Three years ago, the Diverse Learners Cooperative published a teacher retention report that named what many schools already felt: special educators and multilingual learner educators were leaving at rates the field couldn’t sustain. The report identified the conditions that made it possible for educators serving students with the most complex needs to stay, thrive, and build careers in schools.
Over the past three years, DLC has been treating that report as a call to action, creating sustainable systems for long-term teacher retention. In 2025, DLC was awarded a Model Development and Dissemination (MDD) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, a highly competitive federal investment in models with national impact potential. Selected from a strong field of applicants across the country, this grant recognized that diverse learner teacher retention is one of the most urgent challenges facing schools today, and that solving it requires intentional systems, sustained support, and tools that allow school leaders to retain and support their staff.
From Research to National Recognition
The MDD grant is allowing DLC to move from diagnosis to design. We formed a team dedicated to evaluating national research and building practical tools that schools can use immediately. Their work has been rigorous and generative, translating findings from organizations like NCTQ, WestEd, TNTP, and the Learning Policy Institute into actionable strategies grounded in the realities of schools serving students with disabilities and multilingual learners.
Building the Teacher Retention Toolkit
The team is developing a Teacher Retention Toolkit, a comprehensive, research-based resource organized around five retention factors:
Factor 1: Supportive Teams & Leaders
Factor 2: Individualized Professional Development
Factor 3: Specialized Resources
Factor 4: Manageable Workload & Protected Time
Factor 5: Equitable Compensation & Recognition
Each factor is grounded in evidence about what keeps educators in schools serving diverse learners, and each comes with concrete tools, protocols, and implementation guidance designed to take the burden off school leaders. The toolkit will provide what leaders need to assess current practices, identify gaps, and take action without starting from scratch.
The DLC Teacher Retention Toolkit will launch this Summer. Reach out if your school is interested in joining the pilot cohort or in learning more about retention-focused strategies for diverse learner educators.
A Five-Year Vision: From Pilot to National Scale
In the 2026–2027 school year, DLC will pilot the toolkit with a small cohort of Nashville schools, testing strategies, collecting data, and learning what works in real implementation. From there, we’ll expand to more schools across Tennessee, then to partners across the country over the next five years.
Throughout that time, the toolkit will be refined, revised, and polished based on what we learn from schools. What facilitation moves help retention strategies stick? What barriers do schools encounter? What adaptations make evidence-based practices implementable and sustainable across different contexts? By the end of five years, we’ll have a model that works in practice and can be disseminated nationally.
What Comes Next
We believe teacher retention is solved through sustained commitment, and leaders who center the voices of diverse learner educators in decision-making, systems that protect time and workload, professional development that honors specialized expertise, and compensation structures that reflect the complexity of the work.
The toolkit gives us a framework and a place to start, inviting schools to take retention seriously as a working-conditions problem that requires intentional, evidence-based solutions.
Three years ago, we named the problem. Today, we’re helping build solutions.