For years, the policy conversation around the educator workforce has operated on a largely unexamined assumption: that the structure of teaching is fixed, and that the work of policy is to make that structure work better. Better evaluation systems … in the one-teacher, one-classroom model. Better ways to pay for performance … in the one-teacher, one-classroom model. Better pipelines into a classroom … that looks, more or less, like every classroom before it.
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. That work matters. But the 2026 competition adds something that hasn’t been there before.
For the first time, TSL explicitly incentivizes strategic staffing as a design principle for how those systems are built.
That is worth pausing on because of where strategic staffing appears in the priority structure. The competitive preference points for strategic staffing are located inside the priority on strengthening core instruction.
The full language reads:
“strengthening core instruction through creating and supporting principals and other school leaders in implementing strategic staffing models, instructional leadership roles, or developing models for teacher and paraprofessional advancement that incentivize educators with opportunities and leverage their time, resources, and talent in innovative ways to better support student learning and achievement.”
That placement carries an argument. Literacy grants fund reading outcomes. Perkins funds career pathways. Other programs invest in ends. TSL has always invested in means. Strategic staffing, placed here, is recognized as a means to those means: the upstream structural condition that determines whether strong instruction is even possible.
What TSL is investing in
The grant is structured around two interlocking systems: human capital management and performance-based compensation. In conventional school models, both are designed around the individual teacher. Evaluation systems observe individual classrooms. Compensation structures reward individual credentials and years of service. Advancement typically means leaving the classroom entirely.
The result is a system that doesn’t reflect how teaching actually works in team-based models, where educators already take on differentiated responsibilities, lead colleagues, coordinate instruction and carry shared accountability for students, often without formal recognition or additional compensation. TSL creates space to innovate on that.
Team-based staffing models require systems that reflect how the work actually operates. When at least two professional educators share responsibility for a common roster of students, with differentiated roles and distributed expertise, the human capital and compensation systems built to support them have to answer different questions. How is expertise developed and recognized across a team? How does compensation reflect expanded role and responsibility without requiring educators to leave instruction behind? How do advancement pathways stay rooted in the classroom?
The compensation and role structures this grant supports are tied to what educators take on, the responsibilities they carry, the colleagues they develop and the students for whom they share accountability.
The grant also carries a clear signal for states. State educational agencies receive a competitive preference of up to 10 points, making SEA-led proposals especially competitive. States that have been investing in strategic staffing, understanding their educator workforce and their systems in ways that no federal agency can, are well-positioned to design approaches that can scale and sustain across districts and school types.
Beyond recognition
This isn’t the first federal signal on strategic school staffing. A proposed definition entered the Federal Register in October 2025. A Dear Colleague letter clarified that Title II funds can support team-based models and redesigned educator roles. In February 2026, that definition was finalized through the Secretary’s Supplemental Priority on Meaningful Learning Opportunities.
The federal definition that now anchors this work is worth having on hand:
Strategic staffing means a team-based approach to school staffing that replaces the traditional one-teacher, one-classroom model. In this model, at least two professional educators, which can include paraprofessionals and other licensed educators, share responsibility for a common roster of students during the same blocks of time in the school day. Teamed educators have differentiated roles and distributed expertise, allowing for flexible student grouping, more effective use of instructional time, and expanded career entry and advancement opportunities.
Each of those moves mattered. But recognition and permission are different from investment. TSL is where that changes.
Proposals that demonstrate how strategic staffing, instructional leadership and educator advancement work together as a coherent system will be more competitive. The field has spent years making the case that team-based staffing is a legitimate strategy. This grant program begins to reward the case being made in practice.
What this makes possible
The most competitive proposals will demonstrate coherence across staffing design, instructional leadership, educator development, and compensation, built around teams rather than retrofitted from conventional models. For systems already doing this work, the grant creates room to formalize and scale. For systems earlier in the process, it creates an incentive to build these structures intentionally from the start.
TSL’s emphasis on catalyzing promising practices puts a premium on evidence. In early May, we will be releasing findings from a quasi-experimental study examining the impact of team-based staffing on educator and student outcomes, directly relevant for applicants who need to demonstrate that these approaches strengthen both teaching and learning. We’ll share more as those findings are ready.
If you are considering a TSL application and want to explore how strategic school staffing could strengthen your proposal, reach out to John Roberts, our assistant director of partnerships, to start a conversation.
