Mark Ornstein of Detroit | Why Staffing Coordination Breaks Down and How to Fix It

Mark Ornstein of Detroit

Somewhere in the district, a teacher just quit at 4 PM on a Wednesday. By Friday, you need a replacement. The substitute database has people, but most of them stopped taking assignments last month because they landed permanent jobs. The few available are teaching outside their content area. By Monday, another classroom is running with a rotating staff. And that's not a crisis. That's how systems work when they're not coordinated.

Mark Ornstein of Detroit manages 600-plus people across 27 schools, which means he's managing a math problem that has no clean solution. Not enough money to pay everyone what they're worth. Not enough time to develop every person properly. Not enough turnover to hire your way out of problems. The only move is precision matching: getting the right person in the right place, keeping them there long enough to get good at it, and doing it across a system where needs are wildly different.

A high school needs a chemistry teacher with serious content expertise. A pre-K program needs someone who can manage chaos and care about small humans. A special education program needs someone patient enough to do the same lesson five different ways. You can't hire the same person for all of these. But the budget system treats them like you can.

The substitute system is where bad hiring becomes visible

A substitute teacher might teach 40 times a year or 180 times a year. If they're teaching 180 times, that's somebody's job you've left unfilled. If they're teaching 40 times, you've got coverage gaps on the days you need them most. The system only works if your substitute pool wants to work, which requires paying them more than they can make doing literally anything else. Most districts pay $90 a day. Childcare workers make $80. The substitute who could make $120 somewhere else works in your schools because she believes in the mission or because the commute is close.

That's not a sustainable system. It's a system that works because of goodwill, and goodwill is what you run out of first.

Ornstein's solution is simple: pay more, be selective about who you hire, and don't treat it like the bottom of your talent pipeline. The good substitutes get scheduled like they're permanent. They know the buildings. Kids know them. Teachers request them. They're not covering a slot, they're teaching. And because they're treated like professionals, they stay.

The hiring trap is looking for credentials instead of culture

A candidate has a master's degree and plenty of classroom experience. On paper, they're perfect. Then they come to a school where the culture is collaborative and they spend the first year resisting every suggestion because "that's not how we did it at my last district." Or they have great credentials but they're exhausted and they're only going to drain the people around them. Or they're technically competent but they have no idea how to manage a classroom where kids are actually kids.

Credentials don't predict whether someone wants to improve and learn and work alongside people. Culture fit is hard to assess in an interview. But it's the thing that determines whether a hire improves your system or taxes it.

Ornstein looks for people who want to be part of something and who are curious about how other people do work. That's harder to find than a master's degree. But it changes everything about whether an investment in that person pays off.

Retention is an operational strategy. Treat it like something else and you'll lose that way.

A teacher who's taught in your system for five years knows things a new teacher doesn't know. They know which routines work. They know the families. They know the other staff. That's not loyalty. That's productive capacity. And the moment you treat retention like an HR thing instead of an operations thing, you've decided to rebuild that knowledge every year.

That means principal attentiveness matters. A teacher leaving because she's burned out is telling you something about the building culture. A teacher leaving because the principal doesn't know her name is telling you something about the leadership. A teacher staying because she has a coach who invests in her growth is telling you something about what retention actually costs.

Ornstein's question isn't "how do we keep people?" It's "what's the cost of losing this person?" Because the cost is real and it's calculated in lost instruction, lost relationships, and the energy it takes to rebuild. And if you're calculating it accurately, you'll pay attention to the people you have instead of assuming there's another one just like them waiting in the pipeline.