Teacher attrition is becoming a bigger problem with each passing year. In the United States, 23% of K-12 teachers reported that they were “likely to leave” their jobs in 2023. In North Carolina alone, more than 10,000 teachers left classrooms last year, which made for a 42% increase from 2022. The situation is even bleaker for new teachers, with up to 30% quitting the profession in their first five years.
This level of attrition negatively impacts students, and can also cost school districts tens of thousands of dollars per departing teacher. And while there are a lot of specific reasons that have been cited for it (i.e. low salaries and safety issues), one underlying culprit is that teachers don’t feel adequately supported by their administrations.
That’s where Raleigh-based startup Pathstitch comes in with its platform to support teacher development. Founder Ruka Osoba is participating in the current cohort of CED’s GRO Incubator and has also been selected as one of five Triangle founders to receive a scholarship to Grep-a-palooza 3 by Cherry Bekaert.
The need for Pathstitch’s solution is clear. In 2019, an assessment from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) concerning teacher shortages revealed that “fully half of teachers reported not feeling a great deal of support or encouragement.”
Solving this problem is not as simple as demanding that administrations do better. Most school principals conduct regular assessments and observations (both formal and informal) to assist teachers and foster optimal learning environments. But they also have full-time jobs simply keeping their schools running. Moreover, there is not an available tool that captures or utilizes teacher assessments in a comprehensive or particularly useful manner.
Pathstitch is designed to be that tool.
The startup seeks to provide a platform that will help teachers maximize their talents, meet their goals, and by extension feel more fulfilled in their careers. It was founded by Osoba as a sharp pivot away from what was initially a travel-planning-and-budgeting concept.
While exploring that earlier iteration of Pathstitch, Osoba spoke to a friend who happened to be a teacher. On a teacher’s salary, though, this friend was organizing the summer around professional development and extra work rather than vacation. Their response to the early Pathstitch concept was skeptical: “What kind of travel are we talking about?”
That interaction provided valuable new perspective and led Osoba to conduct more research on the conditions that teachers—whom she stresses she’s always deeply admired—are facing.
“The more I started to research, the more I started to realize how broken the education system is,” she recalls. What stood out to her as the biggest problems were the lack of teacher development and support, and the resulting attrition.
Ultimately, Osoba asked herself, “How do we create a system or a place where the administration [is] able to better support these teachers to reduce attrition so that we have teachers teaching long term?”
This question essentially defined a pivot and led to Pathstitch’s evolution into its current form.
Supporting Teacher Development
Osoba is quick to acknowledge that principals and administrators are not necessarily at fault for poor teacher support so much as the overall system of evaluation and development.
“[Principals and administrators] will make decisions around [teachers’] professional development based off of the data they’re seeing around student performance,” Osoba notes. She believes that instead they should consider more holistic data that can generate a more complete picture of how teachers should be trained and developed.
That, essentially, is Pathstitch’s proposition. The platform will use AI to compile a greater breadth of information—taking into account teacher goals, evaluations, and even environmental factors such as school safety—in a way that produces specific, targeted suggestions for professional development.
While there are some existing competitors that store observation notes, and some schools and teachers will simply use Google Docs to track evaluations and progress, Osoba believes that Pathstitch offers a uniquely comprehensive approach. The platform simply takes more data into account, and contextualizes that data according to teacher goals and the professional development options that a school can provide.
At this stage, Osoba is bootstrapping the company—her current fulltime job is as a marketing specialist at Red Hat—and working on an interactive wireframe she can send to schools to explore. She is also going through CED’s GRO Incubator and may be seeking grants thereafter.
Ultimately, the plan is to sell access to the Pathstitch platform to school districts, which will in turn make it available to principals. This will happen first with North Carolina public and charter schools (including magnet and STEM), with sights set on an eventual national rollout and inclusion of private schools.
Osoba is inviting any interested principals, assistant principals, or superintendents to reach out to discuss the platform—and potentially pilot it.
