Rural & remote communities
Understanding geographic maldistribution and hard-to-staff locations.
GLOBAL RESEARCH · LOCAL REALITIES
Who Will Teach—
and Where?
Understanding the Global Educator Workforce Crisis
Around the world, educator shortages are reshaping opportunities to learn. Our research investigates where shortages are most severe, whose communities are most affected, why educators enter and leave the profession, and how education systems are responding.
18Education-system
profiles
profiles
GlobalComparative
perspective
perspective
Multi-phaseFrom desk research
to field inquiry
to field inquiry
CommunityPerspectives and
locally rooted responses
locally rooted responses
THE GLOBAL CHALLENGE
The shortage is global.
Its consequences are local.
A global total cannot tell us which children, schools, or communities are left without qualified educators.
Shortages intersect with geography, working conditions, preparation, retention, policy, and access to inclusive education. Our work asks not only how many educators are needed, but where, why, and for whom shortages are most consequential.
WHERE WE FOCUS
Special & inclusive education
Examining workforce capacity to meet diverse learning needs.
Early childhood education
Considering the educators and settings often missing from workforce debates.
Community & language
Attending to local, Indigenous, multilingual, and culturally sustaining contexts.
OUR RESEARCH
From understanding
to action.
Our work connects comparative education-system analysis with the perspectives of educators, communities, researchers, and policymakers.
Mapping the crisis
Developing 18 education-system profiles to identify patterns in shortages, preparation, working conditions, and policy.
Foundational profilesListening to the field
Learning from teachers, school leaders, teacher educators, and education decision-makers.
Next phaseLearning from communities
Exploring community-rooted recruitment, Grow Your Own pathways, apprenticeships, and other locally relevant responses.
Emerging inquiryCross-national learning
Bringing evidence across contexts into dialogue to inform research, policy, and sustainable workforce strategies.
Ongoing synthesisGLOBAL PERSPECTIVE
Explore the research
across education systems.
Our comparative profiles examine how educator workforce challenges are shaped by local conditions. Individual public profiles will be added as they are reviewed for release.
Illustrative selection; the complete set of 18 profiles will be published following review. Puerto Rico and Alaska are part of the United States.
BEYOND THE NUMBERS
People. Places.
Possibilities.
Who chooses to teach? What helps educators stay? Who is asked to work in the most under-resourced settings? And what can locally rooted pathways contribute to stronger, more representative educator workforces?
Community-rooted and Grow Your Own approaches are a central line of inquiry within a broader investigation of working conditions, educator preparation, policy, recruitment, and retention.
Contribute a perspective ↗THE RESEARCH COLLABORATION
Research across borders.
Learning across contexts.
Based at CU Denver and working with an evolving international network of doctoral researchers and collaborators, the lab is developing comparative evidence to inform more equitable and sustainable educator workforce approaches.
Research leads: Dr. Margarita Bianco and Dr. Madhavi Tandon.
Full team directory and partner affiliations will be added following confirmation.
COLLABORATE WITH US
What is happening
in your community?
We welcome dialogue with educators, researchers, universities, ministries, policy organizations, community initiatives, and doctoral students engaged in educator workforce questions.
Help extend the conversation.
Share an educator workforce initiative, suggest a research connection, or inquire about collaboration.
Contact the lab →Before publishing, replace the placeholder email in this button with your preferred address.