They had made steady gains in retaining educators of color. They had data to show for it. And rather than coast on that progress, they wanted to double down. They wanted to name the issue more clearly, build shared language around it, and make sure their retention work was not left to chance when the school year began.

That is the kind of leadership that changes schools.

Together we named why educators of color leave. We named why their presence matters for every student in the building. We named the research clearly: when educators of color feel supported by their leaders, they are significantly more likely to stay. And then we got practical. We looked at specific strategies that leaders could implement as early as new staff orientation, including one that I write about extensively in Support and Retain Educators of Color: the pulse meeting.

The results from that single day of professional learning tell you everything you need to know about what is possible when leaders are given the right tools.

Leaders came in with an average awareness of factors driving turnover at 2.86 out of 5. They left at 4.43, a shift of 1.57 points in a single session. Their understanding of how to structure a pulse meeting shifted by 2.29 points, the largest gain across the entire institute. Facilitation quality, materials usefulness, and relevance to leadership all rated 4.86 out of 5. The Net Promoter Score was 100. Every single leader said they would recommend this experience to a colleague.

One day. Real movement.

The Tension Most Leaders Avoid

Every August, school and district leaders gather with energy, vision, and a full agenda. Academic initiatives. Student outcome goals. New curriculum. Instructional priorities. All of it necessary. All of it right.

And yet educator sustainability rarely makes the opening slide.

Here is the tension: we cannot drive student outcomes without educators who are well, supported, and positioned to do their best work. Those two conversations are not separate. They never were.

Retention is not a January intervention when vacancies pile up. It is not a spring survey when exit interviews roll in. It is a back to school conversation and it has to start now.

The schools that understand this build educator wellness, sustainability, and leadership into the architecture of how they lead from day one. Great leaders do not treat this as an add-on. They treat it as a leadership priority.

Start With a Pulse Meeting

One of the most practical tools a leader can implement from the very first week of school is also one of the most underused.

A pulse meeting is a one-to-one conversation designed to learn from individual experiences and discern themes that can inspire actionable, sustainable changes to the conditions in your building.

The leader’s role in a pulse meeting is simple and demanding in equal measure: you are the lead listener. This is their time, not yours.

Before you implement one, it helps to be clear about what a pulse meeting is not. This is one of the distinctions I spend the most time on with leadership teams because the confusion is real and it matters.

If the agenda is about metrics and goals, that is a check-in. If the agenda is about their experience, that is a pulse meeting. That line is worth writing down before your first one.

If you are ready to go deeper, you do not need to start from scratch. Pages 143 to 148 of Support and Retain Educators of Color give you everything you need, including guiding principles, sample questions, and a full pulse meeting agenda.

These are yours to use. Do not reinvent the wheel.

Three Questions Before Your First Staff Meeting

Before your first all-staff gathering of the year, sit with these honestly:

1. Does my opening day agenda reflect that I value the people delivering instruction, not just the instruction itself?

2. Have I built any time into the start of year for educators to be seen and heard, not just informed?

3. When retention comes up in my building, is it a reactive conversation or a proactive one?

If you cannot answer those questions with confidence, that is your starting point. Not a new initiative. Not a new hire. A new commitment to treating educator sustainability as a leadership priority from day one.

The schools where educators stay are not the ones with the best recruitment pipelines. They are the ones where leaders decided, from the very first week of school, that keeping people was just as important as finding them.

Are the adults in your building well? Not just functional, but genuinely seen, supported, and equipped to lead?

That is the question every leader needs to be asking themselves by the end of August.

This article is free because every leader needs access to this conversation. But if it moved something in you and you want to go deeper, including the frameworks, tools, and practical resources that help you build retention into your leadership practice from day one, that is what paid subscribers get access to.

Not ready to commit yet? Start by subscribing for free. You can always upgrade when the time is right.

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Support and Retain Educators of Color is available through ASCD.

Learn more about summer institutes, full day professional development, and leadership coaching at ATGabbadon.com.

As the parent of two young children, summers are not always relaxing. In fact, just the other day I attended my daughter’s field trip as a chaperone at a local amusement park. I will be honest: I do not particularly enjoy chaperoning. It requires a particular kind of hypervigilance: counting kids, tracking who is where, keeping up with the group, making sure everyone is safe and happy. That said, I always love watching my daughter light up with joy, exploring new things about herself and her world.

What I want to share has everything to do with school leadership, workforce development, and educator retention. And it started with an incident involving a camp director who, without knowing it, gave me one of the most powerful leadership lessons I have seen in a long time.

What Happened

At this field trip, something went very wrong very quickly. There was an issue with billing. The camp had accrued unforeseen expenses, and there was a question about whether some of the parent chaperones had contributed to the additional cost. I could tell from the camp director’s posture that he was frustrated — and understandably so. The unexpected bill was quite high.

Later, an email went out from the camp administrator. The tone was accusatory. It explained that parents had not followed the rules, that the camp had incurred costs because of parent behavior, and that chaperone privileges might be revoked going forward. As you can imagine, the parents on that trip were seething when they read it, particularly because the administrator had not been present and did not have the full picture of what actually happened.

Here is where the camp director comes in.

While he was initially frustrated, he shifted quickly into problem-solving mode. He was able to rectify the situation, including working with the amusement park to absorb the additional costs that had been attributed to the parents. He reframed the issue entirely. He perceived this to be a communication problem, not a case of parents abusing the camp’s goodwill.

But the part that stayed with me was what he did next.

He went to every single parent individually. He explained what had happened. He acknowledged his initial emotional response. He apologized for the email that had gone out. He was thoughtful, professional, and kind. He was also genuinely vulnerable about where things had gone wrong, including his own reaction.

I am likely almost two decades older than this camp director. And yet I left that interaction with more respect for him than I have for many leaders I have encountered over the years.

Why? Care, clarity, and commitment to the collective experience of everyone on that trip and to each individual within it. He understood that perception matters. He understood that if he did not address the situation directly, someone else would fill in the story for him. And he understood that restoring trust required more than fixing the logistical problem.

That is leadership. And we do not see it nearly enough in schools.

What School Leaders Can Learn

1. Your first response is not always your best response — and your staff is watching.

The administrator sent an accusatory email before having the full picture. In schools, this plays out constantly: a policy gets issued after one incident, a staff member gets addressed publicly before the facts are clear, a decision gets made without input from the people most affected. Leaders who pause before responding protect both their relationships and their credibility. The camp director’s willingness to say “my initial reaction was wrong” is exactly the kind of modeling that builds psychological safety on a staff. It signals that this is a place where honesty moves in both directions.

2. Narratives fill the vacuum that leaders leave.

When leaders do not communicate with clarity and speed, people fill the silence with their own interpretation and that interpretation is almost always worse than the truth. School leaders who are not intentional about shaping the narrative of difficult moments will find that the narrative shapes them instead. This is especially true in schools serving communities that have historical reasons to distrust institutions. Silence reads as confirmation, not neutrality. Stories spread. People leave. Cultures erode not because of one bad decision, but because of the absence of honest communication that could have contained it.

3. Restoring relationship after a rupture is a leadership skill and it can be learned.

The camp director did not just fix the billing problem. He went to every single parent individually. That is relational repair in practice. Most leaders know how to manage a crisis transactionally: resolve the issue, send the update, move on. Far fewer know how to repair the relational damage a crisis leaves behind. In schools, this matters enormously for retention. Educators who feel blamed, dismissed, or unseen after a difficult situation do not forget it. The leaders who go back and do the relational work are the ones whose staff choose to stay.

Let Us Name the Challenges

Challenge #1: “But My Staff Is Too Large”

I can already hear some of you. I manage 350 people. I cannot personally go to every single one of them after a difficult situation.

Fair. And you are right that what the camp director did is not always scalable at the individual level. But the principle is scalable. Here is what that looks like in practice for leaders managing large staffs:

1. Tier your outreach. You cannot reach everyone individually, but you can reach everyone intentionally. Go directly to the people most affected by the situation first. Then work through your leadership team to extend the message to others. The key is that the message is consistent, personal in tone, and comes with genuine accountability — not a blanket email that protects the institution while leaving people feeling unseen.

2. Use small group conversations strategically. Department meetings, grade-level teams, and affinity spaces are all opportunities to address a rupture relationally rather than transactionally. A fifteen-minute honest conversation with a team of eight is far more powerful than a school-wide memo.

3. Train your middle leaders to repair, not just report. Assistant principals, department heads, and instructional coaches are your relational infrastructure. If they are only equipped to manage up and report problems, you have a gap in your system. Invest in developing their capacity to hold honest, humanizing conversations with staff after a difficult moment.

4. Create feedback loops that do not require you to be in every room. Pulse surveys, anonymous check-ins, and structured listening sessions give large staffs a channel to tell you what they actually experienced — before the narrative solidifies into something harder to address.

The size of your staff is not an excuse for impersonal leadership. It is a design challenge. And it has solutions.

Challenge #2: The Multi-Campus Challenge

For leaders overseeing multiple campuses spread across a significant geographic distance, the challenge is compounded. You are not just managing a large staff — you are managing multiple cultures, multiple communities, and multiple sets of relationships that may have very different experiences of the same institutional decision.

When a rupture happens at one campus, the instinct is often to address it centrally and assume the message will travel. It does not. Or rather, it travels — but by the time it arrives at the campus that needed it most, it has already been filtered through three layers of interpretation and the relational damage has deepened.

Here is what multi-campus leaders can do:

1. Designate a relational point person at each campus. This is not a communications coordinator. This is someone with genuine relational credibility among staff. This is someone people actually trust and whose role includes being a conduit for honest feedback and a steward of campus culture. When something goes wrong, they are your first call, not your last call for damage control.

2. Be physically present after a rupture, even when it is inconvenient. A video call is not the same as being in the room. When something significant happens at a campus you do not regularly occupy, showing up in person sends a message that no email or Zoom link can replicate. It says: you matter enough for me to come to you.

3. Resist the urge to centralize the narrative prematurely. Multi-campus leaders often move quickly to issue a unified statement to maintain consistency across sites. That instinct is understandable but it can flatten the very real differences in how each campus experienced a situation. Acknowledge the local context before you make the institutional case.

4. Build campus-specific feedback rhythms. Do not rely solely on your campus leaders to tell you how staff are doing. Create direct channels — brief quarterly surveys, skip-level conversations, or open office hours at each site — that give you an unfiltered read on culture at every location.

Distance is a real constraint. It is not an insurmountable one. The leaders who bridge it most effectively are the ones who are most intentional about presence, both physical and relational.

4. Vulnerability build trust and credibility

The camp director named his emotional response. He acknowledged where he went wrong. He did not hide behind his title or his authority. That kind of transparency is rare in institutional leadership and it is exactly what builds the trust that keeps people in an organization. Educators of color in particular have often experienced leadership that protects itself at the expense of its staff. A leader willing to say “I got this wrong” signals something powerful: that this is a place where honesty is safe, and where being human is not a liability. Rather, it builds credibility.

5. Relational care is structural.

What made the camp director’s response so effective was not just that he was kind. It was that he was systematic about his kindness. He went to every parent. He did not leave anyone out or assume the email apology would be sufficient. School leaders who want to build culturally affirming cultures have to be equally intentional. Inclusion does not show up in isolated moments. It is built through the deliberate, daily work of making sure every person on your staff feels seen, heard, and valued.That is not a personality trait. It is a leadership practice. And like any practice, it can be built, refined, and sustained.

Alright, alright. Let me explain myself a bit.

It is about creating pipelines from hire to retire. Not new tips and tricks to accelerate student achievement, but the infrastructure that keeps committed, capable educators in our buildings long enough for their growth to matter.

I am writing this fresh off presenting at ASCD + ISTE 2026. It was a tremendous experience. My cup was full, my feet tired from walking from one session to the next. I learned so much. I was surrounded by brilliant people with genuinely great intentions.

And still, what I keep noticing is how much of what we add to the conversation amounts to a band-aid.

Wellness apps become a band-aid for educator burnout. AI prompts become a band-aid for principals expected to do the work of three people. Coaching protocols become a band-aid for improving educator effectiveness while quietly ignoring the systemic conditions and policy decisions that created the very opportunity gaps they seek to address.

We have been all about promises in education. Promise after promise, initiative after initiative, none of them glamorous enough to admit what they are actually up against. This comes at a cost to kids but also to the educators that serve them.

What we need instead is to rethink the field itself. We need to present this work in ways that are more attractive, more humanizing, and more sustainable, so that someone entering a classroom for the first time can see a real future for themselves. Clear pathways. Access to teacher leadership opportunities that allow them to develop as leaders without leaving the classroom. Targeted professional development that actually meets their needs instead of a generic mandate handed down from somewhere else.

To be clear, I am not saying we abandon excellence or growth. As someone who has been in education for almost two decades, I always want to get better.

I know this is a hot take. I know some people will hear it and think: that is soft. That is wishful thinking for schools where achievement is already fine, or for schools where nothing is on fire.

I would argue the opposite. This matters most in the contexts where the fire is real. Because the truth is, we cannot fix issues where the undercurrent is the cumulative effect of decades upon decades upon decades of systemic inequality. We just cannot. Cue the righteous refusal.

I say this with a doctorate in organizational leadership and a concentration in education policy sitting behind my name. I can walk you through the exact timeline of how policy decisions widened opportunity gaps, how they made schools work beautifully for some students and quietly divorced others from opportunity altogether.

I also say this with my full chest as a school leader who expanded enrichment offerings and advanced placement, and who led master scheduling so that students could move beyond tracks and cohorts to individualized pathways. I increased staff satisfaction, retention, and educator diversity in my building, all before the age of 30.

In short, we have to stop pushing teachers out. We have to stop addressing education with momentary band-aids dressed up as innovation. If we are serious about keeping the education workforce intact, we have to keep our teachers. Not by working them harder. By building something that allows them to stay.

So what is the practical entry point for leaders who hear this and want to do something with it?

1. Know what you believe about your work as an educator. Before any strategy, any rollout, any new initiative, get honest about your own beliefs about students, about teachers, about what this work is actually for.

2. Build your awareness of the social, historical, and political context you are leading within. Equip yourself with the information so you understand exactly what you are up against. This is not about lowering the bar on excellence and growth. It is about understanding that whatever amount of time you hold a school leadership seat, you cannot single-handedly undo decades of inequality. You are no one’s hero. Lead with that humility, not despite it.

3. Identify the practical, daily rituals to re-humanize the work of teaching. Attend to the technical skill of your teachers. Give them the resources they need. And just as importantly, respect their capacity. Listen to them. Hold real listening sessions and pulse meetings, not just exit interviews. And if you do conduct exit interviews, make sure the data actually informs practice. Check in on their well-being, not just their performance. For more on rehumanizing the work of teachers, I offer you one of my favorite articles from scholar Betina Hsieh, “Rehumanizing the Teaching Profession”.

There is an African proverb that asks: are the children well? I think about that question constantly in this field.

But I am going to keep asking a different one.

Are the adults well?

This article is free because I want as many leaders as possible to find it. But if it moved something in you, I want to invite you to go deeper.

Paid subscribers get access to the frameworks, tools, and reflections that do not fit in a free post. The kind of thinking that helps you actually do something with what you just read.

And in that moment, I understood something about leadership that I had written about and spoken about but had never felt so completely in my own body:

I came to this regional educator retention program around the same time my book was published. That timing felt as if divinely designed. The book was about supporting and retaining educators of color. The program was about doing exactly that in the city where I had first become an educator.

Coming back to Philadelphia to do this work was full circle in every sense of the word. Prior to my return, I held a visiting faculty position at Swarthmore College. Prior to that, I had been a teacher in these schools and a charter school leader at a turnaround school in this city. I knew what it felt like to show up for students in a system that didn’t always show up for you. I knew the weight of being an educator of color in Philadelphia — the isolation, the invisible tax, the emotional and ideological burden felt deeply in conditions that weren’t built to sustain that care.

This work was personal for me and that is what in part led to the immense success.

Over the next three years, I trained 47 teacher leaders and supported nearly 500 educators of color. Those educators, in turn, touched the lives of over approximately 150,000 students.

98% of our educators reported a sense of belonging. 94% felt empowered to voice their perspectives. 94% experienced a sense of mattering in their work and school context.

And perhaps most significantly: an external evaluator found that nearly 94% of program participants stayed in education as a result of our intervention.

In Philadelphia schools, the retention rate for educators hovers between 80 and 85%. The program I led produced a nearly 10-percentage-point difference. That gap represents real teachers. Real classrooms. Real children who kept their educators.

This program became the manifestation of what becomes possible when you build something rooted in the dignity and agency of the people it serves.

The work stretched me in ways I didn’t anticipate.

I leveraged relationships I had built over years with educators, district leaders, and building principals to recruit teachers who needed this community. I facilitated adult learning in rooms where racial equity principles embedded in the design of our work. I watched educators who had been isolated find each other. I watched people who had been carrying too much, alone, realize they didn’t have to.

I also supported our educators in ways that went beyond the program room. I helped leaders engage with media. I created opportunities for educators to advocate for themselves in front of funders, county-wide stakeholders, and decision-makers— people who held real power over the conditions these teachers worked in every day. I convened people from superintendents to school leaders to folks in the mayor’s office around the same conviction: that educator retention is not a human resources problem. It is a justice issue.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I got stopped in a grocery store.

A young man– a early-career Black male educator– recognized me from the retention work. He knew my face because of what we had built together in those rooms. It caught me completely off guard. And it is one of the moments I will carry longest from this chapter because it told me that the work had moved beyond me in the best possible way.

I want to be clear: The program was never about me. It is important that I name that even as I write a piece that necessarily centers my experience of it.

The mark of a true leader is developing others who no longer need to be shown or told what to do.

The mark of a great leader is equipping others to engage in the vision and take it up as their own. The mark of a good leader is someone who doesn’t make the work about them but about the people and the impact.

That is who I tried to be and what I tried to build.

What I hope we built together.

And, I am proud of us.

I am proud of the teacher leaders who will carry it forward. And I am sitting with the particular kind of loss that comes when you leave something you genuinely loved. You left not because it failed, but because it was time.

And because you trust the people you’re leaving it with.

If this resonated and you want to think together about what this work could look like in your context — reply to this post. I’d love to have that conversation.

The six principles at the heart of that book are principles of culturally affirming leadership.

I chose the word “affirming” deliberately. Not inclusive. Not supportive. Not welcoming. Not belonging. I chose “affirming” because affirmation is active. It is specific. It is a practice that requires leaders to tend to their mindset, beliefs, practice, and impact.

I believe these two operate hand in hand. Instructional leadership and management is the practice, the daily deliberate work of developing people, building systems, and driving toward outcomes that serve every educator and student in a building. Affirming Schools is what that work produces when it is done with intention. You cannot have one without committing to the other.

The name is not a departure from the work. It is a declaration of what the work is.

The research on why this matters is not new, but it bears repeating:

• Educators of color leave at disproportionately high rates.

• Educators of color leave for preventable reasons, including leadership, job satisfaction, and workplace culture.

• Every time they leave, districts pay a significant financial and human cost that compounds over time. Every teacher who walks out the door costs a district between $12,000 and $25,000. For a district losing ten teachers a year, that is up to $250,000 spent replacing people who were telling us all along what they needed.

What is less discussed is that this is a solvable problem. Leaders who are willing to do the inner and outer work of culturally affirming leadership can build schools where educators of color genuinely want to stay. I have seen it happen. I have made it happen. I have the receipts. And now I am excited to expand the work and the impact.

Over the coming weeks, I will be sharing more about the four concrete services now available through Affirming Schools, including evidence-based professional development, affinity group facilitation, facilitator training, and executive leadership coaching. Each one is grounded in the same framework that started with six principles and a belief that our schools can do better by the educators inside them.

If you have been following this work, I am glad you are here. If you are new, welcome. There is a lot more to come.

→ Schedule a 30-min exploratory call if you are ready to bring this work to your organization.

And yet.

Every time I sit with these findings, I feel the presence of something the data points toward but cannot fully name. Something that lives in the gap between the statistics and the stories. Between the 18.1% turnover rate for Black teachers and the actual human beings that number represents.

This post is about exploring that gap.

I have spent years working alongside educators of color — in schools, in districts, in the professional development rooms where they are asked to grow and sometimes to perform growth they don’t feel. And what I have witnessed is not captured in any fact sheet.

I have seen educators pour themselves into institutions that did not pour back. Educators loving places and spaces that frankly, did not love them back. I have watched teachers who were brilliant, committed, and deeply called to this work make the quiet, painful decision to leave — not because they stopped loving their students, but because the cumulative weight of showing up in a place that did not fully see them became too much to carry.

Scholars call this spirit murdering — the slow accumulation of psychological and emotional assault that leaves no visible wounds but is no less damaging for its invisibility. It is what happens when an educator of color is asked to represent an entire community while also doing their actual job. When their cultural knowledge is extracted but their leadership is not developed. When they are celebrated in February and invisible in October.

The data tells us Black teachers leave at rates more than 20% higher than white teachers. Spirit murdering is part of why.

There is another dimension the data gestures toward without fully capturing: the specific burden of doing equity work in a moment when equity itself is under attack.

Websites get pulled. DEI programs that took years to build collapse under political pressure. The colleagues who were once champions of this work go quiet — not because they stopped believing, but because the threat of punishment has become loud enough to silence them.

For educators of color, this is not just a policy inconvenience. It is a message about whose presence is valued, whose pedagogy is protected, whose students matter enough to fight for.

Whose humanity matters.

The turnover data reflects that message. It cannot explain it.

So what do we do with what the data cannot measure?

We name it. We take it seriously as a leadership responsibility — not a sensitivity training to schedule once a year, but a daily, structural practice of creating conditions where educators of color can thrive.

1. That means acknowledging plainly that educator diversity matters — not as a program but as a commitment.

2. It means cultivating real reflection and self-awareness within leadership teams about what the institution is asking of educators of color and whether that ask is equitable.

3. It means assessing honestly, using both data and testimony, where your culture falls short — and making plans that are actually accountable.

4. It means committing to sustainable, high-impact supports. Not initiatives. Not one-time investments. Sustained coaching, culturally affirming mentorship, and genuine advancement pathways.

5. It means fostering environments where culturally responsive approaches are protected — especially now, when the political climate is working to dismantle them.

6. Lastly, it means leading toward inclusive community as a daily practice, not a destination.

In the words of the Mandalorian: this is the way.

Teacher turnover is a complex challenge with no single solution. The research is right about that.

But complexity is not an excuse for inaction. And the levers the data identifies — pay, leadership, satisfaction — are not separate from the human dimensions this post has tried to name. They are expressions of them.

Teachers stay where they are valued. Where they are seen. Where the institution’s commitment to them is visible not just in rhetoric but in resources, in culture, in the daily texture of the work.

Educators of color stay where their full humanity is welcomed — not just their credentials, not just their demographic representation, not just their cultural labor.

Building that kind of school is the work of leadership.

It has always been.

———

References:

Tan, T., Wei, W., Carver-Thomas, D., & García, E. (2026). Teacher turnover in the United States: Who moves, who leaves, and why. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/248.479

———

This series — Understanding Why Teachers Leave — draws on research from The Learning Policy Institute (2026) and is informed by the framework developed in Support and Retain Educators of Color: 6 Principles for Culturally Affirming Leadership by Dr. Andrea Terrero Gabbadon. Available wherever books are sold.

Most of them know teacher turnover is a problem. Most of them have seen the data. Many of them have lived it — watched colleagues leave, scrambled to fill positions, onboarded new teachers mid-year, and started the cycle again.

What they often don’t have is a clear sense of where their power actually is.

This post is about that. Research is surprisingly specific (trust me– I wrote an entire book on it) and the levers it points to are squarely within the scope of leadership.

New here? Start with Part 1

The research identifies three factors most strongly associated with whether teachers stay or leave. Not just correlated — significantly, measurably associated.

1. Pay.

2. Leadership.

3. Satisfaction.

Let’s dive in.

Lever 1: Pay

I know. This one feels like it’s out of your hands. Salary structures are often set at the district or state level, and individual school leaders have limited room to maneuver.

But stay with me here.

The data tells us that with every $1,000 increase in salary — adjusted for cost of living — the probability of turnover decreases by about 0.34 percentage points. That may sound modest, but across a faculty of 50 teachers, it adds up quickly. And it tells us something important: teachers are paying attention to whether their compensation reflects the value placed on their work.

Even when you cannot move the salary number directly, you are not powerless. Advocating loudly and visibly for competitive pay — to your board, your superintendent, your community — signals to your teachers that you see their labor as worth fighting for. That signal matters more than leaders often realize.

Lever 2: Leadership

This is the one that should keep every school and district leader up at night.

Cut in half.

Not reduced by a few percentage points. Cut in half. By the perception of leadership alone.

The research puts it plainly: investing in high-quality coaching and mentoring, honoring teacher autonomy, and ensuring professional learning is relevant — not performative — are the leadership behaviors most associated with teachers choosing to stay.

This is not soft leadership. This is the work.

Lever 3: Job and Workplace Satisfaction

The gap here is the starkest of all three.

Teachers with high job and workplace satisfaction were significantly less likely to leave their schools than teachers with low satisfaction — 8.0% versus 22.0%.

That is nearly a three-fold difference.

Job satisfaction is shaped by workload, autonomy, relationships, and a sense that the work being done matters. Workplace satisfaction is shaped by culture — by whether people feel seen, supported, and safe. By whether the environment they walk into every day reflects the values they came into the profession to live out.

Culture is a leadership responsibility. It does not build itself.

The through line across all three levers is this: teachers stay where they feel valued. Not just in words — in structures, in decisions, in dollars, in daily practice.

That is not a complex insight. But acting on it consistently, at scale, over time — that is the work of leadership.

———

Next: What the Data Can’t Measure — the dimensions of teacher turnover that the research points toward but cannot fully name.

The data has been telling us this for years. The question is whether we are willing to listen to what it’s actually saying.

Let’s start with the definition, because language matters here.

Teacher turnover is not just retirement. It is not just attrition in the way we sometimes use that word — as if departure were neutral, inevitable, administrative. Teacher turnover is defined as teachers moving schools or leaving the profession from one school year to the next. It includes the teacher who transferred to a school across town because she felt unsupported. The teacher who left the classroom for a corporate job because he couldn’t afford his mortgage. The teacher who simply didn’t come back in September.

Seventy-four percent of teacher turnover is attributed to reasons other than retirement (Learning Policy Institute, 2026).

Let that sit for a moment: Nearly three quarters of the teachers leaving our schools are not leaving because their careers have run their natural course. They are leaving for other reasons — reasons that, in many cases, are within our power to address.

———

The financial cost alone should stop us in our tracks.

According to the Learning Policy Institute (2026), placing a single teacher costs an estimated $12,000 in small districts and over $25,000 in large ones. That includes recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and the productivity loss that comes with an inexperienced replacement — not to mention the disruption to students who lose a teacher mid-year or at the start of one.

Multiply that by the number of teachers your district turns over in a single year. Then multiply it again by the years this has been happening.

But the financial cost, as significant as it is, is not the most important number on this page. Let me tell you what is.

———

Here is where the data gets harder to look away from.

Teachers of color are leaving at higher rates than their white colleagues — 16.6% versus 14.7% overall. But Black teachers specifically are moving schools or leaving the profession at rates more than 20% higher than white teachers — 18.1% versus 14.7%.

Read that again. More than 20% higher.

The highest turnover rates are concentrated among Spanish, bilingual, CTE, and special education teachers — the educators serving students with the greatest needs, in the most under-resourced roles.

And turnover is higher in urban and rural districts than suburban ones — meaning the schools with the fewest resources are absorbing the greatest losses.

None of this is random. These patterns are the fingerprints of a system that has never distributed support equitably — and that continues to ask the most of the educators it invests in the least. When we lose teachers of color at these rates, we are not just losing individuals. We are losing representation, cultural knowledge, mentorship, and the message their very presence sends to students who rarely see themselves reflected in the adults at the front of the room.

That loss compounds. Year over year. Classroom by classroom. And our students — particularly students of color — bear the cost.

———

I often hear leaders describe teacher turnover as a complex challenge with no single solution. And that is true, as far as it goes. But I want to push back on how that framing is sometimes used because complexity can become a shelter for inaction.

The data does not leave us without direction. In fact, it points us toward specific, measurable factors that are strongly associated with whether teachers stay or go. Factors that are squarely within the scope of leadership. Factors that, when addressed intentionally, have been shown to cut turnover rates significantly.

The question is not whether we know what to do. The question is whether we have the will to do it. This is of central importance in a political moment that is making equity work harder, not easier.

These are not rhetorical questions. They are leadership questions. And they deserve honest answers.

———

So what do the numbers demand of us?

They demand that we stop treating teacher turnover as an inevitability and start treating it as a leadership failure we have the power to address. They demand that we pay particular attention to who is leaving and why — and that we resist the temptation to look only at aggregate data when the disaggregated data is where the real story lives.

They demand that we ask, with real accountability: what kind of institution are we building? And are we building it in a way that is worthy of the educators — particularly the educators of color — who are being asked to give so much inside it?

The next post in this series is about the research-identified levers that leaders can pull. But before we get there, I want to sit here for a moment — in the weight of what the numbers are actually saying.

Because numbers without reckoning are just statistics.

And our educators deserve more than statistics. And ultimately, our kids deserve too.

———

Next in the series: The Three Levers — what the research says school and district leaders can actually do to keep teachers in the building.

They mentioned, almost in passing, that every day — every moment — presents an invitation. That the work is not to resist the moment or simply endure it, but to figure out what it is calling you to.

The more I sat with the idea, the more I recognized it as something I had already been living — but didn’t yet have language to express.

During some of the most politically turbulent moments of 2025 and into this year, I found myself returning to two questions as a practice of grounding — a way of settling my mind and regulating my nervous system when the weight of the moment threatened to become too much.

The questions were simple:

What is this moment calling me to?

What is this moment calling me to be?

I am a scholar-practitioner. My work lives at the intersection of educator diversity, teacher support, and retention. I care deeply — personally and professionally — about building systems of teaching and learning that are humanizing and sustainable for educators, particularly educators of color, so that all students can thrive.

There is a saying that teachers don’t leave kids — they leave leaders. My book, Support and Retain Educators of Color, my consulting work with schools and districts, and my own personal experience confirm this. Teachers leaving our schools are not giving up on their students. Many of them are giving up on systems that were never built with their humanity, dignity, or sustainability in mind. The invitation I am describing in this series is inseparable from that reality — because how we answer it has direct consequences for who stays, who leaves, and what we lose when they go.

The questions I offer, then, are not abstract. I offer them as a gateway to understanding the invitation of this moment. The work of creating more just and equitable schools is not something we do when the conditions are favorable. And Lord knows, justice does not occur by happenstance. Through a liberatory imagination, we design and advocate for justice and equity because the conditions demand it and because the children in our classrooms cannot wait for the politics to settle.

The concept of the invitation is not unique to this moment in education. Book bans. Censorship. Fear of retaliation. The systematic dismantling of DEI programs. The ways in which the full humanity of our students — particularly English learners, students of color, and students in under-resourced schools — has been questioned, erased, and legislated against.

These forces are not random. They are designed with a specific intent: to impose self-surveillance, self-censorship, and compliance on educators — particularly social justice-minded educators of color. To make the cost of standing up feel higher than the cost of staying quiet. We see this plainly in the schools and districts that have maintained their silence and backed away from equity initiatives — even after the current administration abandoned the Dear Colleague letter.

The harm has been done.

And yet, within that hostile design, there is another invitation. As the late US Congressman John Lewis named it, the invitation is to:

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”

Good trouble. Necessary trouble.

This is not a new invitation for educators of color. As I have written elsewhere in this Substack, educators of color come from a lineage of people who made good trouble — who built, who guarded, who subverted, who refused. They answered the invitation of their moment.

The question now is whether we will answer ours.

Read: Builders, Guardians, and Fugitives

What Accepting the Invitation Requires

I want to be honest about what accepting this invitation requires — because I think we do each other a disservice when we make it sound simple.

1. Resistance to equity work is not a neutral policy disagreement. It is, at its core, a defense of a status quo that has never served all students equally and was never designed to. We should call that out clearly.

2. Equity work is not easy work. It never has been. It asks something of us that is beyond job description. It demands a willingness to stand in the gap between the school we have and the school our students deserve — and to keep standing there even when the institution is not fully with us.

3. Education is political work. Not political in the partisan sense, but political in the most foundational one. It is about power — about whose knowledge is centered, whose history is taught, whose humanity is affirmed. When we advance outcomes and opportunity for those furthest from the center, we are doing political work. We should be honest with ourselves about that, and prepared for what it asks of us.

   ---

Not taking a stand is still taking a stand. Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality — it is a choice. And in a moment like this one, it is a choice with consequences for the educators and students who are counting on leaders to hold the line.

So why is the idea of the invitation?

Because it has direct implications for one of the most pressing challenges in education right now — why teachers leave, and what it will take to make them stay. Particularly teachers of color, who are leaving our schools at disproportionately high rates, carrying burdens that most leadership conversations still don’t fully name — despite a surplus of data that points clearly to the core issues driving turnover and eroding retention.

The invitation is the beginning of the answer.

What is this moment calling you to?

What is this moment calling you to be?

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This year, something unexpected happened. We had to reschedule our January session. What was meant to be a two-month gap between sessions became five. And when we finally returned to the room together in April, I had to reckon with a question I hadn’t fully anticipated: How do you rebuild a brave space after months of silence — especially when the world outside has not been quiet?

The answer, I’ve come to believe, lives inside a framework I’ve been thinking about for years: relational trust (Bryk & Schneider, 2002).

The Space We Returned To

When I design these sessions, I think carefully about sequencing. Our first three gatherings moved deliberately — from establishing why we caucus, to examining how our identities position us within organizations, to understanding how intersecting identities shape power and who gets seen in schools. Each session built on the last. Each asked participants to go a little deeper.

By November, the group had done real work together. They had named where they sit — closer to the mainstream or nearer to the margins. They had looked at data on discipline disparities and asked hard questions about what it means to lead in systems that continue to harm the students they serve. They had sat with Audré Lorde’s reminder that there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle.

And then — five months passed.

When we returned in April, I didn’t want to pretend the gap hadn’t happened. I didn’t want to pick up where we left off as if no time had passed, as if nothing had changed in their schools, their communities, or them. I wanted to acknowledge the distance — and use it.

So I opened with a Mentimeter prompt: What is trust?

Responses filled the screen. Consistency. Honesty. Showing up. Safety. Vulnerability. Reliability. One word appeared more than once, in different forms: presence.

That single word told me everything I needed to know about where this group was. They weren’t just thinking about trust as a concept. They were thinking about what it costs to be present — fully, honestly present — when you are exhausted, uncertain, and under pressure to perform otherwise.

What Bryk & Schneider Gave Me

I’ve returned to Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider’s research on relational trust many times over the course of my career. Their work, rooted in a decade-long study of Chicago public schools, established something that practitioners know intuitively but rarely see named so clearly:

Not curriculum. Not assessment systems. Not even leadership style.

Bryk and Schneider identify four determinants of trustworthiness: respect, personal regard, competence, and personal integrity. Each one is worth sitting with on its own. But it was their definition of competence that stopped me when I first read it — and stops me still.

Competence is described as fulfilling role expectations capably. It means knowing what to do, even when you don’t know what to do.

Read that again: Knowing what to do, even when you don’t know what to do.

For aspiring school leaders, that phrase is both clarifying and terrifying. Because what it describes is not expertise. It is presence under pressure. It is the capacity to stay oriented — to your values, to your people, to your purpose — when the answers aren’t clear and the ground is shifting beneath you.

That is the crossroads these leaders are standing at right now.

When Uncertainty Threatens Each Dimension of Trust

Here is what I’ve observed, both in my own leadership and in the leaders I work with: uncertainty doesn’t pause the work of trust-building. If anything, it accelerates the stakes. The people we lead are watching us more carefully when things are hard, not less. And the gap between who we say we are and how we actually show up becomes more visible — to them, and to us — precisely when we are most depleted.

Each of the four determinants of relational trust becomes harder to sustain under pressure — and more important to protect.

Respect asks us to value the ideas of others even when we are overwhelmed. When leaders contract inward under stress — when they stop listening, stop consulting, stop making space — the people around them feel it immediately.

Personal regard asks us to show genuine care even when we are running on empty. There is a difference between care that is performed and care that is felt. People know the difference. They have always known.

Competence asks us to lead honestly through uncertainty rather than defaulting to false confidence or silence. This is the hardest one for many leaders — particularly leaders of color, who often carry an additional burden: the pressure to appear certain, capable, and unshakeable, precisely because their right to lead is more frequently questioned.

Personal integrity asks us to close the gap between espoused values and enacted virtues. What we say we believe and what we actually do under pressure. That gap, when it widens, is felt as a betrayal — by our teams, and by ourselves.

What the Aspiring Principals Are Teaching Me

In our April session, I asked participants to sit with this question: What messages — spoken or unspoken — did you learn about whether leaders are allowed to show up in times of uncertainty?

What followed was one of the most honest conversations I’ve witnessed in this space.

Leaders named the messages they had internalized — from supervisors, from mentors, from the culture of schools themselves. Leaders don’t cry. Leaders have answers. Leaders hold it together so everyone else can fall apart. And underneath those messages, something more personal: the fear that showing uncertainty would be read not as humanity, but as incompetence. That for them — as leaders of color, as women, as first-generation professionals — the margin for visible struggle was narrower than it was for their colleagues.

Bryk and Schneider’s research tells us that trust is built through daily interactions. What these leaders are teaching me is that for those at the margins, every interaction carries additional weight. Every moment of uncertainty is an opportunity — not just to lose trust, but to model something different. To demonstrate that presence, honesty, and care are not weaknesses. They are the architecture of trustworthy leadership.

That is the work we are doing together. And it is nowhere near finished.

Read more

A blueprint does four things:

It carries design. It holds memory. It guides construction. And it outlives the builder.

I recently had the privilege of delivering a keynote to a room full of brilliant and committed leaders of color. I shared what I believe with my whole heart: the conditions we are navigating right now are not new. The hostility, the rollbacks, the silencing — educators of color have always faced versions of this. And they have always found a way through.

When I led the call and repeat, the room rose to meet it — we are not new to this, we are true to this.

Bring This Work to Your Organization

That chant holds a truth worth sitting with. In every moment of challenge, backlash, and resistance to racial progress throughout American education history, educators of color have played a critical role — advocating for social progress, building conditions that served all learners, and refusing to wait for the dominant narrative to align with what was simply right.

Here is what the history tells us:

Educators of color have never waited for permission. Anna Julia Cooper did not wait. Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson did not wait. The Japanese American educators who taught inside incarceration camps did not wait. The Black teachers who Jarvis Givens documents — who created fugitive pedagogies, who built freedom inside hostile systems — they did not wait.

They were the blueprint.

Not because the systems they worked inside were fair. Not because the politics of their moment were hospitable. But because they understood something that no executive order, legislative session, or administrative rollback can fully reach:

That the formation of a child’s mind, dignity, and sense of possibility is a sacred act. And that some of us have been called to do it regardless of the conditions.

The blueprint metaphor asks something of leaders specifically.

A blueprint is not just inspirational. It is functional. It is a document with specifications, with load-bearing walls, with measurements that have to be right or the structure fails.

For those of us leading schools and districts: the blueprint is something we are responsible for building with them.

That means:

None of this happens alone.

The educators I have had the privilege of learning from and working alongside over the years — and the leaders I most admire in this work — share one quality above all others. They find their people. They create spaces of healing, safety, and encouragement. They rally around opportunities for change. And they honor each other as the change agents they are.

If you lead a school or district, you have an extraordinary opportunity right now. Not despite the moment. Because of it.

History is watching what we do when it is hard.

The blueprint has been laid down by those who came before us — in conditions far more hostile than what most of us are navigating today.

Builders and Organizers. Culture Keepers and Guardians. Subversive Change Agents.

These are not new categories. They are not a framework I invented. They are who educators of color have always been — documented, if often overlooked, across more than a century of American education history.

And they are who the educators of color in your schools are today.

Read Part 1

Builders and Organizers

Anna Julia Cooper was born into enslavement in 1858 and died in 1964 at the age of 105 — having lived through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, two World Wars, the Brown v. Board ruling, and the Civil Rights Movement. She led M Street High School in Washington, D.C., and prepared Black students for college and intellectual life at a time when the entire social architecture insisted this was either unnecessary or impossible.

She did not wait for permission to believe her students were capable of excellence.

She built. She organized. She produced scholars who went on to the most rigorous universities in the country. And she did it while fighting bureaucratic obstruction, racial hostility, and a system that would have been perfectly content with her teaching less.

Take This Work Deeper

When you look at the educators of color in your buildings who are creating clubs, forging mentorships, staying late, writing grants, and finding resources the school didn’t provide — you are looking at people in the tradition of Anna Julia Cooper.

Culture Keepers and Guardians

Ella Deloria and Ruth Muskrat Bronson worked in the early and mid-20th century in schools designed — by law, by intent — to erase Indigenous identity. The mandate was explicit: assimilate or perish. The institutions they worked in operated under the premise that a child’s language, knowledge, and cultural tradition were liabilities.

They believed otherwise.

They devoted their lives to honoring Indigenous language, intellectual tradition, and knowledge systems. They understood that a child’s language is not a liability. It is a birthright — a gateway to self-determination and personal agency.

They did this work inside institutions that were actively working against them. Not because the system made it easy. Because the children in front of them deserved nothing less.

When educators of color in your schools insist on culturally responsive curriculum, on affirming their students’ full identities, on refusing the premise that some children’s stories don’t belong in the classroom — they are not being difficult. They are carrying a centuries-old commitment to the wholeness of children.

Subversive Change Agents

In 1942, under Executive Order 9066, Japanese American families were forcibly incarcerated in internment camps. Among them were educators. And in those camps — inside the architecture of their own dehumanization — they continued to teach.

They created learning communities. They refused to let the state’s reduction of their humanity define what was possible for their students.

Scholar Jarvis Givens names this tradition in his contemporary research as “fugitive pedagogy” — the ways Black educators historically created spaces of freedom and intellectual life within and despite hostile systems. They taught who their students actually were, and in accordance with their God-given dignity, not who the system said they were.

Subversive change agents do not blow up the system from the outside. They build within it, around it, and sometimes in spite of it. They hold onto a vision of their students’ full humanity with extraordinary tenacity.

What this means for your leadership

These are not historical footnotes. This is living legacy. It is present in your schools right now, in educators who are often underpaid, under-supported, and over-taxed — and still showing up.

The question for school and district leaders is not simply: How do we recruit more educators of color?

The deeper question is: Are we building organizations worthy of what they carry?

Because when educators of color leave — and they are leaving at disproportionately high rates — it is not because they were not committed enough.

It is because we did not build systems that matched their commitment.

Next up: The Blueprint — what it means to lead with and for educators of color in a moment that demands both urgency and hope.

Websites get pulled down. Carefully crafted language gets revised into something unrecognizable. Projects stall because funding has become precarious. People who were once champions of this work go quiet — not because they stopped believing, but because the threat of punishment has become loud enough to silence them.

I have felt that weight personally. As a scholar-practitioner of color who has spent years doing this work, I know what it is to pour yourself into something and then watch the environment shift around you — to wonder whether the ground you thought you were standing on was ever as solid as it seemed.

I’m writing this because I think a lot of people are feeling it right now and not saying so. And I think the silence is part of the problem.

So let’s name it. Let’s name all of it.

There’s a question I often ask at the start of my sessions with educators:

What traits do you hope to embody as an educator? What — or who — inspires those traits?

The answers are always stunning. Patience. Courage. Presence. Joy. People name grandmothers and mentors, coaches who saw them before they saw themselves. The room fills with something that can only be described as calling.

For me, the answer has always been my grandmother (far right). I am including a photo of her here, with her sisters.

And then I have to hold that tenderness next to the reality we’re all living inside.

Because right now, in 2026, educators of color are being asked to answer that calling in conditions that were never designed with their humanity in mind.

The landscape is not subtle.

The number of anti-CRT measures introduced across the country has climbed steeply since 2020 — at the local, state, and federal level. Book bans have reached into thousands of school libraries. DEI programs rolled back under threat of the now-rescinded "Dear Colleague" letter have not yet been reinstated.

Former champions have gone quiet. The path forward feels uncertain. And educators of color are being asked to keep showing up with excellence and joy inside institutions that are, in some cases, actively dismantling the conditions that made their work possible.

This is the K-12 moment educators of color are being asked to lead through.

And they are doing it while already carrying something that rarely gets named out loud. I call it the Triple Bind.

The Triple Bind has three layers.

The first: being held to high standards inside systems that were not built with your full humanity in mind. The expectation of excellence without the infrastructure to support it.

The second: navigating under-representation, professional isolation, and what I call the invisible tax — the weight of being the one, or one of very few. Of being expected to speak for an entire community while also doing the actual job. Of being the diversity initiative and the teacher and the mentor and the advocate, all at once.

The third is the one that doesn’t get talked about enough in education leadership circles: stewarding a calling in spaces where dominant cultural narratives do not always center people who look like you. There is a spiritual dimension to this work that scholars have named "spirit murdering" — the psychological and emotional assault that leaves no visible wounds, but whose weight is very much real.

Why does this matter to you as a leader?

Because educators of color are not leaving schools because they aren’t committed. The research is clear on many of the reasons: professional isolation, cultural taxation, insufficient support, limited advancement pathways, and inadequate compensation, to name a few.

They are leaving because the conditions are unsustainable.

And that is a leadership problem. One you have more power to address than you might think.

But before we get to what to do — and we will — I want to do something less common in this conversation.

I want to root us in who these educators have always been.

Because if we only talk about the burden without talking about the lineage, we do educators of color a profound disservice.

Next in the series: Builders, Guardians, and Subversive Change Agents — the ancestral legacy that lives in every educator of color in your building today.

If this resonated, subscribe so you don’t miss Part 2.

That matters enormously. As a parent of young children, I think about this type of safety a lot.

At the same time, research indicates that physical safety is not the whole picture — and for teacher retention, it may not even be the most important part.

There are two other kinds of safety that determine whether educators stay or go, and most schools are barely measuring them, let alone actively building them.

Three Layers of Safety

Physical safety is about protecting bodies. That’s the one we’ve invested in.

Psychological safety is about protecting voices. It’s the belief that you can speak up, disagree, ask a question, or admit a mistake — without fear of embarrassment or retaliation. In schools with low psychological safety, teachers go quiet. They execute, but they don’t engage. And eventually, they leave.

Intellectual safety is about protecting ideas. Can an educator pitch something new without it being dismissed? Can they take a pedagogical risk without being punished if it doesn’t land perfectly? And when a teacher from a historically marginalized identity experiences microaggressions or treated yet again as the “angry Black teacher”, “the disciplinarian”, or the “perpetual foreigner” by families or colleagues, are they safe enough to say so — or have they learned to stay quiet because speaking up hasn’t been worth it?

If the answer is no, the most creative, resilient, and ambitious teachers — exactly the ones you most want to keep — often go find somewhere that says yes.

Safety isn’t just about physical protection. It’s about whether educators feel trusted enough to bring their full selves to work.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

During the webinar I recently facilitated with ISTE+ASCD, we explored a set of questions that leaders can use as a gut-check on the safety they’re actually creating. Here are a few worth sitting with:

• Do I actively invite and listen to diverse perspectives — or do I mostly hear from the same voices?

• Do I model self-awareness and accountability — or do I expect it from others without demonstrating it myself?

• Are there multiple, accessible ways for educators to give feedback — or just the official channels that most people don’t trust?

• When I introduce change, do I slow down to explain the ‘why’ — or do I expect people to just get on board?

These aren’t comfortable questions. They’re not supposed to be. But the leaders who ask them — and actually do something with the answers — are the ones building schools where educators genuinely want to stay.

It also costs schools roughly $25,000 and the equivalent of 72 instructional days to replace a single teacher. Most turnover isn’t about pay. It’s about whether people felt safe enough to stay.

Leaders who get retention right aren’t doing anything exotic. They’re doing the work of paying attention — to what their educators experience, what makes them feel seen, and what makes them feel like they can take a risk without losing their footing.

That’s leadership. And it’s available to anyone willing to ask better questions.

Not because you don’t care. Because most support systems aren’t designed to find who needs help — they’re designed to respond to who asks loudest.

And in schools, the people who ask loudest are rarely the ones perceived most at risk of leaving.

Think about who shows up to voluntary PD. Who responds to the principal’s open-door policy. Who raises their hand in staff meetings. Who requests coaching. Now think about who quietly disappears at the end of the year.

Those are often very different people.

The Stage Problem

One of the most important insights from the retention research I’ve been digging into: educators don’t need the same support throughout their careers (Day, 2012; Will, 2024). And treating them like they do is one of the fastest ways to lose them.

In his work, Christopher Day examines a teacher’s career into six distinct statuses. I re-organize them into three stages. Here is rough breakdown of what these three different career stages actually need:

• Early-career teachers need structure and feedback. They’re trying to find their footing. The ambiguity that an experienced teacher navigates with ease can be paralyzing for someone in year one or two.

• Mid-career teachers need growth and recognition. They’ve figured out the basics. What they want now is to know they’re seen, that their work matters, and that there’s somewhere to go.

• Veteran teachers need autonomy, trust, and influence. They’ve earned it. If your systems still treat a 20-year teacher like they need hand-holding, don’t be surprised when they start looking elsewhere.

The risk of one-size-fits-all support? Treating all teachers the same — and meeting none of them well.

Two Things Most Schools Aren’t Doing (But Should)

First: track who is receiving support — and who isn’t. Most schools have no mechanism for this. Support flows to whoever initiates it. That means the quietest, most overwhelmed teachers — often the ones most likely to leave — get the least.

Second: conduct stay interviews. Not just exit interviews. By the time someone is in an exit interview, you’ve already lost them. A stay interview asks a simple but powerful question: What’s keeping you here, and what might make you leave?

That conversation, done well, is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do. It signals that you care about retention before it becomes a crisis — not just after.

The schools that retain educators aren’t the ones with the best all-staff retreats. They’re the ones that know their people well enough to meet them where they actually are.

We keep talking about it like it’s a pipeline problem — not enough people entering the profession, not enough interest, not enough pay. And while pay absolutely matters, focusing there alone misses something urgent.

The data tells a different story:

• 1 in 6 teachers leaves their school or the profession every single year.

• Of those who leave, only 16% retire. The rest walk away early.

• 1 in 5 early-career teachers leaves their school or the profession altogether.

• 90% of K–12 teachers say burnout is a serious problem. More than half plan to leave early.

Teaching now ranks as the #1 most burned-out profession (McKibben, 2025; Peck, 2025; see also Bryant et al, 2023). Not because teachers stopped caring — but because the work they love has been buried.

"They aren't leaving because they lost their passion or stopped caring about students. The work they love has become buried under layers of bureaucracy, micromanagement, lack of support, and tasks that pull them away from their purpose." — Bryant et al., 2023

That reframe changes everything. If teachers are leaving because of purpose erosion — not passion erosion — then the solution isn’t inspiration. It’s protection.

What ‘Protecting Purpose’ Actually Looks Like

During a recent webinar I facilitated with ISTE+ASCD, we explored what school leaders can do to change this. The first move is deceptively simple: protect educators’ ability to do the work they came to do.

In practice, that means:

• Reducing tasks that pull educators away from teaching

• Protecting instructional stability — fewer mid-year subject or role changes

• Guarding time for both individual and collaborative planning

And one question every leader should be asking about every new initiative:

Does this support teaching — or distract from it?

The answer to that question should drive a lot of decisions.

We’ve built a culture where the loudest voices in education leadership talk about adding: new programs, new initiatives, new frameworks. But retention asks us to think about subtracting — clearing the path so teachers can actually teach.

If you lead a school or district, the most powerful question you can ask this week isn’t ‘What should we add?’ It’s ‘What’s getting in the way?’

A principal friend recently reached out to me regarding a course requirement for her studies in school leadership. She was being asked to start a DEI committee at her school and wanted to know my thoughts about the nature of the assignment—and whether, by starting the committee, she was actually doing right by her students and faculty.

I deeply appreciated the opportunity to chat.

First, because I deeply appreciate reflective and curious leaders. But also because I found this to be an uncommon question.

In my work across traditional public, charter, and independent schools, a director of equity (or equivalent role) and a committee or advisory body is often the status quo. Since the murder of George Floyd and the so-called “racial awakening” across sectors in the United States, the idea of diversity is, at this point, more normal than not.

Despite title changes or shifts in responsibilities, it is still not uncommon for the theoretical commitment to equity to be championed in some way by someone.

If you’re new around here and wondering why this matters to me, it’s helpful to know that much of my work focuses on helping organizations support and retain diverse, effective educators and staff. Through that work, I’ve seen firsthand how well-intentioned structures—like DEI committees—can either deepen belonging or unintentionally undermine it, depending on how they’re designed.

Now that you know a bit about my work, let me lift the veil on how my brain works.

I think in questions. Before I offer answers or opinions, I start by asking them.

Questions provide entry points to reflection, but they also encourage metacognition and inner dialogue. In short, answering one’s own questions facilitates a different kind of thinking than sole pontification.

So here I share my thoughts.

While the questions that follow are framed around the titular question—Should I start a DEI committee?—I believe there is value in applying them more broadly to affinity groups or other strategic initiatives intended to address, heal, and navigate deeply entrenched inequities in school settings.

While the sequencing of these questions may vary by context, I argue that all of them offer necessary food for thought.

Question 1: What is the specific problem you are trying to solve?

As with any school initiative, there should be alignment between a DEI committee and the school’s stated values and goals—or a clear attempt to realign or course-correct when misalignment erects barriers to achievement, belonging, or equitable experiences for students and staff.

This is where data comes in.

There should be evidence that points to a problem worth addressing. Data isn’t always numerical (though I do love a good dashboard); it can include stories, anecdotal feedback, incidents, patterns, or community input.

Alongside naming the problem is an equally important question: Why is a new committee needed, rather than modifying existing structures, policies, or practices already in place?

Question 2: What influence will this committee have on schoolwide decision-making?

This is a critical consideration.

Effective committees have power.

Curriculum committees, for example, have the authority to evaluate and recommend instructional materials. Parent-teacher organizations influence schoolwide events and family engagement policies.

Committees that exist solely in an advisory capacity—divorced from decision-making authority—are often set up to fail from the start.

Accountability also matters here.

In what ways, if at all, does the committee have the license to hold leadership accountable for stated intentions and actions?

And taking it one step further: who is the committee accountable to, and how will its recommendations or learnings be communicated to the broader school community?

Question 3: How will members of the committee be identified or selected?

This question is ripe for surfacing bias in recruitment, application, and selection processes. Too often, teacher leadership opportunities are governed by unclear or informal practices.

Instead of transparent applications and selection rubrics, decisions are made based on:

• who is most vocal (perception bias)

• who shares our background or worldview (affinity bias)

• who is perceived as “most competent” (halo effect)

Leaders must be vigilant here.

Equally important is ensuring that those most impacted by inequity and marginalization are represented—without tokenization or adding to their burden.

This question should also prompt clarity around:

• role expectations

• boundaries for participation (time, labor, emotional load)

• recognition

• compensation

I know compensation can be challenging as both independent and public schools across the national are navigating enrollment shifts and economic uncertainty.

Still, I live by this principle in my own work:

If I can’t pay you for labor that extends beyond your role, I need to take something off your plate.

Question 4: What resources will the committee have to actually do the work?

Educators are miracle-workers. But even angels have help.

By resources, I mean:

• Time: If equity work is relegated to “extra,” its sustainability is immediately threatened. That is not a failure of individual educators; it is a failure of structures that signal equity is not a true priority.

• Administrative support: Are you, as a leader, equipped to listen, respond, troubleshoot, and act in a timely manner?

• Professional learning: Capacity building requires both time and access to meaningful resources that challenge and affirm educators’ intellect, humanity, and contributions.

• Capacity: A committee should never be a committee of one. Aim for three to five members. Life will life; attrition is inevitable. Collective brilliance matters.

• Budget: If people are being asked to advance institutional goals, resources must follow.

This list is not exhaustive, but the message is clear:

Without resources, the work will stall at ideas alone.

Question 5: How will the committee’s work be integrated into the school’s existing foundations?

When my friend shared that she was tasked with creating a DEI committee as part of a graduate course requirement, I played it cool but I was honestly shocked.

What happens once the assignment is submitted?

What does that imply about the lifespan of DEI work beyond the course itself?

I shudder at the potential harm of a performative DEI committee that is not designed to be integrated into the core of how a school functions—its policies, frameworks, strategic plans, and instructional vision.

If there is no intention to embed DEI into the foundation of the school, I would urge leaders to return to Question 1 and reflect more deeply.

Question 6: Are you ready to lead through discomfort?

The current political climate and social retreat from equity have shown us that efforts to advance equity are often met with resistance.

There must be a proactive plan for how committee members will be supported when pushback arises.

Because it will.

You may also encounter evidence of harm or inequity that challenges how you see yourself as a leader.

When that moment comes, how will you respond—to others, and to yourself?

Pause.
Breathe.

This discomfort is an invitation—to personal and collective growth.

And it is an opportunity to align the daily lived realities of students and staff who are most marginalized with equal access, opportunity, and fulfillment within your school.

What are your thoughts?
If you’ve started a DEI committee, to what extent were these considerations on your mind?

Looking back, what—if anything—would you have done differently?

I’d love to hear your reflections.

Yes.

TL;DR: Educators of color still matter—but not only because of representation.

They matter because they are cultural bridge-builders, truth-tellers, and essential to the health of our democracy and our schools.

Educators of color do matter. Especially in this moment.

This question, do educators of color still matter?, is being asked more often now, even if quietly.

It’s surfacing in board rooms, C-suite meetings, and leadership retreats as school systems navigate political pressure, legal uncertainty, and a national backlash against race-conscious efforts.

In some places, the response has been retreat: scaling back recruitment initiatives, dissolving affinity spaces, or re-framing commitments in ways that avoid naming race at all.

So let’s be clear.

Why I’m Writing This

My name is Dr. Andrea Terrero Gabbadon. I’m a former school leader, an ASCD author, faculty member, and an educator whose work focuses on school working conditions, organizational culture, and the retention of educators of color. I also lead regional educator support and retention efforts and work closely with school and district leaders across the country.

In short: I spend a lot of time listening to educators and to leaders who are trying to make sense of what it means to lead well in this moment.

What the Research Told Us And Why That Frame Is No Longer Enough

For years, the case for educator diversity rested largely on empirical research. The findings are well documented: students of color—particularly Black students—experience stronger academic outcomes, higher graduation rates, and improved post-secondary trajectories when they have at least one teacher who shares their racial background (Gerhenson et al, 2022).

Put simply, representation matters. (For a synthesis of this research, see resources from the Learning Policy Institute.)

More recent research has expanded this framing, demonstrating that educators of color benefit all students- not only those who share their racial identity—through culturally responsive pedagogy, higher expectations, and more inclusive learning environments (Cherng & Halpin, 2016).

And yet, we are living in a moment when evidence itself is under assault.

Extensive empirical evidence is dismissed as “DEI ideology.” Race-conscious supports are framed as preferential treatment rather than as efforts to correct long-standing inequities (Meltzer, 2025; see also Lonetree, 2025).

In some contexts, policy and documented commitments to diversifying the educator workforce are now pulling back—quietly or overtly— due to federal pressure, to avoid scrutiny, or financial risk (Mehta, 2025; see also this press release from the U.S. Department of Justice.)

This shift has changed the conversation.

So if the old justification is no longer deemed acceptable, we must ask a slightly modified question:

why do educators of color matter now?

Why Educators of Color Matter Now

Whether in K-12 spaces, university settings, or community third spaces, educators of color support students and their caretakers to navigate institutional, organizational, cultural, and even linguistic differences.

Justice-oriented educators of color are often the first to name when policies harm students, when practices exclude or marginalize, or when values professed in mission statements are misaligned with daily reality.

They do this at great risk to themselves but out of a deep burden of love and support.

My own research highlights how some Black women educators take on characteristics of othermothering, treating students with deep respect, affection, concern, and care as if they were their own flesh and blood for whom they are responsible for.

At a time when public education is under strain, educators of color remind us through their presence and persistence that schools are not neutral spaces.

The dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education, book bans, curriculum censorship, and other policy debates signal one shared truth across the political spectrum:

schools play a powerful role in shaping the world we live in.

In short, schools are civic institutions tasked with preparing young people to participate fully and freely in society.

And they matter because many of them remained in classrooms and school buildings through extraordinary upheaval—pandemic disruption, racial reckoning, political polarization while systems asked more and protected less. (For more on this topic, check out this piece from educator-activist and my friend, Rann Miller.)

What This Means for Leaders

If educators of color still matter—and they do—then leadership must reflect that reality in action, not just in aspiration.

Here are three leadership moves that matter now:

1. Double down on your commitments to racial justice.

Leadership is tested most in moments of resistance. Document what you stand for. Say it out loud. Make clear that equity and racial justice are not trends you abandon when challenged, but values that guide your decisions—especially when it is uncomfortable.

2. Build an inclusive culture that goes beyond “heroes and holidays.”

As a leader, you shape whose joy, brilliance, and leadership are made visible. Create space for counter-narratives. Ensure students and staff encounter the full humanity, creativity, and intellectual contributions of people of the global majority—not only during designated months, but as part of everyday learning.

3. Actively support the growth and aspirations of educators of color.

Too often, educators of color—particularly Black educators—are funneled into narrow roles rooted in discipline or crisis management.

Ask different questions. What are their goals? What leadership pathways interest them? What support would make advancement possible? Then commit to removing barriers that have historically limited their mobility.

More can—and should—be said. But let’s start here.

Dear leader:

Does your leadership communicate that educators still matter?

And if so,

how are you making that belief visible in the conditions you create, the opportunities you extend, and the risks you are willing to take?

For leaders interested in exploring this further, I’ve linked a few resources throughout the piece.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be inviting leaders into a deeper conversation about what educators are asking for and what leadership must be willing to change in response. Stay tuned.

Midyear burnout is often framed as an individual issue—resilience, mindset, stamina.

But in my work with educators and leaders, burnout is more accurately understood as a signal about working conditions.

It’s telling us something about:

• How supported (or unsupported) people feel in their roles

• Whether expectations have quietly exceeded capacity

• How much emotional labor is being absorbed without acknowledgment

• And whether educators feel valued as whole people—not just performers of outcomes

When educators leave midyear, it’s tempting to frame the departure as disruption or loss. But more often, it’s a reminder that schools and organizations are systems made up of real humans—humans operating alongside real lives that do not pause for the academic calendar.

The leaders who navigate this season well don’t rush to fix people.
They pause to examine culture—and make tangible shifts in how they lead.

Below are three leadership moves that can begin to shift conditions immediately.

Three Tangible Leadership Shifts You Can Make Next Week

1. Shift from “How are you doing?” to “What is costing you the most energy right now?”

I often see leaders default to generic check-ins. While well-intentioned, these questions rarely surface what’s actually weighing people down.

The most productive conversations happen when we explicitly name energy drains.

Try this next week:

• Ask your team—or one or two key staff—to name one task, expectation, or dynamic that feels disproportionately heavy right now.

• Resist the urge to solve immediately. First, listen for patterns.

This move signals three important things:

• Psychological safety

• Care

• A distinction between stress and systemic failure

Sometimes the shift people need most is not relief—but recognition.

2. Make invisible labor visible—and reduce it where possible

Educators are clear: burnout is not just about workload.

Much of it comes from unrecognized emotional labor—the invisible tax of mentoring others, managing conflict, holding school culture together, and absorbing stress on behalf of students, families, and colleagues.

Try this next week:

• Name one form of invisible labor you know specific staff members are carrying.

• Acknowledge it publicly—and clarify what can be paused, shared, or redistributed, even temporarily.

This is not about lowering standards.
It’s about protecting educator capacity so sustainability becomes possible.

Leaders who do this well communicate: “I see what you’re holding, and I don’t expect you to hold it alone.”

3. Plan for flexibility without making it feel like failure

One of the hardest moments leaders face midyear is when a strong educator needs to step back—or step away—due to family, health, or unforeseen circumstances.

In every coaching and network space I facilitate, I return to this idea:

How leaders handle exits and pauses shapes the culture for those who remain.

Try this next week:

• Pay attention to how your team talks about absence, leave, or transition.

• Replace language of disruption with language of continuity and care.

Sounds like:

• Instead of “This puts us in a bind,” try “We’ll figure this out together.”

• Instead of “We can’t afford this right now,” try “People don’t stop being human because the year is busy.”

These moments communicate more than we can imagine.

A Final Thought

Midyear burnout is not a sign that people don’t care.

More often, it’s evidence that they care deeply. In fact, they care so deeply they have been carrying too much, for too long, without conditions that make staying sustainable.

The leaders who respond well don’t just ask,“How do we keep people?”

They ask,
“What conditions would make staying possible, sustainable, and worth returning to year after year?”

Please be among those who ask the latter question.

If this feels useful, feel free to share.

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I work with school and district leaders on educator retention and leadership strategy. If you’re navigating this in your context, you can learn more about working together here: ATGabbadon.com.

Too often, retention is framed as an individual problem—about resilience, mindset, or “self-care.” In my work as an educational consultant and researcher, I see something different: educators stay when leadership, working conditions, and belonging are taken seriously.

This Substack is a space for research-informed reflection, lessons from the field, and practical wisdom for leaders who want to build schools where educators can stay and thrive.

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