The Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) launched the DC Staffing Data Collaborative—a partnership between OSSE, LEAs who opt to participate, educator preparation programs, and TNTP, a national non-profit serving as the research organization. The goal of the Collaborative is simple but bold: help LEAs develop effective strategies to attract, develop, and retain the teachers they need to serve their students through access to better data.

In exchange for sharing human capital data with TNTP—which LEAs are often already required to collect and share to meet federal requirements—participating LEAs receive regular reports on targeted and timely topics, such as school culture, staffing, and differential retention. These reports provide LEAs information about their own schools as well as comparison data across the city. The Collaborative then brings LEAs and education preparation programs together for convenings where school, LEA, and city leaders discuss data in their reports and solve shared challenges around access to effective teaching. Now in their fourth year, the Collaborative has increased to include schools serving nearly 95% of all public school students, 50 LEAs across the District, and 7 educator preparation programs. 

To date, the Collaborative’s research has primarily focused on retention of effective teachers, taking advantage of rich data on teacher backgrounds, perceptions of instructional culture, and performance. With three complete years of data collection including over 200 schools and 7,000 teachers, the Collaborative has surfaced several key findings affecting teacher retention for participating LEAs, the city as a whole, and educators across the country. OSSE and TNTP believe these early findings should fuel conversations among policymakers and educators—and that the Collaborative can serve as a model in DC and beyond for how the public education sector, working together, can identify and solve challenges to benefit students.