Addressing Michigan’s Teacher Shortage: Policy Recommendations & Innovative Solutions

In 2025, EdTrust Midwest released its latest report, Closing the Opportunity Divide, which examines the growing disparities in access to quality educators and the factors contributing to Michigan’s teacher shortages. The report highlights that these shortages disproportionately impact schools serving historically marginalized students, particularly Black and Brown students, and may be a key driver of persistent achievement gaps. Research consistently affirms that teacher quality is the single greatest in-school factor influencing student success (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014). However, Michigan’s education system faces a severe and widening gap in access to well-trained, effective educators, particularly in under-resourced communities. The report’s findings align with existing literature that suggests teacher shortages exacerbate systemic inequities, limiting opportunities for students in historically marginalized communities to receive the high-quality education they deserve.

Policy Recommendations

To address these challenges, Edtrust outlines several key policy recommendations to strengthen Michigan’s educator workforce. The report calls for fair and adequate funding through the full implementation of Michigan’s Opportunity Index, identifying an additional $2 billion in revenue to ensure all students, regardless of zip code, have access to high-quality teachers. Another critical recommendation is the improvement of statewide data systems, which would enhance public access to information on the distribution of credentialed teachers while also developing a centralized system for tracking teacher effectiveness. Additionally, the report emphasizes the importance of making teaching a competitive and attractive career choice by establishing equitable compensation mechanisms. This includes the introduction of a salary floor, ensuring that all schools, especially schools serving historically marginalized students can attract and retain top teaching talent. Finally, the report stresses the need to build teacher capacity by investing in professional development and improving methods for assessing teacher effectiveness. These efforts should move beyond punitive evaluation measures and instead focus on tools that support instructional growth.

Rethinking Teacher Evaluations

A key aspect of Priority 4 is the shift in focus from high-stakes accountability measures to genuine professional growth. Historically, teacher evaluations have been framed around accountability and compliance, rather than instructional improvement. Decades of research, including studies by Robert Marzano, indicate that most existing evaluation systems fail to improve student outcomes and offer little meaningful feedback to teachers (Marzano, Frontier, & Livingston, 2011). Additionally, Value-Added Models (VAMs) have proven unreliable in differentiating teacher effectiveness and often disproportionately penalize teachers of color (Goldhaber & Theobald, 2019). One promising alternative to traditional evaluation systems is instructional coaching, which has been shown to significantly improve teacher practice—but only when teachers actively seek it out (Knight, 2007). Top-down coaching models often fail to foster teacher agency and can undermine self-efficacy.

A New Approach: Coaching & Culturally Responsive Teaching

In the following section, we aim to expand on the challenges that Priority Four seeks to address and introduce a tool developed by the EDquity team—the Becoming Culturally Responsive Matrix. This tool is designed for both educators and administrators to cultivate culturally responsive approaches to instruction. When integrated into existing teacher evaluation frameworks, it has the potential to provide schools, administrators, and teachers with more robust tools to assess instructional effectiveness. Additionally, it offers a clearer understanding of the types of professional development needed to support and enhance teacher capacity.

A key tenet of Priority Four's policy recommendation is equipping administrators with better tools to accurately identify teacher needs. We believe the authors of the Closing the Opportunity Divide report were deliberate in their language choice, marking a shift from traditional calls for more stringent evaluation tools focused on accountability (The Education Trust-Midwest, 2025). Historically, similar recommendations would have emphasized administrative oversight mechanisms designed to hold teachers accountable. However, this shift aligns with extensive research and scholarship—such as the work of Robert Marzano—demonstrating that teacher evaluations, in their current form, often fail to improve student outcomes (Marzano, 2012). Research suggests that existing evaluation models provide limited insight into actual teacher performance, with the majority of teachers consistently rated as “effective” (Darling-Hammond et al., 2012).

On the other end of the spectrum, studies indicate that value-added measures (VAM) often fail to accurately capture teacher efficacy, frequently conflating external factors with instructional effectiveness (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014). Decades of policy efforts aimed at increasing teacher accountability have largely resulted in persistent shortages—precisely the issue the report highlights (The Education Trust-Midwest, 2025). The problem is further exacerbated by research showing that evaluation tools disproportionately yield negative ratings for teachers of color (Lindsay & Hart, 2017).

Given these findings, there is a growing body of research supporting alternative models that enhance instructional quality and provide meaningful teacher support. One such model is instructional coaching. Scholars such as Jim Knight emphasize that coaching is most effective when teachers actively seek it out, as top-down coaching initiatives often undermine teacher self-efficacy (Knight, 2019). However, coaching is just one of several research-backed approaches to supporting educators. The next section introduces a novel tool piloted by our team at EDquity, which we believe contributes to this growing body of literature and should be considered for deployment in classrooms, schools, and districts.

The BCRM

Traditional evaluation tools often focus on teacher actions, whereas more effective models prioritize student actions as indicators of instructional quality. The CLASS (Classroom Assessment Scoring System) framework, for example, centers student engagement in its assessments, organizing observations into domains that measure the quality of instructional interactions (Pianta, La Paro, & Hamre, 2008). Typically, trained assessors conduct classroom observations and share findings with teachers and school leadership. While CLASS has been widely recognized as a valuable tool, our research suggests that minor adaptations to its deployment could yield even greater insights—particularly in measuring culturally responsive instruction.

Scholar Geneva Gay was among the first to introduce the concept of culturally responsive teaching into the educational lexicon (Gay, 2000). Since then, culturally responsive instruction has become as ubiquitous a term as "rigorous instruction." However, quantifying such instruction remains a challenge due to shifting definitions and a lack of practical measurement tools. Despite these challenges, three core principles remain consistent within the literature on culturally responsive, relevant, and sustaining teaching: cultural competence, critical consciousness, and student focus (Ladson-Billings, 1995). These principles align closely with key domains of the CLASS framework, particularly student engagement, which emphasizes student voice and agency. Within this framework, two subdomains—student interactions and student expression—offer measurable indicators of culturally responsive instruction.

It should be noted that critical consciousness—an essential component of culturally responsive teaching—is not explicitly accounted for in the current CLASS framework. However, other research-backed tools have emerged that can capture this dimension of instruction (Paris & Alim, 2017). 

Rooted in ten years of classroom observational training and observation our team at Edquity began crafting a tool to merge the valuable insight of tools such as the CLASS and EDUSnap frameworks and the robust literature on culturally responsive teaching to create what we have named the Becoming Culturally Responsive Matrix (BCRM).  Our initial foray into this work began in the 2021-2022 school year when a team of us collaborated to use the emerging framework to support and improve teacher practice at a small K-3 elementary.  Our initial pilot showed promise, revealing increased improvements in the frequency of opportunities for student voice and choice in those classrooms. In 2025 we began building on these results infusing even more research-based frameworks such as Goldie Muhammad’s HRL framework in the work. These findings offer promising insights into the potential for quantifying cultural responsiveness, improving student engagement, and driving systematic instructional change. A link to the findings of our pilot study can be found below.

We believe this strand of research holds significant promise—not only for improving student achievement but also for providing teachers with meaningful opportunities to enhance their culturally responsive instructional practices. Furthermore, when tools such as the Becoming Culturally Responsive Matrix (BCRM) are integrated with the broader policy recommendations outlined in Closing the Opportunity Divide, these approaches may offer one of the most effective pathways to closing both achievement and opportunity gaps. The evidence is clear: strong teacher-student relationships, culturally responsive instruction, and meaningful professional development are essential to fostering educational equity and improving outcomes for all students.

• Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014). Measuring the Impacts of Teachers I: Evaluating Bias in Teacher Value-Added Estimates. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2593-2632.

• Darling-Hammond, L., Amrein-Beardsley, A., Haertel, E., & Rothstein, J. (2012). Evaluating Teacher Evaluation. Phi Delta Kappan, 93(6), 8-15.

• Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. Teachers College Press.

• Knight, J. (2019). The Impact Cycle: What Instructional Coaches Should Do to Foster Powerful Improvements in Teaching. Corwin.

• Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491.

• Lindsay, C. A., & Hart, C. M. (2017). Teacher Race and School Discipline: Are Students Suspended Less Often When They Have a Teacher of the Same Race? Education Next, 17(1), 72-78.

• Marzano, R. J. (2012). The Two Purposes of Teacher Evaluation. Educational Leadership, 70(3), 14-19.

• Paris, D., & Alim, H. S. (2017). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World. Teachers College Press.

• Pianta, R. C., La Paro, K. M., & Hamre, B. K. (2008). Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) Manual, Pre-K. Paul H. Brookes Publishing.

The Education Trust-Midwest. (2025). Closing the Opportunity Divide.