Want stronger readers? Support the people teaching them.
Picture a first-grade classroom in September. A new teacher stands at the front, ready to teach 25 excited six-year-olds how letters become words. But she’s never been trained to teach reading. She was hired on an emergency permit, and she’s learning the job in real time.
This is not a story about one teacher falling short. It’s a story about a system that needs a stronger way to recruit, prepare, support, and keep the people teaching Philadelphia’s children.
If we want strong readers, we have to invest in the people teaching them.
At a recent Read by 4th Lunch & Learn, Scott Gaiber, Deputy Chief of Talent Initiatives at Elevate 215, walked through what's actually happening inside Philly’s teacher pipeline and what a citywide coalition is doing to fix it.
Philadelphia needs more teachers.
Philadelphia needs about 2,000 new teachers every year across District and charter schools. Right now, roughly half of them walk into the classroom on an emergency certification instead of a full teaching license.
The fix isn't just fewer emergency-permitted teachers. It's getting those teachers certified and supported, so they have a real shot at staying. Many of them want to be there. The system just hasn't caught up to them yet.
But it's starting to. The share of Philadelphia teachers on emergency permits dropped from nearly 23% to 18% in a single year.
Hiring teachers is one thing. Keeping them is another.
In a survey of 734 Philadelphia teachers, higher pay came out on top as the reason to stay. No surprise there.
But money was only part of the answer. Teachers also want less paperwork, more time to actually plan and collaborate, and a little more flexibility in how the job gets done.
Philadelphia can hire a thousand great teachers a year, but if the job burns them out by spring, the pipeline stays broken. If we’re serious about keeping teachers, it’s clear that pay and working conditions have to move together.
Who's at the front of the classroom matters.
A strong teacher workforce is also a diverse one. This is especially important in a city as culturally rich as Philadelphia. In 2024-25, 38.5% of Philly’s teachers identified as people of color, the highest share the city has seen since the early 2000s.
The research backs up why this matters. Teachers of color benefit students across every racial group, and students of color often see even more gains when their teacher shares their background.
Building stronger teacher workforce takes a citywide strategy.
Right now, more than 50 organizations, schools, charter networks, universities, nonprofits, workforce programs, and city government, have started working together as one coalition.
The Citywide Talent Coalition is tackling the whole teacher pipeline at once: recruitment, preparation, certification, retention, funding, and policy. That collaboration has already produced real programs on the ground, like TeachPHL, “Grow-your-own” pipelines now running in nine Philadelphia high schools, registered teacher apprenticeships, and initiatives built specifically to support and retain teachers of color.
There’s no single fix for systemic challenges, whether we’re talking about the teacher pipeline or the early literacy crisis. But there is always hope in what we can accomplish together.
