School districts could more efficiently retain teachers by creating a single, dedicated office responsible for recruitment, evaluation, professional development, staffing, and collective bargaining, a report argues.
“Currently, in most school district central offices, when anything that has to do with teachers or teacher quality arises, people look to the human-resources department,” says the report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “What is often overlooked, however, is that key human-capital-management functions such as professional development, evaluation, collective bargaining, and policy development many times fall outside of human resources.”
If districts mount excellent recruitment and marketing campaigns from human resources, but have professional- development offices that provide poor-quality mentoring and training options, for example, the quality and stability of their teaching force may suffer.
