyond academic instruction, as they collect more experience, teachers also have more opportunity to develop many other skills crucial to teaching, such as how to deal with student behavior problems, how to teach students with diverse backgrounds and abilities, how to work and communicate with parents, how to best promote good work habits in students, and how to nurture students’ self9 esteem.

500

new aspiring teachers enrolled by FY27. Continue to increase the number of

BLACK AND LATINX aspiring

teachers we welcome into our program to better reflect the student populations in each of our city partners

SPOTLIGHT: PHILADELPHIA

THEORY OF CHANGE

WE ASPIRE TO

Philadelphia takes pride as the newest site at City Teaching Alliance completing its first academic year. Fueling the intersection of innovation and strategy, Philly has centered its local theory of change alongside the principle of “deepening our focus. The vast majority of residents and fellows are placed in the most vulnerable school communities of North Philadelphia with a focus on middle grades. Our intentional focus in developing the teacher pipeline in the most underserved and understaffed school communities of Philadelphia speaks directly to our mission of disrupting systems of racial and socioeconomic injustice.

Philly’s cornerstone and passion is ignited in strengthening the Black and Latinx educator pipeline. With strong alignment to mission and model, Philadelphia launched its inaugural year with over 30 teaching residents placed across two partnering local educational agencies (The School District of Philadelphia and Mastery). Within its first year, Philly has developed multiple strategic philanthropic and programmatic partnerships to strengthen our preservice to in-service recruitment, onboarding, and early retention supports.

PEOPLE OF COLOR

BLACK EDUCATORS

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE In 2010, we launched our signature new urban teacher development model in Baltimore and DC with fewer than 40 total aspiring educators. Since that time, our educators have reached more than 350,000 students within and beyond our program sites. Our network impacted approximately 350 schools during the 2022-23 school year alone. Our uniquely comprehensive pathway is at the core of how we reach students. The following components are critical to achieving these results:

STRATEGIC RECRUITMENT Strategic recruitment of aspiring career teachers with a sharp focus on diversity, including our landmark Black Educators Initiative to amplify the recruitment, support, and retention of Black educators across our program sites

CLINICAL RESIDENCY A yearlong clinical residency in our public schools under the guidance of experienced teachers and our expert faculty, followed by a three-year post-residency teaching commitment – taken together, a four-year programmatic service commitment

UNIVERSITY-PARTNERED MASTER’S PROGRAM A two-year program featuring deep, customized clinical coursework delivered in partnership with American University to prepare every educator for dual licensure in a core subject area (elementary education, secondary English language arts, or secondary math) and special education, complemented by demand-driven supplemental professional development offerings across our sites and added English as a Second Language certification preparation for all educators in Dallas

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

INTENSIVE & ACTIONABLE TEACHER COACHING Three years of intensive, actionable teacher coaching, totaling 85+ hours – among the most effective school-based interventions to drive improved instruction and academic achievement results. 10

WRAPAROUND SUPPORT FOR TEACHERS Substantial wraparound supports for teachers including peer-topeer and faculty/staff mentorship, free-of-charge mental health counseling services and wellness resources, and financial direct support and guidance.

PROFESSIONAL TEACHING LICENSURE Evaluation and accountability culminating in full non-provisional teaching licensure recommendations only after educators have demonstrated program and teaching practice success over three program years.

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

WHAT WE ACCOMPLISHED

Educator Recruitment & Diversity From fewer than 40 aspiring teachers in our inaugural 2010 cohort, we estimate that our national network of participantteachers and alumni teachers and schoolbased leaders stood nearly 1,400 strong as of school year 2022-23, reaching over 59,000 students across approximately 350 schools. Further, even as aspiring teacher enrollment has fluctuated within our program and across the U.S amid COVID-amplified recruitment headwinds and an indelibly changed economic landscape, we have intentionally and substantially increased the diversity of our incoming cohorts.

Educator Preparedness & Impact for Students

Through our coursework, coaching, and development, we have continued to cultivate well-prepared novice teachers who build and refine their content knowledge and teaching practice in the years leading up to full certification. Our most recent insights from school partners and evaluators reaffirm that our participants are successfully growing from aspiring to novice to expert educators, with increasingly positive student impact. For example, surveyed partnering principals have rated 90% of our first-year teachers as prepared in recent years (consistent with pre-COVID trends and goals in a time of heightened, widely diverse, and still-evolving student needs and shifting instructional roles/modalities), and further indicated that 93% of residents and early-stage teachers in our program have positively impacted student progress and 92% of early-stage teachers have contributed to students’ social-emotional learning skills.

A record 77% of incoming teaching residents reporting to our 2023 Summer Institutes identified as people of color - with 72% identifying Black and/or Latinx or Hispanic, versus 51% in 2019.

Findings from recent external evaluation activities also affirm positive, holistic student impact which grows as our educators grow with multiple years of scaffolded development and support. For example, preCOVID cross-site teacher and student data revealed City Teaching Alliance first-year teachers’ district teacher evaluation scores outpaced those of their peers, and that students of City Teaching Alliance teachers in their third or more year of teaching – i.e., those who had completed our full multi-year coursework, coaching, etc. – had statistically higher math achievement relative to comparison teachers’ students.

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

Whole-Educator Support & Retention As teachers have faced heightened and dynamic personal and professional demands in a transformed profession, we have steadily sharpened and expanded our focus on whole-educator well-being and sustainability - from a more robust residency-year financial package prior to first-year teaching salary, to expanding community partnerships and staff-led activities focused on mental health/wellness. Our increasingly holistic approach has translated to promising retention trends and powerful, actionable learnings to shape the future of our investments in this space. In the height of the pandemic (including the shift to virtual/hybrid instruction in 2020 and the exceptionally challenging return to increased in-person instruction in 2021),

Ongoing Validation, Investment, & Innovation The votes of confidence our model, impact, and educators have received in our first decade-plus of operations - including nearperfect TPI-US model evaluation scores in 2019, numerous awards and accolades earned by our teachers, and our landmark investments from Ballmer Group, MacKenzie Scott, and the U.S. Department of Education have fueled and accelerated our work to couple our continuously-improving flagship program operations with pace-setting investments in learning, innovation, and equity by design. These relentless efforts have spanned structural conditions for success (including investing in perhaps our greatest engine for impact - our people - by strengthening our internal compensation structure in alignment with our values and best practices across sectors), our landmark Black Educators Initiative, our field-leading transformative social-emotional learning offerings, our ongoing push to embed access and affordability as a central component of our teacher preparation and development pathway, and much more.

We were particularly proud to see that 86% of our placed teaching residents went on to lead their own classrooms as firstyear teachers. This exceeds our annual residency-year goal as we balance support and retention with the opportunity to assess program/profession fit. Post-residency, during this same time period, 70% of our prior first-year teachers returned for their third year of teaching in our communities after completing coursework and coaching. Moreover, speaking to the power of our multi-year programming and commitment model, we estimate that 84% of our four-year pathway completers were still driving impact as teachers or school-based leaders as of the 2022-23 school year.

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

WHAT WE KNOW We Empower Student Success Through Teacher Diversity, Effectiveness, and Retention Like Kyair Butts - a 2012 Baltimore residency cohort alumnus and 2019 Baltimore City Public Schools Teacher of the Year, he is now a veteran educator and district Wit & Wisdom PD leader. Per a 2022 feature in The74 (www.the74million.org/article/covid-closures-preserving-schoolrelationships):

"[Mr. K] has established himself as a constant, supportive presence in his students’ lives, both inside and outside school, and an unlikely role model for young people growing up in a very different time and place than he did. ...Honored in 2019 as Baltimore’s Teacher of the Year — district CEO [Dr.] Santelises cited his 'passionate commitment to student achievement and equity' — Mr. K. sees teaching as more than just a job. One weekend a month, he brings students to get free books at the Maryland Book Bank. Then he takes them out to brunch and, on occasion, to attractions like Baltimore’s National Aquarium. The outings further cement his bond with families, said Henderson-Hopkins [Asst.] Principal J.D. Merrill. 'That relationship piece is something that you can’t really quantify, but it translates into academic gains because the kids will work for him. They know he’s there for them, that he loves them.'... 'You can tell that he treats each student as if they were his own kids,' [a fellow teacher] said.”

Demand for our well-prepared, well-supported educators has never been higher. With a strong principal net promoter score of 43 as of the 2022-23 school year, we remain a talent pipeline of choice. Across our operating sites, our district and charter networks have continued to “vote with their feet” in recent years by significantly increasing their per-resident program fee and stipend investments in our aspiring educators - even as school funding winds have shifted and COVID relief funding has dwindled.

"Typically, student teachers get into the classroom the second semester of their senior year, which is way too late,” says Sharif El-Mekki, a former Mastery principal who founded the Center for Black Educator Development. El-Mekki cites a Temple study from a few years ago in which most young teachers said they were not prepared to teach, and even fewer were prepared to teach students of color. “These are people who are teaching the next generation of citizens who will lead our city and to not take that into consideration is a tragedy. I believe in the model of sound residencies like they do at [City Teaching Alliance].” 24

KEY RESULTS AND LESSONS TO DATE

Powered by partnership, the core tenets and features of our model are impactful, scalable, and sustainable. Our recipe for success - including community-centered recruitment and pedagogy, full clinical residency year prior to leading a classroom, multiple years of sustained coaching and development support for new teachers, supports to uplift teachers as whole people and practitioners, and concerted work to prove a model of financial investment in educators that brings every public and private resource to bear - is evidence-based and holds the promise of sector-wide change.

We have more to do to meet the promise of our mission, vision, values, and model, within and across our communities. In a time of tremendous change, challenge, and opportunity for our organization and the education sector, we have leaned into our life-long learning core value. The voices and experiences of our teachers, expert teacher-educators, and school and community partners have enabled us to better understand the nuances and potential of our emerging impact as a maturing nonprofit model. Additionally, they have helped us identify key levers to double down on our educator recruitment, diversity, development, and retention impact in COVID’s wake. These levers, identified within our flagship program model as well as nascent and early-stage educator-, school-, and community-level investments alongside it, form the basis for this strategic plan.

THE PATH FORWARD

THE PATH FORWARD SPOTLIGHT: WASHINGTON, DC

THREE UNIFYING PRIORITIES

To advance our mission and vision, we have spent the past year in deep dialogue, learning from the experiences of our teachers, staff and faculty. This process led us to three central strategic principles to shape our course for the next four years, simultaneously strengthening our existing programmatic pillars and guiding investment in new opportunities. This path and these principles will help us accelerate our mission and meet the ambitious impact objectives that comprise our Theory of Change.

PRINCIPLE 1: DEEPENING PROGRAMMATIC FOCUS

DC prides itself as one of City Teaching Alliance’s flagship sites, significantly impacting the District’s educator landscape since inception in 2010. From a cohort of fewer than 20 Urban Teacher Center residents in 2010 to 575+ estimated City Teaching Alliance teachers and alumni teachers and school-based leaders serving nearly 25,000 students across 140+ schools during the 202223 school year alone, our DC network has experienced tremendous growth. City Teaching Alliance DC is proud to be the largest novice teacher provider of its kind partnering with DC’s public and public charter schools, with the majority of school placements clustered in Wards 5, 7, and 8.

Similar to our mission, our core program elements - coaching, coursework, clinical, and community - remain tenets to which we are fully committed. Even in the face of labor market challenges, and our resulting decline in applications, City Teaching Alliance will look to invest more in our flagship programming we model a new path forward for deep, sustained investment in a sustained network of diverse, dynamic lifelong educators co-creating the future of teaching and learning. In a landscape in which this deep investment is not yet the norm and evolving 3 challenges remain on the horizon, we are committed to three guiding strategic priorities that will mobilize resources to strengthen and complement our existing programmatic delivery and help us accelerate our mission.

Maximizing New Teacher Candidate Matriculation & Persistence in Our Cities

Increasing Investment in Host Teachers

Mobilizing a Cross-Site Secondary Math Cohort

SPOTLIGHT: WASHINGTON, DC

THE PATH FORWARD

Over the past thirteen years, DC has been a laboratory of innovation, centering the voice of our teachers and partners to drive change. Changes in the school placement process, the way partnership health is measured, the type of support provided 3 the residency year, and the amount of the during residency stipend are examples of innovation driven directly from teacher feedback. Our alumni are at the forefront of our leading work throughout the city as founders and leaders of schools, Teachers of the Year in their schools and networks, doctoral candidates, and teacher-leaders continuing to impact instruction within and beyond their own classrooms. They are also deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of City Teaching Alliance, as host teachers, mentors, graduate assistants, clinical faculty, staff members, and board members.

Maximizing New Teacher Candidate Matriculation & Persistence in Our Cities The breadth, depth, and impact of our work are inextricably linked to the number of high-quality applicants we attract to enroll in our pathway, grow as teachers, and persist as educators in their respective communities. As external conditions continue to evolve, we are making targeted investments and designing responsive innovations across our recruitment, selection and enrollment ladder, including a new campus activator network, deeper investment in marketing lead generation, more program experience weekends to inspire and connect prospective future teachers, and data-driven modifications to our application windows to meet ready-to-matriculate candidates where they are. These elements will all be enhanced under the umbrella of our new name, complete with all-new marketing and communications that spotlight the distinguishing programmatic features of our program and champion the opportunity to live our shared values and drive generational change as well-prepared, well-supported career educators. Once our new teachers arrive, deepening our support around their financial and mental health (as detailed below) in concert with our signature professional preparation and support will further enable our teachers to thrive in our communities. Additionally, with a new approach to alumni, we will continue to pour into and mobilize our vibrant network of educators as they serve in our communities and attract the next generation of aspiring educators to City Teaching Alliance as our most powerful ambassadors. Importantly, many of the amplified investments and initiatives highlighted across our strategic priorities will also serve to elevate our platform and further fuel our work to reach and sustain critical program enrollment and retention thresholds in each of our communities, year over year - positioning us, in turn, to more loudly and effectively champion best practices alongside our expert educators as a premier teacher development model, and ultimately change the teacher development landscape nationwide.

THE PATH FORWARD

Increasing Investment in Host Teachers Since its inception, our program model has relied on host teachers to open the door of their classroom to our residents for an entire school year. Our host teachers, by design, spend more time with our residents than the combined touch points of our coaches, faculty, or local staff. However, we have historically underinvested in ensuring that host teachers are a consistent, aligned, and well-prepared pillar of clinical support within our model, with opportunities for growth and amplified impact spanning our local selection process, host teacher onboarding and professional development, and activities to encourage and expand symbiotic learning. As we have heard directly from current residents and veteran alumni, the host teacher relationship is pivotal to their ascension into first-year teachers of record. In response to both these voices and the growing body of research showing the positive multi-faceted benefit an effective host teacher can have on a teaching resident’s development, the host teacher’s own effectiveness,11and students’ performance, City Teaching Alliance will methodically enhance our host teacher engagement over the next four years to better support residents and increase retention.

Increasing Investment in Host Teachers Will Include Revisiting: Selection

Compensation

Professional support and growth

Impact and learning

Over the course of the coming year, we will will construct a roadmap reflecting opportunities to address the aforementioned elements (as well as any other high-leverage opportunities surfaced in ongoing dialogue with our constituents) into our host teacher onboarding, support, and collaboration design.

Over time, we anticipate host teacher investments yield in: 1

Residency-year retention in placement schools

Resident satisfaction, self-efficacy, and development

Alumni engagement as more teachers in our network choose to become a part of our host teacher community

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our program coursework and coaching was primarily delivered through in-person environments. The pandemic forced us to quickly pivot to and implement a greater online modality. This unexpected experiment allowed us to better understand the tradeoffs of virtual engagements, finding that some of our core work in coursework and instructional coaching worked well through an online medium, while other components of these offerings still worked better as face-to-face experiences for our practitioners. We are now looking to apply this learning across all four of our cities, with intentional course-by-course modalities based upon programs of study and local discretion and with one unique exception: secondary math. Effective, gap-closing mathematics instruction has emerged as a particular pressing need as our schools navigate the impact of the pandemic on student learning. The 2022 NAEP math scores show the largest decline since the assessment’s launch in 1990 as well as stark disparities in extent of decline by race. A NPR12 article recently stated, “Among Black students, math scores declined 13 points, while white students had a 6-point drop. Compared with the 35-point gap between Black 13 and white students in 2020, the disparity widened to 42 points.” At the same time, our schools continue to face a sizable overall mathematics teacher shortage with 75% of ~2,400 public schools reporting difficulty filling open positions in August 2022 in the Institute of Education Sciences’ 14 School Pulse Panel survey. Additionally, there is a disproportionately limited pipeline of teachers of 15 color certified in STEM fields.

SPOTLIGHT: WASHINGTON, DC

THE PATH FORWARD

Mobilizing a Cross-Site Secondary Math Cohort

Through the next four years, DC will continue building upon its strong foundation by refining and enhancing its core teacher development programming, intentionally clustering placements based on partnership health data and acute need, and strengthening school and community-based alliances of host teachers, administrators, and community partners. And as city leadership strives to cultivate an environment where educators flourish in our schools and communities, our team is particularly excited to continue building upon the legacy and learning of 13 cohorts by mobilizing our powerful alumni network to influence local and national conversations about the decisions that directly impact DC’s educators and students. Together, we will elevate and accelerate the conditions for a diverse, effective instructional community of practice to co-create the future of teaching and learning in our nation’s capital.

THE PATH FORWARD

In direct response to historical and ongoing challenges in meeting the pressing demand for secondary math teachers across our district and charter partners, we will capitalize on our hybrid virtual and in-person program implementation learning during the pandemic to design, test, and refine a new multi-city math cohort - expected to launch in 2023 - that will:

Capitalize on untapped cross-community practitioner learning and advocacy potential within a specialized, high-leverage field of study

Unleash new efficiencies enabling City Teaching Alliance to operate rigorous, engaging secondary math programs in each of our communities regardless of recruitment scale in any given cycle or city

Build on our existing programmatic strength in the preparation and development of effective, culturally responsive mathematics educators - underscored not only by direct feedback from our teacher candidates and school partners, but by the findings of our first-ever external impact evaluation regarding our program graduates’ statistically significant impact in this space

By freeing our program of the traditional enrollment threshold constraints imposed by typical coursework structures, this new approach will allow us to more effectively mobilize, prepare, support, and “cross-pollinate” a committed professional learning community of secondary math teachers - a crucial pipeline shortage area for our urban schools, even before the pandemic. Our school partners continue to cite secondary math as a consistent area of need, and we expect that this cross-site approach to elevate, connect, and deepen support for this smaller but critically important teacher constituency will help them to both staff and retain well-supported educators within key vacant positions across their classrooms that may have otherwise gone unfilled or more frequently turned over.

THE PATH FORWARD

PRINCIPLE 2: ELEVATING TEACHER VOICE As we embarked on this strategic planning process, our three core priorities were developed in dialogue with and response to the constructive feedback, questions, and solutions brought forth by our teachers. By listening to them, embracing the ensuing dialogue, and moving from words to tangible action and intention, we aim to better serve our teachers at every point in their journey with us as practitioners, change agents, and active members of our communities. This means attending not just to the comprehensiveness, rigor, and responsiveness of our teacher preparation and development programming, but the most salient and central supporting conditions for success and thriving consistently cited by our practitioners leading up to, during, and in the pandemic’s wake: mental health and wellness and access and affordability.

Prioritizing Mental Health and Wellness Since our organization’s inception, we have often invested in well-intended local mental health supports, partnerships, and referral pathways for our aspiring and early-career teachers - but these local approaches had never coalesced into a named or prioritized systemic, organizationwide approach. In September 2022, we had our first all-staff convening in three years following a protracted period of primarily-virtual engagement as we adapted our operations to the realities and unknowns of COVID-19. Hosted at our newly-launched Philadelphia site, our theme of “Community and Connection” presented a forum for re-establishing relationships and engaging in authentic dialogue. A panel of local teaching residents was asked how we could better serve them mere weeks into their clinical preparation journey, there was almost universal agreement that stronger mental health support should be a top priority for the organization going forward.

The voices of our residents and lead teachers also strongly echo pressing concerns within the U.S. teacher workforce writ large. OVER 25%

NEARLY 75%

of teachers and principals reported experiencing symptoms of depression as of January 2022, according to a survey from the RAND Corporation.16

of teachers and 85% of principals said they were experiencing frequent job-related stress, compared with only a third of working adults, according to the survey. 17 32

SPOTLIGHT: BALTIMORE

THE PATH FORWARD

Research has further borne out our intuitive and experiential understanding that teacher wellbeing and student well-being are inextricably linked. For example, emotional exhaustion and disconnection from students and other school-based staff have both been shown to negatively affect teacher retention (O’Brennan, Pas, & Bradshaw, 2017), with rates of teacher burnout and attrition on the rise even prepandemic. Conversely, well-supported teachers tend to have greater social-emotional competence - correlated with desired teaching behaviors including developing supportive teacher-student relationships, fostering student motivation, coaching students through conflicts, and promoting cooperation, and leading to more nurturing classroom environments that support wholechild development and student achievement outcomes improvement (e.g., Harding et al, 2019; Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Moreover, teachers who have help in managing their stress have greater job enjoyment and a stronger commitment to the work (REL Pacific, 2020). As we strive to build durable, responsive solutions to address the crucial, COVIDcompounded needs of students and teachers in our urban communities in recent years, the voices of our residents and teachers have served as a clarion call to action to build the knowledge base, infrastructure, and partnerships and collaborations around educator mental health and wellness. Knowing we don’t currently hold mental health expertise on staff - but that deep practitioner expertise exists all around us - we are responding methodically (but aggressively) with external partners to better assess (i) what elements of our program and structures may be adding to teacher mental health challenges and compounding the impact of external structures and precipitants (and, how we can respond through ongoing design improvements) and (ii) what existing and new resources we can employ on behalf of our teachers to ensure timely, accessible, and needs-aligned support across a diversity of needs. Mobilizing these resources will necessitate strategic partnership with clinical experts and service providers outside of City Teaching Alliance, enabling our educators to more seamlessly access support and guidance at their discretion and while maintaining confidentiality.

Located in City Teaching Alliance’s first hometown, our Baltimore site is recognized across the school district as a teacher recruitment pipeline of choice. In the 2022-23 school year, nearly 1 of every 2 public schools in Baltimore City had a City Teaching Alliance resident or fellow on its faculty, and we supported more than 200 total teachers across the four years of our teacher development pathway.

Research and experience tells us that by investing in teacher mental health and wellness, we can position our aspiring and current educators to: Stay in the profession longer

SPOTLIGHT: BALTIMORE

THE PATH FORWARD

While this work doesn’t lend itself to as quantifiably precise a measurement as some of our other activities, we know that not everything that matters can be easily measured - and this matters.

Be more effective instructors for their students Thrive as valued members of our communities alongside their students and families.

City Teaching Alliance’s work in Baltimore understands the root causes and persistent consequences of the city’s history of racism and segregation. Baltimore’s Black students report every day to school buildings that, 70 years ago, would have refused to seat them. City Teaching Alliance promotes a vision of educational equity that dismantles barriers and recognizes the assets of local families and communities toward doing so. The guiding principle of the next three years in Baltimore will be empiricism. We continue to elevate the real-life, day-today experiences of our teacher practitioners to understand what makes a day at work a really good day, what are the things that keep teachers in the classroom, and how our organization can make more of those things possible. This innovation permits a better understanding of the needs of schools, families, and educators, suggests ways that the organization can respond to those needs, and promotes more organic school partnerships. This empirical approach will drive continued initiatives in holistic teacher supports, including targeted financial assistance like test fee coverage and mental health resources. A renewed emphasis on City Teaching Alliance as a partner in the work alongside its practitioners and its school partners leads, in the end, to a place where we are all parties to each other’s success.

To assess the efficacy of our efforts over time, we expect to incorporate regular engagement with and feedback collection from our practitioners to better understand whether, where, and how we are meeting their needs in this space and fostering the conditions for them to thrive in the program and profession. Working from the classroom out, we will look to leverage our learning and resources to similarly meet the growing needs of our faculty and staff - team members who show up every day to support, develop, and guide our teachers, within and beyond the classroom.

THE PATH FORWARD

Enhancing Access and Affordability The well-being of our educators is also directly rooted in and tied to their ability to meet the most basic of their needs, from food and housing security to health and wellness - and the costs associated with our program remains a barrier for many to successfully and seamlessly progress “to and through” this supportive, research-backed multi-year model and build flourishing careers as lifelong educators in our communities. In the last three years, we have sharpened our use of existing financial instruments, invested new dollars, and piloted innovative financial services to pair direct and in-kind resources with thoughtful long-term financial planning. While the current in-house and third-party portfolio of transition funds, emergency funds, third party-scholarships, federal and state grants, AmeriCorps, housing partnerships, loan forgiveness/consolidation supports, and more have demonstrably met immediate needs and enhanced retention, this fragmented and complex landscape of services has also been marked by variable participation and usage rates and inconsistently-met needs. Both practically and emotionally, finances are uniquely personal and, availability of services and resources does not ensure timely access absent more intentional design. Over the course of our strategic plan, we will cultivate a more personalized, seamless fiscal journey for our practitioners. This will start during the recruitment and application process with a dramatically revamped financial communications and onboarding cadence, and follow through the residency year into full-time teaching through a combination of:

Enhanced direct and in-kind fiscal resources and partnerships

Redesigned and newly embedded approaches to help our teachers more easily and efficiently leverage external financial resources

New staff capacity paired with innovative use of technology (including a tailored, user-friendly participant portal) to guide our current and aspiring teachers step-by-step through the information and action items necessary for them to maximize available financial supports and services

We expect that as we integrate our teachers’ financial journey into their programmatic journey, some services will continue to be proactively implemented for all practitioners, while other services will be encouraged and promoted but not required to enable self-determination and customization.

THE PATH FORWARD

PRINCIPLE 3: EXTENDING ORGANIZATIONAL REACH Supporting a Life-Long Educator Journey Our educators directly actualize our mission, vision, and values in our schools and communities, and we have only just begun to tap into the power of this growing network. The enhancements we’ve made to our teachers’ journeys thus far have been shaped by both their voices and their actions. In parallel with a more defined financial pathway, we know that by building and pouring into our network through a more seamless, responsive programmatic and professional journey from aspiring to novice to veteran educators, we can more fully uplift, expand, and multiply their individual and collective impact. This is why, in both name and function, we are refreshing each year of our four-year teacher development pathway to align our program completion timeline, milestones, and alumni offerings with the realities and potential of current practice, state and federal policies, and community needs and opportunities.

YEAR 1: RESIDENT

YEAR 2: FELLOW

Yearlong clinical experience in the classroom of a host teacher in a partner school, with multiple opportunities for supplemental summer clinical experience American University Master’s degree coursework begins 1:1 expert coaching in the classroom Local site support Opportunity to serve on programmatic Advisory Committee

First-year as a full-time time teacher, with provisional teaching license/certificate Completion of coursework and attainment of American University Master’s degree 1:1 expert coaching in the classroom (cont’d) Local site support (cont’d) Opportunity to serve on programmatic Advisory Committee

Second year as a full-time teacher Attainment of dual teaching licensure (certification) based on City Teaching Alliance recommendation at end of year 1:1 expert coaching in the classroom (cont’d) Local site support (cont’d) City Teaching Alliance “Program Completer” recognition – congratulations! Opportunity to serve on programmatic Advisory Committee

YEAR 4: ALUM Third year as a full-time teacher Induction into dedicated alumni programming, where our teachers strengthen and expand their connections to a lifelong community of practice and begin to plan for and receive City Teaching Alliance support for the next step in their journey beyond year 4 of the pathway. Continued emphasis on and encouragement for program completers to stay in the classroom, coupled with assistance for alumni planning to move into any PreK-12 role in their community to leverage the instructional expertise they have built during their supported classroom experience and development as lifelong educators within our pathway Invitations and incentives to engage in at least one act of service to build the next generation of City Teaching Alliance teachers (already a point of pride among our current network). Examples of volunteer and compensated opportunities may include:

Serve as a host teacher for residents

SPOTLIGHT: DALLAS

THE PATH FORWARD

YEAR 3: SENIOR FELLOW

Help with recruitment and cultivation of applicants

Since 2016, we have welcomed more than 600 aspiring teachers to Dallas and have made significant impacts in the education community in Dallas and beyond. We’ve had a direct hand in molding the future of teacher preparation across Texas by making our voices heard on what assessments and standards should look like for educator prep programs across the state. Our work has challenged the status quo in Texas and is creating an environment that prioritizes high quality teacher preparation models (like ours) that will help teachers thrive – not just survive – in the classroom. While we are proud of the impact we have had in state policy – we are even more proud of the successes we have had in our schools. Because of the outstanding work of our teachers, our school partners’ demand for our teachers far exceeds the supply. We are proud to be home of the organization’s first housing partnership to reduce housing costs for residents. We are also proud of our partnerships with local non-profits like “Not My Son” and “For Oak Cliff” that allow our teachers and staff the opportunity to engage with our community beyond our campuses.

Serve on a local or national alumni board that reports to the City Teaching Alliance senior team

SPOTLIGHT: DALLAS

THE PATH FORWARD

With an already-powerful network of career educators driving impact within and beyond our cities, we have directly tapped into their insights to inform our vision for a new alumni engagement and support program fueled by increased staffing, investments, and partnerships. Their voices have coalesced around three recurring themes that will ground our alumni infrastructure and activities: (i) Increasing connection to the organization and building community across our alumni; (ii) Providing professional support toward the next stage of their career - whether that be in classroom or in another impactful PreK-12 role within their city; and (iii) Spotlighting the amazing successes of our alumni - from serving as lead teachers to community organizing to starting their own schools! As we build from this blueprint, we will continue to elevate and center the voices and experiences of our diverse, impactful alumni.

We are proud of the hundreds of teachers and alumni of our program that serve as mentor teachers, graduate teaching assistants, policy advocates, recruiters, and champions of City Teaching Alliance. Their commitment to our mission and community has allowed our program to thrive in a state where there are a plethora of pathways to the classroom. Through the alliances we’ve built with our community partners, our school partners, and our funders, we are taking steps towards achieving our mission in Dallas every day. Though we have come a long way since 2016, there is still work to do – and we are here for it.

Launching a new Educator Initiative as Part of a Diverse Cohort of Teachers: La Comunidad In 2019, we partnered with Ballmer Group to launch our landmark Black Educator Initiative (BEI), furthering the generational movement to mobilize, uplift, and support the experiences of the next generation of Black teachers and teacher-leaders in our schools. There has been a longtime need to build the pipeline of well-prepared, well-supported Black educators in our communities, amplified over the past few decades by (for example) the significant decline seen in the Black educator workforce in major U.S. cities following the turn of the 21st century (e.g., Shanker Institute 2015). Informed by prior catalytic Baltimore pilot activities, our central organizational commitment has involved scholarships, supports, affinity spaces, and dedicated programming as well as game-changing tuition scholarships made possible by Ballmer Group and UNCF. " This work has challenged us to think differently about how we learn and lead in our efforts to ensure students of all races and gender identities benefit from teachers who reflect their identity, as well as the inherent power of teacher workforce diversity in every child’s education.

THE PATH FORWARD

In continuing to learn from our BEI efforts and assessing our successes and challenges within our overall commitment to build thriving pipelines of educators of color in our communities, the need and opportunity to better mobilize the next generation of Latinx and Hispanic practitioners became ever that much clearer. While needs, opportunities, and dimensions of identity are as rich and varied among our Latinx and Hispanic teachers and students as they are among our Black teachers and students, a growing body of research reveals two shared truths in a context where Latinx and Hispanic student enrollment has grown.

WITH LATINX AND HISPANIC STUDENT ENROLLMENT ON THE RISE IN OUR SCHOOLS:

Same-race teacher-student match has a tangible impact on the educational outcomes of Latinx and Hispanic students, especially during formative elementary 18 years

The pipeline of teachers who share this key aspect of identity with our students is not commensurate with our student population -

currently, only 9% of the U.S. teacher workforce is Latinx, versus nearly 25% of students 19 - a disparity with direct roots in actionable structural factors influencing profession 20 access and persistence, from disproportionate undergraduate student loan debt to disparities in teacher certification test passage rates 21 In response, our Latinx educator working group comprised of staff, faculty and alumni, has come together over the course of this planning process to develop a foundational blueprint for a dedicated initiative named La Comunidad. This blueprint includes plans to accelerate recruitment, support professional thriving and retention, and grow and nurture a powerful community, network, and movement. Within these foci and through this working dialogue and ideation, we have already identified a number of concrete actions - from immediate operational changes such as ensuring external communications are available in Spanish to more deeply engage the families and support network of applicants coming from bilingual households and communities, to designing affinity spaces and inclusive supports, to identifying and mobilizing currently-available and prospective-future partnered/third-party scholarship support. We will hire a new leader to spearhead this crucial charge within a newly-conceived organization department dedicated to ongoing innovation to advance and deepen teacher pipeline diversity in our communities and the cultivation of meaningful synergies and learning across our Black and Latinx educator verticals. With respect to our La Comunidad, as we build upon early momentum and learning within our BEI, the first year of our strategic plan will be used as a year of listening, infrastructure-building, and initial responsive action - leading to a concrete, comprehensive action and investment plan for the subsequent three years guided and enabled by a growing educator, teacher-educator, staff, and partner learning community.

THE PATH FORWARD

Expanding Transformative Social-Emotional Learning (T-SEL) Given the impact of COVID-19 on student academic and emotional health as well as the ongoing impact of racial and socioeconomic inequities and injustices for students in our partner schools, the need for culturally-relevant social-emotional supports has never been higher. Observing this need for more actionable, embedded, and inclusive social-emotional learning (SEL) professional development for teachers in the cities we serve, the US Department of Education awarded us a Supporting Effective Educator Development (“SEED”) grant to create equitycentered SEL content to enhance the professional development opportunities for educators.

Over the last two years, our team developed and piloted a transformative social-emotional learning (T-SEL) professional development series inclusive of a set of online, self-paced modules full of interactive, reflective exercises and resources including sample activities and lesson plans. Upon completion of the pilot program, teachers have shown increased knowledge of the foundations of the T-SEL framework and their connections to culturally relevant pedagogy; better understanding on how to develop T-SEL competencies within themselves and their students; and new skills to implement T-SEL practices in their classrooms.

The response to this effort has been overwhelmingly positive With word-of-mouth and demand continuing to burgeon in our earliest months of expanded implementation, we see real opportunity to multiply the reach of this work both within and beyond our current partner schools. Under the new “umbrella” construct of City Teaching Alliance, we plan to transform this pilot initiative into a distinct programmatic offering that sits both within our existing flagship program and as a separate stand-alone professional development series for school partners to bring to their entire instructional departments/teams. As we formalize our first-ever professional development fee-for-service offering, we will look to grow slowly at first, likely starting with 1-2 new partners in FY24. We will then expand in line with interest, capacity, and emerging insights, while continuing to learn from and build on the design, pilot, and rigorous testing runway enabled by our catalytic SEED grant. Including both learnings around transformative social-emotional learning content, and around the conditions to successfully implement, expand, and sustain one or more stand-alone professional learning offerings alongside a robust flagship model.

OUR COMMITMENT

OUR COMMITMENT FOCUSED INVESTMENT IN OUR COMMUNITIES Throughout the process of developing this four-year strategic plan, we were grateful and humbled to have so many voices engaged and so many good ideas generated. At the same time, we maintained a keen awareness of the compounded challenges faced by today’s practitioners and partners in teaching and learning, and accordingly, we worked deliberately toward an ambitious and achievable set of priorities over the next four years. As City Teaching Alliance looks to enact the bold but measured initiatives envisioned here, we must also set the organization up for future success, including preparation to capitalize on future opportunities for accelerated growth and greater impact.

All this comes after completing the essential market research and due diligence to identify it as the right next program track for our organization.

Such future opportunities include the potential for both geographic and programmatic expansion. With respect to the latter, we have continued to field inquiries from prospective partner communities near and far, and we envision beginning conversations with potential school partners in both regions that are contiguous to our four current sites and new cities across the country as early as 2024. At the same time, as experience has shown us, expanding to new geography can take up to three years, including a year of partner cultivation, a year of contracting, state approvals, and planning, and a year of staffing and initial recruitment.

As such, in parallel with these future-state explorations, and within the bounds of our four-year strategic timeline and priorities, we expect to maintain our sharp dual focus on (i) meeting our four city partners’ demand for our teachers within our three core programs of study (elementary education, secondary mathematics, and secondary English language arts, with essential preparation in special education for all) and (ii) ensuring we better serve our current and prospective teachers through our existing services and the new initiatives outlined in this plan.

Similarly, a new custom program of study to open a new certification track, which would be developed in partnership with our higher education counterpart American University, typically takes approximately two years to design and receive approvals (both from the University and each state we operate) before a new cohort can be recruited to that program.

This approach ties directly to our Theory of Change, which is predicated on deep, longterm investments in each of the communities to which we have committed our work and network - and we believe it will position us to more aggressively build momentum toward our dual impact and influence goals, locally and nationally.

CITATIONS 1 Elliot Weinbaum. (2018, Dec 17). Training New Teachers to Succeed in Urban Schools. William Penn Foundation Blog. https://williampennfoundation.org/blog/training-new-teachers-succeed-urban-schools 2 Ingersoll, R., Merrill, E., Stuckey, D., Collins, G. & Harrison, B. (2021). Seven Trends: The Transformation of the Teaching Force, updated January 2021. Research Report. Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania 3 Sutcher, L., Darling-Hammond, L., & Carver-Thomas, D. (2019). Understanding teacher shortages: An analysis of teacher supply and demand in the United States. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 27(35). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.27.3696 This article is part of the special issue, Understanding and Solving Teacher Shortages: Policy Strategies for a Strong Profession, guested edited by Linda Darling-Hammond and Anne Podolsky. 4 Gershenson, S, Papageorge (2023, July 18). Through peer learning, the benefits of teacher diversity extend beyond classroom walls. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/through-peer-learning-the-benefits-of-teacher-diversity-extend-beyond-classroom-walls/ 5 Gershenson, S, Papageorge (2023, July 18). Through peer learning, the benefits of teacher diversity extend beyond classroom walls. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/through-peer-learning-the-benefits-of-teacher-diversity-extend-beyond-classroom-walls/ 6 Aronson, B., & Laughter, J. (2016). The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas. Review of Educational Research, 86(1), 163–206. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654315582066 7 Aronson, B., & Laughter, J. (2016). The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas. 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National Center for Teacher Residencies. https://nctresidencies.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/02/BRWBAY20034_NCTR_NOV-GlassFrog-Report-FINAL.pdf 12 The Nation’s Report Card. (2022). NAEP Report Card: 2022 NAEP Mathematics Assessment. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/mathematics/2022 13 Carrillo, Sequoia. (2023, June 21). U.S. reading and math scores drop to lowest level in decades. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/21/1183445544/u-s-reading-and-math-scores-drop-to-lowest-level-indecades#:~:text=Among%20Black%20students%2C%20math%20scores,disparity%20widened%20to%2042%20points 14 Institute of Education Sciences. (2023). School Pulse Panel. https://ies.ed.gov/schoolsurvey/spp/ 15 Burke, Amy. (2021, July 8th). Elementary and Secondary Stem Education. NSF. https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb20211/teachers-ofmathematics-and-science 16 Will, M. (2022, June 15) Stress, Burnout, Depression: Teachers and Principals Are Not Doing Well, New Data Confirm. 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Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/12/10/americas-public-school-teachers-are-far-less-racially-andethnically-diverse-than-their-students/ 20 Student Loan Debt: A Disproportionate Burden on Black and Latino Borrowers. (2023, March 15). DFPI. https://dfpi.ca.gov/2023/02/13/student-loan-debt-a-disproportionate-burden-on-black-and-latinoborrowers/#:~:text=Subsequently%2C%2090%20percent%20of%20Black,less%20than%20their%20white%20counterparts 21 Will, M. (2019, March 5). You’re More Likely to Pass the Bar Than an Elementary Teacher Licensing Exam. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/youre-more-likely-to-pass-the-bar-than-an-elementary-teacher-licensing-exam/2019/03