If you talk to almost any school leader who serves students with disabilities or multilingual learners, you’ll likely hear some version of the same teacher retention story. They tried a new onboarding process, stipend, or a restructured planning block. For a while it worked, or seemed to, but then the school year picked up, priorities shifted, and by spring, things looked pretty much the same as before.
Rarely is this a story about bad leaders or lack of effort. Instead, this highlights the importance of understanding how change works, and how our systems can be designed to support it.
The Reason Retention Efforts Stall
Nationally, more than 300,000 public school teachers left the field between February 2020 and May 2022, noted in DLC’s Teacher Retention Report. States have reported special education teacher shortages dating back to the early 1990s. Today, 49 states and the District of Columbia report staffing shortages in special education, representing 98% of US school districts. In Tennessee alone, approximately 2,200 teacher vacancies were reported on the last state report card. The number of graduating teacher candidates has dropped by nearly one-fifth over the last five years. DLC’s Teacher Retention Report identified these five factors as the most influential in whether special education and ESL teachers stay or leave: supportive teams and leaders, individualized professional growth, specialized resources, manageable caseloads, and equitable compensation. Our recent post describes how those findings became the foundation of DLC’s Teacher Retention Toolkit — a comprehensive, research-based resource for schools ready to take retention seriously.
As we build this model, we want to keep in mind that knowing what needs to change is not the same as knowing how to make change last.
Schools aren’t struggling to retain diverse learner educators because leaders don’t care or because solutions don’t exist. They’re struggling because most retention efforts are treated like events — a professional development day, a policy update, a one-time intervention — rather than ongoing systems. A new idea is implemented, but rarely is data collected on whether it’s working or needs adjustment. Then, when it doesn’t produce the hoped-for results, it quietly fades, leaving teachers no more supported than before.
Addressing this gap is precisely what DLC’s Model Development and Dissemination (MDD) grant from the U.S. Department of Education was designed to support. Awarded in 2025, the MDD grant gave DLC the resources and the mandate to move beyond diagnosing the challenge: to hire dedicated staff, rigorously evaluate national research, and build practical tools grounded in the realities of schools serving students with IEPs and multilingual learners. The work described in this post — the continuous improvement framework, the coaching model, the pilot cohort — is that grant in action.
What Continuous Improvement Changes
Through the MDD grant, DLC has been grounded in a principle that research on sustainable change in education makes clear: small, iterative changes — tested carefully, studied, and refined based on evidence — are more likely to produce lasting results than large-scale launches that never get revisited.
The Continuous Improvement framework we’re embedding into DLC’s pilot model asks school leaders to do something that feels counterintuitive at first: start small, on purpose. Rather than rolling out a new mentoring program to every teacher on day one, a school tests it with a small group. They ask: Was this implemented the way we intended? Did teachers feel more supported? What did we not anticipate? Then they make a decision — adopt, adapt, or abandon — and try again, better informed than before.
It sounds simple, but building the structures to actually do it is challenging. That’s where coaching comes in.
Coaching Is the Bridge
A toolkit can tell a school leader what to do, but coaching helps them figure out how to do it in the context of their school, their team, and their constraints – and how to keep going when the first attempt doesn’t go as planned.
As we’ve been developing the tools that will support our pilot cohort, we’ve been building with that coaching relationship in mind. One example: the Plan, Do, Study, Act planning tool we’re implementing with pilot schools asks leaders to write down what they tried, rate implementation fidelity, weigh evidence of improvement, and commit to a specific next step within a defined framework. The options aren’t open-ended, but grounded in the adopt, adapt, or abandon protocol that Continuous Improvement research has validated, with built-in space for both the data and the context that should inform every decision.
We designed it this way intentionally, because the hardest part of any improvement effort isn’t the first cycle, it’s the second, and the third. It’s staying in the process when results are mixed, when the team is tired, and when it would be easier to move on to something else. The structure is what makes it possible to keep going, and the coaching is what makes the structure feel like support rather than compliance.
What This Means for Pilot Schools
When we launch our pilot cohort in fall 2026, schools won’t just receive a toolkit. They’ll work alongside DLC coaches who understand both the evidence base for diverse learner teacher retention and the continuous improvement process that connects that evidence to real practice. Together, we’ll build Improvement teams at each school, move through structured planning and data collection cycles, and learn across schools and over time what it actually takes to make these strategies stick in different contexts.
We know retention isn’t solved in a single school year. The goal of this pilot is to build and test a model that schools can sustain long after DLC coaches are no longer in the building.
Follow the Journey
We’re still in the development phase of this grant. In the months ahead, we’ll be sharing what we’re building, learning, and hearing from school leaders as we prepare to launch.
If you’re a school leader who has tried to improve retention for your diverse learner educators and wondered why it didn’t hold, this work is for you. If you’re a partner, a funder, or a practitioner who believes that students with the most complex needs deserve educators who stay, grow, and thrive in schools that support them, we want you on this journey with us.
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for updates as we get closer to launch. And sign up for the DLC newsletter to be the first to know when the toolkit is available and when opportunities to participate in a future pilot cohort are announced.
We’re building the feedback loop that’s been missing from teacher retention work, and we’d love for you to be part of what we learn.