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The Teacher and School Leader Incentive program, known as TSL, has long been the federal government’s primary vehicle for pushing that work forward. It is a competitive grant designed to help state and local education agencies redesign how they manage their educator workforce and how they compensate educators. The 2026 competition adds something that hasn’t been there before: For the first time, TSL explicitly incentivizes strategic school staffing as a design principle for how those systems are built.

Hoover Middle School was one of six schools within Albuquerque Public Schools in New Mexico to launch team-based strategic school staffing models in 2025. In this story, Hoover’s leaders and four educators on the 6th-grade team — whose experiences span from one year to over two decades — share on their takeaways from their first year teaming and how the model is working to ensure that “no student falls behind.”

Early lessons from ITEL AZ demonstrate how educator teams and high-quality instructional materials can work together to strengthen grade-level instruction.

The seventh annual Strategic School Staffing Summit, hosted by Arizona State University’s Next Education Workforce™ initiative, took place Feb. 4–5, 2026, and featured more than 30 virtual sessions on how schools, systems and states are building and sustaining team-based staffing models, reflecting a field gaining traction and moving toward scale.

Four educators from across the country shared how teaming shapes their day-to-day work in a session entitled “A Conversation With Educators Working in Next Education Workforce Models” during the 2026 Strategic School Staffing Summit.

Recent federal guidance, via a new letter from the U.S. Department of Education, creates new opportunities to use Title II funds to support redesigned educator roles and team-based instructional models.