Teachers’ voices matter. The Tennessee Educator Survey is an annual opportunity to learn from those voices to identify both strengths and opportunities to improve how the state supports its educators.
In 2024, the Tennessee Department of Education partnered with the Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA) to administer the survey to roughly 44,000 educators — over half of all teachers and school leaders across the state. SCORE analyzed the survey results and identified five key takeaways spanning teacher evaluation, the educator labor market, and (CTE) career and technical education pathways. SCORE hopes this analysis is helpful to leaders who are focused on recruiting and retaining quality educators throughout the state, a priority recently laid out in our 2025 State of Education report.
1. Teacher Evaluation: Most teachers agree the evaluation process is fair and led to improvements in their teaching. Tennessee’s teacher evaluation system is foundational for providing regular feedback to improve instruction. Educators’ continued support of teacher evaluation mirrors research that consistently finds Tennessee’ s multiple-measure evaluation system has led to positive student achievement and teacher growth.
2. Educator Labor Market: An increasing share of new educators decide to become teachers later on in their education and career journeys. Nearly half of early career teachers report deciding to enter teaching after first completing college or working in another field, a 5 percentage point increase from last year. Tennessee has responded to this shift in the educator labor market by investing in more flexible and supportive pathways to and through the teaching profession, as documented in a recent SCORE report. These data insights suggest early career teachers are using these alternative pathways and that continued state investment in the educator pipeline is a smart bet.
3. Educator Labor Market: Less than a third of school leaders report having a sufficient applicant pool for teaching positions. There are over 1,400 vacancies in Tennessee and varying staffing challenges across regions and districts. These findings, along with a SCORE report published earlier this year, point to the need for better data to help districts and schools craft tailored solutions, more flexible pathways to teacher licensure, and better support for the teaching profession as a whole.
4. Educator Labor Market: One in three early career teachers aren’t assigned a formal teacher mentor and only about half receive instructional coaching in their first year of teaching. Support for early career teachers is critical. Novice educators are less effective, on average, than veteran educators and are vulnerable to exiting the profession. In fact, Tennessee loses one out of every five teachers in the first three years on the job. Not only does research find that instructional coaching improves instruction and student achievement, but it can also be a strategy to strengthen teacher retention. Investing in early career supports — like the strategic staffing models highlighted in a recent SCORE report — can help districts attract, improve, and retain effective educators.
5. Career and Technical Education (CTE) Pathways: CTE teachers report that workforce alignment and career advising for students in CTE programs vary widely. Over a quarter of CTE teachers report that their program of study does not offer an early postsecondary opportunity (EPSO) at their school. EPSOs are opportunities that accelerate students towards credentials such as dual enrollment, AP coursework, or industry credentials. Further, over a third of CTE teachers lack access to their students’ learning plans, which include career interests and aptitude inventories. Without these learning plans, CTE teachers miss opportunities to advise and support students. The disparate quality of workforce alignment and support indicates a need to identify and prioritize high-quality CTE experiences in Tennessee to set students on clear pathways to careers that enable economic independence.
Looking forward, these insights from this year’s survey highlight the importance of foundational education policies like teacher evaluation as well as the need to strategically improve the teacher pipeline and support teachers in delivering quality instruction. Interested in digging deeper? SCORE has many resources expanding on teacher evaluation and foundational policies that enhance student success, including:
Jack Roberts Jue is a policy analyst at SCORE. Grace Glasgow is a graduate fellow at SCORE.