Chris Torres

• Improving teacher recruitment/retention and the status of the teaching profession.
• Discovering ways to address and ameliorate the negative impacts of workforce shortages while also attending to teacher quality.
• Improving policy by working to understand the conditions affecting productive implementation such as educator retention, district capacity, leadership, and how policy impacts and is experienced by students and educators.

For example, his early work used survey and interview methods to understand urban “no-excuses” Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) and how the organizational climate in these schools influenced high teacher turnover. Although supporters often claim that the climate of these CMOs help them improve opportunities and outcomes for minoritized children of color, Torres complicates this narrative by drawing attention to some of the costs and consequences of their practices such as high teacher turnover and harsh disciplinary methods.

More recent work focused on district capacity building and improvement efforts in the context of accountability policy implementation and workforce shortages. Recent studies on school turnaround policy and urban Portfolio Management Models of educational governance underscore the challenges of productive policy implementation when system capacity is limited by chronic issues with teacher supply and turnover. His work on K-12 educator workforce shortages looks at the substitute teacher labor market as well as teacher absences, supply, and retention to understand how these issues collectively impact schools and students. Across this work he highlights inequities, impacts, and implications for low-income schools and systems serving marginalized communities.

New research looks at root causes and potential solutions to some of the challenges identified in earlier work. For example, he is working to understand why and how a set of oversubscribed charter schools made substantial impacts on college entry and completion. He is also studying new programs aimed at improving the supply, development, diversity, and retention of educators across Michigan. For example, he examines the implementation of team-based models of teacher staffing that aim to improve educator efficacy, development, and retention. 

Prior to joining the University of Michigan Chris was a professor of Educational Leadership at Michigan State University and Montclair State University, and he worked in New York City as a K-2 teacher, grade chair, teacher mentor, mentor teacher trainer, teacher educator, school board chair, and in the central office designing teacher hiring and leadership development systems. Dr. Torres has served in various leadership roles for professional associations. He is a former Associate Director for the University Council of Educational Administration (UCEA). He was associate editor for Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ) and is an editorial board member for various journals. He served as Program Chair for AERA Division A (Section 1) and the Charter and School Choice SIG and was elected secretary for the Politics of Education Association (PEA) SIG from 2019-2021. He received the Outstanding Reviewer Award in 2019 and 2020 from Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA) and is a recipient of AERA Division L’s Outstanding Policy Report (2021). He holds a BA in Psychology from Yale University, an MA in Early Childhood Education from Mercy College, and a PhD in Teaching and Learning from New York University (NYU).