Case Study: Teach Western Mass 

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Summary

Teach Western Mass (TWM) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the quantity, quality, and diversity of educators in the Pioneer Valley. Local education innovators launched the organization with considerable support from the state and private philanthropy. A woman of color with deep experience leading schools and strong ties to the region was selected to develop and lead it. She built buy-in around a mission and vision for long-term impact through a comprehensive systems-change approach.

With focus and determination, TWM had many achievements over its first 10 years: the organization created a residency program that gave educators of color greater access to the profession; it helped its partner schools and districts build capacity to attract and retain diverse, quality educators; and it promoted and influenced education equity conversations, making the region more attractive to diverse talent. TWM accomplished all of this amid a global pandemic that disrupted our educational system in ways that could not have been imagined when the organization was created.

However, the extraordinary effort required to deliver these accomplishments has been hard on the small staff, and the organization has had difficulty building and sustaining the internal capacity to drive true systems change. Despite its determined leadership and many successes, economic realities have forced TWM to focus on more modest programmatic interventions that deliver immediate outputs, a familiar pattern in the nonprofit landscape.

This case study documents TWM’s achievements and its eventual strategic retreat, thereby raising important questions for funders and policymakers working to position people of color led organizations for long-term impact in a period of constrained resources and racial equity retrenchment.

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I. Introduction

In 2016, Teach Western Mass (TWM) launched to address severe staffing challenges in Holyoke and Springfield. Each year, roughly one-in-three teachers working in the region’s highest-need schools left their positions. This churn stemmed largely from heavy reliance on inexperienced and unlicensed educators to fill hard-to-staff roles. Unprepared for the demands of the job, a majority of these new hires abandoned teaching within a few short years. This combination of high turnover and a largely novice workforce undermined student learning and made it extremely difficult for high-need schools to plan and carry out improvement efforts.¹

The teacher shortage that urban districts in Western Massachusetts confronted a decade ago is even more prevalent now in cities throughout the state. Relatively low pay and the post-pandemic challenges that teachers face are placing considerable downward pressure on the educator workforce. Without strategic intervention, the teacher pipeline will narrow further because the state’s high school graduates are becoming more diverse, and statistically students of color are less likely to attend four-year colleges, and when they do earn a bachelor’s degree, they are less likely than white peers to become teachers.²

Moving aggressively to grow the Massachusetts educator workforce is paramount because teacher quality contributes two to three times more to student achievement than any other school-level factor.³ As leaders and policymakers weigh their options to fortify the commonwealth’s teacher pipeline, they must reflect carefully on the lessons that TWM provides. 

Through the ups and downs of the past 10 years, the small nonprofit has worked collaboratively with partners to develop and lead an unparalleled effort to prepare effective teachers. While this case study documents how TWM’s data-driven systems-change approach has had positive impact increasing the quantity, quality, and diversity of educators, it also shows how the structural inequities that produce large disparities in educator quality across districts remain largely intact and resource limitations have forced the organization to prioritize short-term outputs over longer-term transformation.

Drawing from key stakeholder interviews, this case study describes the evolution of TWM and distills clear takeaways that leaders can apply to similar efforts to advance education equity through systems change.

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II. The Evolution of Teach Western Mass

A clear understanding of TWM’s impact to date—and the lessons that it provides for other initiatives with similar ambitions—begins with a deeper grasp of its founding circumstances and how the organization evolved in response to financial constraints, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the changing needs of its district partners. This short synopsis describes TWM’s first 10 years of operation, as well as major shifts in the organization’s focus and mission from startup to the present day.

The Founding Mission and Vision

In 2014, Empower Schools incubated and launched the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership (SEZP), a collaborative effort with the Springfield Public Schools and the local teacher’s union to improve learning outcomes in the city’s nine middle schools. To help these hard-to-staff “turnaround” schools recruit and retain teachers, Empower worked with others to hire The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a leading national nonprofit that assists communities with educator recruitment and training.⁴ Through dialogue with local teachers, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and community stakeholders, TNTP highlighted the acute need to help urban districts across Western Massachusetts fill and retain teacher vacancies with high quality talent.⁵

Pema Latshang, TWM’s founding executive director, was working for the Holyoke Public Schools (HPS) at this time. In 2015, DESE placed the district in state receivership due to chronically poor performance. Pema was brought on to help lead turnaround efforts in Holyoke, including supporting talent pipeline initiatives and new teacher induction. A biracial, queer woman and mother, Pema grew up in a working-class family in Western Massachusetts, the daughter of a Tibetan refugee father and an Irish Catholic (turned Buddhist) mother.

The first in her family to graduate from college, Pema began her career as a Teach for America Corps member in the South Bronx. While earning two master’s degrees in education and educational leadership and administration, she joined the New York City Department of Education. There she led strategy and improvement initiatives across schools, supporting educators and district leaders in areas ranging from curriculum and literacy to school design and reviews.

At HPS, Pema gained a deeper appreciation of the urban education context in places that lacked the resources of major cities like Chicago and New York. She learned that Holyoke and Springfield endured high rates of teacher vacancies year after year. The challenge was especially severe in hard-to-fill license areas, such as special education, math, English as a Second Language, and science. To staff open positions in these fields, the region’s urban districts typically turned to unlicensed teachers working on emergency waivers.

Designing a new teacher induction and mentoring program was one of Pema’s first tasks at HPS. She understood that induction programs typically resemble onboarding programs, offering mentoring and social-emotional support to new teachers. Pema adopted a stronger skills-based coaching approach used by a Boston-based organization, tailoring it to meet Holyoke’s needs. She also became a frequent presence at meetings of the newly formed Diverse Teacher Workforce Coalition (DTWC) of Western Massachusetts. She began to meet colleagues from higher education and surrounding districts and quickly established herself as a fresh leader committed to helping the region develop a diverse and effective educator workforce.⁶

By 2016, Empower Schools (with support from DESE) was leading efforts to launch a regional educator workforce initiative. TNTP helped build an emergent understanding of districts’ talent needs, and of the unique ways in which a standalone organization could develop and implement a robust set of strategies to address them—particularly in SEZP and HPS, which were hungry for new talent. The Irene E. and George A. Davis Foundation provided seed funds to cover start-up costs and the executive director’s salary. TFA and Empower Schools contributed shared office space. They posted an announcement for an executive director who wanted to “solve the teacher workforce puzzle in Western Massachusetts.” Drawn by the opportunity, Pema applied for the position. She was hired to devise a strategy and launch the organization.

In December 2016, TWM launched with a logo, a website, and a staff of one. Pema quickly went to work developing a vision for an organization that would grow the quantity and quality of educators by pursuing change on multiple fronts. This comprehensive approach was rooted in an understanding that students and aspiring educators with limited social capital face compounding disadvantages at every stage of the education and workforce pipeline. These inequities do not occur in isolation: undergraduate access, graduate pathways, licensure, recruitment, classroom experiences, career transitions, and long-term advancement are all interdependent. Rather than just focusing on one slice of the problem in isolation, TWM sought to deliver systemic solutions to systemic barriers across the continuum.

While they were not recorded in a formal plan, Pema saw the organization developing six core practices over time to fulfill its mission:

1. Recruitment. Targeted outreach to attract a diverse pool of candidates through hiring fairs, storytelling-driven marketing, and mission-aligned branding in partnership with local school districts, colleges, and community-based organizations.
2. School system capacity building. Consulting services grounded in research and field-tested best practices to provide customized guidance on building sustainable talent pipelines, creating inclusive school cultures, and aligning recruitment with long-term student achievement goals.
3. Alternative pathways to licensure. Teacher training focused on equity, cultural responsiveness, and practical classroom readiness, targeting career-changers from underrepresented backgrounds.
4. Community-building and affinity spaces. Regular cohort gatherings, cross-sector partnerships, and alumni networks to provide spaces for collaboration, shared learning, mutual support, and a sense of belonging rooted in a collective commitment to educational equity.
5. Support for novice teachers. Tailored support through instructional coaching, peer mentorship, and ongoing professional development to help new teachers navigate the complexities of the classroom, build resilience, and lay the foundation for long-term impact in the profession.
6. Advocacy and policy development. Advocacy work focused on elevating the voices of educators of color and advancing equity-centered reforms by building coalitions with peer organizations, and community stakeholders to shape state and local policies around teacher licensure, preparation, and retention.

It is important to note that Pema was not hired to lead a racial equity organization and diversity was not prominent in TWM’s founding mission. But Pema knew that lack of diverse talent was contributing significantly to the region’s teacher shortage. Consistent with research, she saw that the relatively small number of educators of color in these high-need schools were burning out and leaving the profession at even higher rates than their White peers.⁷ And perhaps most concerning, students of color in the region were not receiving exposure to teachers with similar racial and ethnic backgrounds, which can have significant negative consequences for their academic achievement and long-term outcomes.⁸

Before TWM could join with other stakeholders and elevate racial equity as the region’s sole organization dedicated to educator workforce, Pema had to address a bevy of regulatory and administrative tasks to become a standalone nonprofit with a sustainable funding stream (see box below for more). To tackle this monumental job in the relatively short amount of time allotted, Pema leaned heavily on working groups that included board members, as well as consultants from TNTP.

Before long, Pema, local educators that she hired part-time, and a small group of TNTP consultants were delivering recruitment and talent services to approximately 30 partner schools, which together employed roughly 1,000 teachers in Holyoke and Springfield. These schools received a full suite of supports: TWM helped them fill vacancies by recruiting externally and connecting candidates with job openings; TWM pooled resources so the schools could advertise job postings on both local and national platforms to reach a broader audience; and TWM’s website served as a hub for job opportunities, showcasing positions across multiple districts and charter schools in the region.

When TWM’s recruitment efforts surfaced prospective educators, the team offered “concierge” services, shepherding candidates to appropriate job openings that matched their interest and qualifications.

From the beginning, TWM was working toward systems change by helping school district partners build long-term internal capacity through consulting on HR best practices, including equity and diversity in hiring. And Pema sought to strengthen her voice in advocacy through the DTWC and other groups involved in policy change.

Between 2017 and 2018, TWM grew from having just an executive director and a $289,000 operating budget to 6 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff and a nearly $700,000 budget.

As TWM grew and expanded its programmatic work alongside its thought leadership and advocacy efforts, Pema realized this work would place heavy demands on staff. She sought to build an organizational culture that would protect the team from burnout. From her own experience as a single parent managing personal challenges, leading schools, and developing and nurturing multiple professional relationships, she wanted employees to have flexible schedules, ample personal time, and autonomy to meet their professional responsibilities.

Accordingly, TWM adopted HR policies that featured flexible schedules (staff were only required to be in the office one day per week even before COVID-19), an open paid time off policy, and planned office shut-downs to ensure that staff actually took time off. This human-centered design would reduce the stress often created by tension between personal and professional commitments in a hard-charging environment, where staff were deeply committed to the cause and willing to make considerable sacrifices to accelerate progress.

The Residency Program

Teacher residency is a training model that pairs aspiring educators with experienced mentor teachers for a full year of apprenticeship in the classroom, while the resident simultaneously completes coursework required for licensure. Inspired by medical residencies, studies have generally shown that this practice-based preparation model can increase retention and teacher effectiveness in urban districts.⁹

Creating a residency program for the region was a big part of TWM’s theory of change, and an even larger part of its budget, focus, and early success. The organization and its founding partners sought to widen the educator pipeline by supporting bachelor’s degree holders who wanted to change careers and enter the profession through a new regional residency program. Pema and the TWM team also hoped to develop and demonstrate new models to attract and prepare diverse teaching candidates that others could replicate.

TWM had resources from a federal Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant to launch the residency program, but the fledgling startup still needed to win approval to operate the residency. DESE reviews all organizations sponsoring teacher preparation programs in Massachusetts, which are typically higher education institutions. To reduce the administrative burden, TWM issued an RFP to identify a higher education partner to serve as the sponsor. Ultimately, the search did not yield a partner who offered the needed licensure programs and could work within their budget parameters. So the team once again turned to TNTP consultants with experience navigating similar processes elsewhere in the country.

TNTP provided technical assistance with the application for six different licenses (moderate disabilities, both elementary and secondary; ESL, both elementary and secondary; elementary education dual license add-on; and middle school math). However, TWM was careful not to shift too much of the design work to these outside consultants. Their on-the-ground partners were heavily involved so that the residency program’s operation would be custom-tuned to match local strengths and needs, including incorporating methods from the HPS New Teacher Induction and Mentoring program designed by Pema during her time there. Ultimately, this collaborative design produced an accelerated one-year coaching-intensive teacher residency.

Launched in early 2018, the initial model primarily drew career-changers and other older individuals entering the profession. TWM used differentiated recruitment strategies to reach candidates of color and offered scholarships and other financial incentives to lower the direct costs that candidates incurred. Affinity groups, job placement services, and a culturally responsive curriculum were developed to mitigate institutional racism and affirm the experiences of participants of color.

The program was branded “The Teach Western Mass (TWM) Residency,” although it differed from other residency programs because candidates became paid “teachers of record” after only a few months of training. Residents began with an eight-week summer pre-practicum and pre-enrollment coursework. They then needed to pass a gateway assessment at the end of the summer to stay enrolled. Throughout the first year, residents received continuous coaching and participated in coursework. Graduates were eligible for initial licensure if they met all residency standards and state requirements.

TWM also partnered with American International College (AIC) to offer a discounted pathway to a master’s degree for residency graduates, utilizing their AmeriCorps Segal Education Award. In exchange for leading service-learning projects with students or community partners, residents chosen for this program received roughly $7,000 to reduce the cost of obtaining their master’s degree, which is required for a Professional License and teacher tenure in Massachusetts.

The residency program delivered promising early results: all 24 residents in Cohort 1 (30 percent of whom were people of color) were hired as teachers by partner schools in the fall of 2018; Cohort 2 enrollment increased by 64 percent to 36 residents (33 percent of whom were people of color), with a 100 percent placement rate in the fall of 2019.

By the time Cohort 2 graduated, TWM had 7.5 FTEs and a $1.7 million budget.

Strategic Plan 1

By late 2018, the demand for TWM’s services had increased to the point where it began to outpace organizational capacity. And while interest in all the services that TWM offered was high, stakeholder groups did not share a common understanding of TWM’s expansive efforts. Each constituent group had its own perception of the organization based on their unique interactions. Pema saw the need for a strategic plan to prioritize the many initiatives underway.

Between 2018 and 2019, TWM conducted an intensive planning process involving multiple stakeholders. The organization’s first strategic plan outlined the expanded organizational capacity and internal functions needed to ensure continued success and financial sustainability. It also called for a tighter programmatic focus on just two activities: the residency program and general recruitment. Additionally, the plan called for reframing TWM’s mission and vision to explicitly work to increase the diversity of teachers in the region.

Narrowing and focusing the work was difficult because TWM previously operated under the organizing principle that the region needed a comprehensive systems-change approach that only a standalone nonprofit dedicated to the mission could deliver. Now this organization was shifting its gears to focus on the two initiatives that institutional stakeholders believed would yield the greatest value in the shortest possible time.

“We needed to pick the highest value thing that we were doing… to just focus on recruiting and the Residency…Our schools, who were clients at the time needed teachers ASAP. And so our greatest value was giving them teachers as quickly as possible, and those two strategies were the things that gave the most immediate result versus the other stuff, which is a longer-term strategy.”

Pema Latshang

To execute the new plan, staff had to discontinue higher education initiatives that TWM had worked hard to forge with a variety of partners. These included an effort to expose diverse students from Smith College and other institutions in the Five College Consortium to teaching careers and the exciting school reform work taking place in Western Massachusetts. While this recruitment program enrolled many participants, most of them ultimately opted to relocate elsewhere after graduation. TWM also ended a partnership with Generation Teach, a nonprofit that offered diverse undergraduates and high school students the opportunity to teach summer school in Holyoke. Though this effort was fairly successful, TWM had to focus resources on its highest-yield activities.

On the heels of implementing these difficult changes came the global pandemic and the murder of George Floyd.

In April 2020, TWM had to pivot to fully remote status. While the team had a head start because they previously functioned with a hybrid work environment, confronting and responding to the intense loss and suffering that TWM students, teachers, and staff endured—often on top of prior trauma—presented new challenges. And once again, the organization was under tremendous time pressure. The team had just two months to build a virtual substitute for Cohort 3’s eight-week in-person summer training. This virtual training would also need to serve a far larger cohort because many people changed careers at the onset of the pandemic.

TWM partnered with Generation Teach to engage a Silicon Valley-based company to create the online training experience. According to multiple accounts, the program was very effective at simulating live teaching experiences: Different student profiles were represented, with live actors guiding their behaviors and residents interacting with them in real time.

But the residency’s rapid expansion in 2020 strained staff and financial resources, due to both the surprising enrollment growth and the sudden need for technology to support online instruction.

The murder of George Floyd spurred many organizations to reexamine their values and their efforts to act in accordance with these values. The post-George Floyd moment gave TWM the chance to further develop the habit of self-examination, and to identify the ways in which it was living out its values. The moment also gave the organization license to articulate its values more explicitly.

It did this by launching two sub-programs of the residency: the Black, Latine, and Educators of Color (BLEC) Fellowship and a new TWM AmeriCorps program. The BLEC Fellowship provided tuition assistance and additional supports (e.g., affinity groups) to help residents of color achieve greater success. Similar to other AmeriCorp programs, the new TWM AmeriCorps Professional Corp offered more participants in the residency program opportunities to complete service learning and document that experience to receive tuition assistance (the Segal AmeriCorps Service Award) toward a master’s degree with institutions of higher education. The BLEC Fellowship was explicitly named to express how much TWM valued diverse candidates and had tailored program components specifically for them.

Pema recruited a diverse, local team with strong ties to the region to lead these efforts. They worked extremely hard to grow the residency program amidst the pandemic. In June 2020, Cohort 3 launched with 39 participants (students of color made up 39 percent of this group). The following June they brought in another 45 residents for Cohort 4, maintaining the same proportion of students of color. Like so many other professionals in nonprofits at the time, staff were struggling to balance their workload, their personal lives during the pandemic, and the intense racial reckoning taking hold across the country. At the same time, they wanted TWM to push harder for systems change, and some were disappointed that the organization had been forced to narrow its scope, just as it began to work on teacher diversity more explicitly.

Strategic Plan 2

Between 2021 and 2022, TWM conducted a regional teacher diversity landscape analysis across the network of schools it served in Holyoke and Springfield, followed by another formal strategic planning process. This reset was required because DESE allowed districts to utilize emergency licenses during the pandemic, whereas previously only waivers were available for hard-to-fill roles in a limited number of schools. Career changers with college degrees could now enter teaching in paid full-time positions without the need to participate in a teacher licensure program. After the initial growth in residency enrollment early in the pandemic, interest dropped off sharply once career changes learned they could begin paid teaching immediately without this type of intense training, resulting in an especially small and less diverse Cohort 5. These effects were felt across the state resulting in the closure of some teacher preparation programs.

“I remember there being some earlier conversations in the strategic planning processes, like ‘Well, are we a regional organization that provides any service that a school or a district or DESE wants? Are we dedicated specifically to our teacher prep programs and residency? Can we play both roles and what are the implications if we take them on either or both of those?”

External stakeholder

Removing the systemic barrier that licensure presented resulted in a far more diverse crop of educators entering the workforce in urban districts across the state. And early signs indicated that the initial crop of untrained educators were performing relatively well under extremely difficult conditions.¹⁰ TWM needed to think anew about the role it would play in the post-pandemic environment. This led to a series of expansive and sometimes difficult conversations.

Ultimately, the process led to another round of substantial changes to both programming and governance at TWM. Released in June 2023, the new five-year strategic plan identified goals in four areas (teacher diversity, quality, retention, and organizational health) and established metrics to measure progress. To achieve these goals, the strategy put forward new governance and funding structures and eliminated all services other than a completely revamped residency program.

Taking into account the organization’s human and financial capacity, the plan sought to position the TWM residency program to play a central role in helping the region respond to the acute need to license approximately 1,000 teachers working with emergency waivers set to expire in just two years. Moreover, TWM services could help support these novice teachers and increase their retention rates.

To align with the new strategy, TWM’s governance and funding structures were changed. They adopted a more traditional governing board model. Constituent organizations would no longer hold seats, reducing potential for perceived conflicts of interest. Districts and other partners would only pay a fee for service instead of membership dues. The plan also outlined the internal organizational restructuring required to support the new operating model.

The most important shift was reinventing the residency to serve teachers holding emergency licenses issued during the pandemic and others who enter service on waivers. Originally intended for career-changers new to the profession, the program now supports a diverse group of teachers, ranging from first- to fifth-year educators, many of whom are people of color. TWM extended the program from 12 months to 18. Residents now have four semesters of coursework, which gives teachers working in the hardest schools more time to get through the content. The additional time also allows more opportunity to provide support and preparation for the Massachusetts Tests for Educator Licensure (MTEL).

In the revamp, TWM worked to better coordinate the BLEC Fellowship and the AmeriCorps program both to serve a larger number of residents and to ensure that there was alignment across these enhanced offerings, so that residents could participate in both without experiencing excessive workloads along the way.

Focusing the redesigned residency on educators with emergency licenses has led to far more diverse participants; educators of color made 83 percent of the 23 teachers in Cohort 7 (entering January 2025).

TWM has a sound plan and a rigorous residency program to offer its partners. It is the only program of its kind in the state, offering targeted, skills-based training for new teachers utilizing culturally responsive curriculum. Even as emergency licenses granted during the pandemic expire and those educators are served, the redesigned residency program remains a viable and effective model. Until systemic issues in the teacher pipeline are fully resolved, districts with persistent staffing challenges will continue to rely on waivers and will need a program to support and license their current teachers.

Under Pema’s leadership TWM built a strong culture of responding swiftly to change. But going forward the organization will need to navigate without her. Having established the organization, leading it successfully through many challenges, and creating a strategic plan that positions it for long-term success, Pema decided it was time for a fresh executive director. She officially handed over interim leadership in April 2025 to Deputy Directors Lisa Doherty and Julie Anderson.

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III. Four Key Takeaways

TWM’s founders and partners deserve considerable recognition for their commitment to building TWM for the Pioneer Valley. Over its first 10 years, the unique organization has helped to reframe the regional narrative around the systems change necessary to build a strong and diverse educator workforce. With a strategic position at the intersection of multiple stakeholders—including school districts, higher education institutions, the Diverse Teacher Workforce Coalition, political leaders, and funders—TWM has been a particularly effective partner in elevating teacher diversity as a systemic need. While it was not part of the organization’s founding mission, TWM has become well known as a champion for educators of color. As awareness of the organization’s commitment to educators of color spreads by word of mouth, increasingly diverse teaching candidates are seeking out opportunities to train through TWM.

TWM is widely recognized for its many achievements, but it has still had to strategically retreat from its ambitious change agenda, even as the need for systems change intensifies. Reflecting on this paradoxical outcome, case study interviews point to four key takeaways:

1. As a regional intermediary charged with leading the response to a problem that requires systems change, TWM has had to cautiously balance its relationships with institutional partners. This is a well-documented challenge in the collaborative impact field, where “backbone” organizations lead coordinated efforts. Because the backbone consolidates functions like strategy, data management, fundraising, and communication, resentments may surface if others begin to see the organization as a gatekeeper.¹¹ When the backbone organization steps in with programs to fill an unmet need, they are inevitably competing with their own partners for finite funds. This can prompt distrust or fear that the backbone is “taking over” by diverting resources from others.¹²

Pema and her team worked to counteract this dynamic by building strong relationships and centering conversations on a shared mission and vision for educational equity for the students and communities of Holyoke and Springfield. This approach helped partners better understand TWM’s data-informed decision-making.

TWM’s focus on recruiting and preparing a diverse educator workforce, particularly for urban school districts in Western Mass, also required careful navigation of relationships with institutional partners. Many first-generation students encounter challenges at colleges and universities that are not always fully equipped to support their specific needs or leverage their existing strengths. At the same time, collaboration with large urban districts—where leadership structures had historically placed less emphasis on educator diversity—often involved thoughtful and sometimes complex conversations about priorities and practices.

To bring about the systems change necessary for Western Massachusetts, in collaboration with the Diverse Teacher Workforce Coalition, TWM sought to reframe the educator workforce conversation around unmet student needs and the misalignment between district demand and the profile of graduates produced by regional teacher preparation programs. As a small nonprofit led and staffed by majority people of color, TWM had to navigate various power dynamics in these conversations.

“I think that TWM is tremendously data-driven and they think hard about questions. They also spend a lot of time making sure that they’re not just making an assumption but are asking, ‘What is the data saying? What’s the yield?’”

Key stakeholder

Recognizing the risks, TWM followed best practice and took a direct and data-driven approach, engaging partners with constructive candor. They used national research, landscape analyses, and district-level data to prompt institutions to reassess long-standing assumptions and practices. These exchanges challenged partners to examine whether their systems were structured to achieve their stated commitments.

While the constituent member board had the potential to put institutional interests over the organization and its mission, the model served the organization well in its startup phase because it supported high levels of engagement, and distributed leadership, so TWM and its partners could tackle a heavy workload. Working groups composed of board members, TWM staff, and TNTP consultants were able to identify problems, craft solutions, and implement new programs.

However, as the organization grew, the constituent member board presented more difficult conflicts of interest. Members were put in the uncomfortable position of representing both TWM and their institutions, and everyone was dealing with the adjustment to an increasingly resource-scarce environment. Ultimately, reconfiguring the board structure became necessary so that TWM could make strategic decisions with its singular mission in focus.

2. Resource limitations have pushed TWM to focus on a single program at the expense of the more comprehensive systems change strategy. Comprehensive systems-change strategies frequently begin with bold visions to alter the structures that hinder real progress. However, many of these efforts move into “program mode” over time. This process starts when the backbone organization identifies the need for a discrete service that has not been adequately served and opts to fill the void directly. The program has short-term, measurable outputs, which makes it easier to fund and support. Slowly the backbone shifts its focus toward the program and away from sustaining the systemic work that has the potential to produce long-term transformation.

“Looking back on it, we were definitely under-resourced, definitely doing really big systems-change projects with no money and no staff. We were all doing seven jobs. … Is that because most of our staff were teachers and working in these really poor districts? We’re all so socialized to do that—especially those of us who grew up poor.”

Pema Latshang

With each new strategic plan, TWM pared back its services and focused more time and attention on the residency model. In part, this decision was justifiable because the organization had made considerable progress helping districts improve HR practices to recruit and retain diverse educators. Moreover, the residency program’s output had grown significantly, it was attracting and drawing the diverse educators the region urgently requires, and it could help meet an even more immediate need to ensure that those with emergency waivers were able to obtain full licensure.

If there had been resources and support for a robust regional systems-change initiative, TWM could have continued focusing on this collaborative effort.

The TWM residency program is now playing an increasingly important role in the region’s long-term strategy to grow the educator pipeline, but it should not take the place of a comprehensive change strategy and a dedicated organization tasked with implementing and continuously reviewing the plan. The shift to a more programmatic approach also carries the inherent risk of making TWM more cautious, which impacts the type of leaders and change agents that will be drawn to the work of the organization.

 3. TWM has responded to resource scarcity by working harder and attempting to do more with less, but this comes at a cost. The culture of the education reform—especially school turnaround efforts—involves personal sacrifice and total commitment to the work. To deliver results, leaders attempt to identify and address every problem impacting students and teachers at an exceptionally fast pace. One of the major advantages of this mindset is that leaders are willing to interrogate any practice and revise and correct course as many times as necessary. Many TWM stakeholders have great admiration for the organization’s willingness to turn on a dime to respond to change and meet new needs. However, this approach is difficult to sustain, and it can cost education—and especially communities of color—invaluable leadership talent.

Pema understood the demands and expectations that this work entails, and she specifically sought to build an organizational culture that would protect staff from burnout. When it became clear that TWM was doing more work than it had the capacity to support, she made difficult decisions to focus efforts more strategically over and over again, while still focusing urgently on the shared mission of increasing the quantity, quality, and diversity of educators in the region. But this meant TWM was no longer pursuing larger systemic change that some of its stakeholders thought was required, which in itself became another source of tension and stress.

4. Leaders in state government and philanthropy must support systems change efforts with hypersensitivity to the sociopolitical dynamics that these efforts will invariably face.  State government and private philanthropy must recognize when efforts to increase educational equity require systems change at the regional level—not just more funding. In these instances, it is vital to support the design and governance of intermediaries working to spearhead change, with particular focus on buttressing the nonprofit CEOs leading the campaign.

TWM’s founding partners hired and empowered Pema to disrupt the system. She was an ideal choice to serve as a regional change agent because she believed deeply that people on the ground closest to the work must be empowered to identify problems, develop interventions, and refine their strategies in response to new knowledge or emerging issues. She also brought invaluable expertise redesigning and managing educational delivery within flawed systems. However, like most practitioners with this expertise, she lacked direct policy and advocacy experience.

Over the past decade, leaders in state government and philanthropy have gained significant insight into unlocking the potential and avoiding the pitfalls of collaborative impact initiatives. Moving forward, they can ensure that those chosen to lead these efforts receive the training and support needed for long-term success. This includes providing resources to sustain impact through the inevitable ups and downs of ecosystem changes, as well as clarifying the role that infrastructure and policy supports should play in strengthening regional backbone initiatives.

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IV. Where Do We Go from Here?

Data show the educator workforce challenge is steadily intensifying in Massachusetts. With 20 percent of teachers working for less than three years, the share of educators who lack experience is at the highest point since the state began tracking the figure in 2017. For the first time on record, the number of Black and Hispanic teachers in Massachusetts fell last year.¹³

While statewide retention rates are fairly stable with around 90 percent of teachers returning each year, urban districts are clearly struggling, and the challenges in Western Massachusetts remain particularly intense. Between 2012 and 2022, retention rates for the five urban districts in the region fell by approximately 3 percentage points, roughly mirroring trends for urban districts statewide. But retention has fallen further over the past three years for cities in Western Massachusetts. In 2025, just 82.5 percent of teachers in these districts returned; the lowest recorded retention rate since the state began collecting these data in 2009. Across the five urban districts in Western Massachusetts, 25 schools lost one-third or more of their teachers last year.¹⁴

“This was my dream job… There’s so many people like me who care so much… and are working so hard and doing such good work. I was given this opportunity to build something from the ground up. And yes, I had to navigate all the different systems—the financial system, the social, philanthropy—but the thing that I was so flexible. And a gift.”

Pema Latshang

Massachusetts will not make meaningful progress in closing opportunity gaps until it deals with educator recruitment, retention and diversity. With educators in the state’s higher-poverty schools turning over at twice the rate compared to those in its lowest, there is no question that teacher shortages are harming students with the greatest needs the most. Moreover, the state must find a way to ensure that all students, especially low-income students and students of color, have greater exposure to diverse and experienced educators.

Compared to other industries, teacher labor markets are especially regional. Educators tend to work near where they were raised and in very close proximity to where they live today.¹⁵With the right structure and support, regional workforce intermediaries like TWM can attract talented leaders and play a central role in advancing a comprehensive strategy that aligns districts, higher education, state agencies, and community partners around a shared approach for the systems change needed to ensure that all school districts in Massachusetts can staff their classrooms with highly effective educators.

The trend lines are clear: incremental, district-by-district solutions are no longer sufficient. Massachusetts needs regional educator workforce infrastructure that strengthens recruitment pipelines, stabilizes retention, and increases diversity. This case study raises important questions for state leaders, philanthropy, and community stakeholders looking to invest in this infrastructure. Fully answering these questions will require deliberate action to encourage further experimentation, iteration, and refinement.

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