Report: Digital classroom tools could improve teacher retention, student outcomes
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Burnout and career departures among the nation’s teacher workforce can have significant effects on the outcomes of their students.
Public schools across the U.S. are losing their teachers, putting communities at risk of school closures and more negative outcomes for young children. One way state and local governments can try to keep classrooms filled is by investing in digital solutions that enhance how educators manage their work and interact with their students, a new report found.
In 2025, data from more than 30 states showed that they faced 45,582 vacant teacher positions, and an estimated 365,967 teaching positions were filled by people who were not fully certified, indicating a shortage of teaching professions, according to the Learning Policy Institute.
The wave of teachers leaving or not entering the education workforce has significant ramifications for student and community outcomes, said Nicol Russell, chief academic officer at Teaching Strategies, an educational consultant and early learning solutions provider. Research suggests that quality early childhood education and intervention could be linked to better outcomes in adulthood, like attaining higher education and employment opportunities.
That’s why policymakers and school leaders must address more than just the student’s experience, Russell said, and consider “what is the cost of not investing in systems that wrap around the teacher?”
The reality is, “you get a lot of burnout and a lot of teacher turnover,” she said. For example, disparate or siloed environments that require teachers to visit different systems to gather information to inform their work can create administrative burden that takes away from quality teaching and learning experiences, Russell explained.
Indeed, the report released this month from the National Institute for Early Education Research suggests that deploying digital solutions to help teachers more efficiently navigate their workplace can improve staff retention and, ultimately, young students’ outcomes, Russell explained.
The study evaluated how more than 100 teachers across two school districts in New Jersey interacted with digital resources from Teaching Strategies during a three-year period. The digital resources included virtual and asynchronous professional development materials and Teaching Strategies’ SmartTeach online platform.
The former tool helped coach teachers on creating meaningful experiences for their students, implementing student assessments, leveraging digital and print resources in the classroom and other skills, according to the report.
With the SmartTeach online platform, teachers could use a virtual platform and dashboards to manage classroom operations — like creating lesson plans, evaluating student progress and crafting reports — and maintain a school-to-home connection to help families engage with their child’s learning.
“With this kind of approach — an integrated ecosystem — we find that teachers are more likely to stay. That's a really big deal in a reality where teachers are leaving [the workforce] in droves, especially early childhood [education],” Russell said.
In fact, the digital intervention "significantly increased teacher retention by 23 percentage points,” the report states. The findings also suggest that improved teacher retention could be linked to more positive peer play skills among students in the treatment group and gains in children’s executive function in both treatment and control groups.
Additionally, teachers reported “statistically significant higher levels of personal accomplishment and marginally lower levels of emotional exhaustion than control group teachers,” according to the report.
“That's an important finding for us too, because it's not only keeping teachers … [When] they feel good about their work, we know that they're more likely to then keep staying … and less likely to burn out,” Russell said.
Officials should view tech and digital solutions as “part of the workflow now,” particularly “more as a tool than a replacement for teachers,” she said. “When you bring technology to life in a way that, for the teachers, feels like you’re adding value to their work … teachers are much more effective [because] they can now focus on the children and focus on their teaching.”