“I had nothing, no resources,” Defreese said. “I built the curriculum from scratch.” 

Though Defreese was the lead teacher in her 11th- and 12th-grade English classes — designing and delivering lessons, grading student work and offering feedback — she was not operating alone. Technically, she was still an apprentice. Her first year in Beech Grove was part of a partnership with local Marian University, a residency program where she’d agreed to be the “teacher of record” at the school while still receiving training and taking courses to earn her master’s degree in teaching. 

During her first year, Defreese had both a mentor teacher at the high school plus professors at Marian providing her with ongoing coaching and training.

Marian professors said the design of the program, which began in 2019, was intended to increase the skill set of new teachers by exposing them to the research on learning, but also to get teachers “on their feet” and into classrooms sooner. “We have a teacher shortage,” said Karen Wright, director of residencies and clinical experiences at Klipsch Educators College at Marian. The one-year residency, she said, “gives an opportunity for us to truly partner with our community as well as fully train our candidates.”

It covers the $21,000 tuition for a new teacher’s master’s degree, plus provides a living stipend that ranges from $18,000 to $39,000, depending on teacher qualifications.

Local schools and the university see the arrangement as a win/win: understaffed schools get qualified teachers into classrooms quickly, and new teachers get ongoing coaching and support to hone their skills.

Marian University is one of a growing number of programs overhauling how teachers get trained, moving away from short, uneven practical experiences in classrooms to something more closely resembling a medical residency. Residents do more of the day-to-day work of a licensed teacher but in a more junior position, under the supervision of more experienced teachers. 

Apprentice teachers take education courses at night and on weekends while spending their days working directly with students, through tutoring and academic intervention as well as full-time teaching. And unlike traditional programs, apprentice teachers often get paid for their time.

Though the number of residency, apprenticeship and mentorship programs is hard to quantify, experts say the model is not just in university programs, but in non-traditional, alternative certification and “” programs as well. 

Program leaders say longer residencies are happening in part due to the profession’s rising demands and changes in the field. Some residency programs focus on specific targets, like equipping teachers with the research— such as on the science of reading —  to understand how learning works; others look to create a more diverse workforce or address chronic teacher shortages. 

The apprenticeship model has promise, said Suzanne Donovan, executive director of the incubated at the National Research Council. Programs like SERP — the Strategic Education Research Partnership — are looking to add a research element to new teacher residency programs, making early teaching look much more like young doctors training in a research hospital.

“I’m convinced it’s the thing that could make education a system that continuously improves in the way that,” she said. 

New teachers now outnumber any other group

improving student teaching is one of the most efficient ways to strengthen student achievement and teacher retention overall. Over the last 30 years, novice and first-year teachers have grown to make up the of the workforce, researchers say, outnumbering teachers who’ve worked for five, 10 or any other number of years or more.

According to a 2017 analysis, about 7% of all teachers, or 245,000 out of 3.5 million, are either first-year or novice teachers. In 1987, by contrast, those just entering the field made up 3% of the teacher workforce. 

Since new teachers tend to be less effective than experienced ones, and leave in higher numbers, especially the that work in high-poverty schools, the student teaching experience becomes critical to success. Teachers in training who have positive student teaching experiences with effective, experienced mentor teachers to teach. 

But according to a 2023 report from EdResearch for Action, many state regulations come up short, offering bare minimum requirements ranging in quality. Only 27 states require at least 10 weeks of student teaching under a mentor teacher in the building; even fewer, the report says, mandate a student teacher work full-time during those weeks. Few programs set criteria for what student teaching should include. Mentor teachers often receive , and if they are paid at all, receive an average $200 to $250 stipend. 

 “The frequency and quality of support provided to teacher candidates by mentor teachers and field instructors vary significantly and are often inadequate,” researchers wrote.

“People are not paying enough attention to this issue,” Dan Goldhaber, director of the at the American Institutes for Research, told ����Ӱ��. “There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to making student teaching better.” 

Studies have shown, for example, that a for novice teachers reduced teacher attrition within the first few years. 

�ҴDZ���󲹲����’s links mentor teacher quality to how effective new teachers are once they get in front of students. While only about 5% of working teachers volunteer to be mentors, student teachers who do get highly effective mentor teachers perform substantially better once they’re in classrooms. 

“If you work with a very effective, two-standard-deviations-above-average mentor teacher, you end up looking almost like a teacher who has two years of teaching experience instead of a novice,” Goldhaber said.

But several obstacles stand in the way of higher quality training for novices, said Matthew Kraft, an education economist at Brown University. Teacher compensation continues to be a factor, and districts and universities can’t pay for long training periods like in medicine. No such thing exists for educators. 

“It’s alluring to characterize teaching as medicine, but we’re not going to have anything close to that until we have something that even approaches medical pay,” Kraft said. “Those things go together. You train many, many years to become a doctor, not only because it’s necessary, but because there are returns to that multi-year investment in your education.” 

Getting into the nitty-gritty of teaching 

Some new residency and apprenticeship programs are paying more attention to breaking down the steps of teaching. They’re spending more time on research and practical tools in the way new doctors practice the “how” while learning the “why” of treating patients. 

When professors overhauled the student teaching program at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, in 2020, school of education dean Douglas Cost said they needed better measures to know whether their clinical teacher training was doing a good job preparing teachers for the classroom. Teacher licensure was the bare minimum.

“Accreditation is an important goal,” Cost said. “But it doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of teaching. Understanding the science behind learning has given us a real lever to begin thinking about what makes a good teacher.”  

Cost and colleagues adopted , an evidence-based educator curriculum focused on improving student learning. It gives new teachers specific techniques like connecting students’ prior knowledge to what they’re learning, or how to make sure all students are thinking about the material. 

“Our professors gave us a template for designing our lesson plans, based on prior knowledge, gaps in knowledge, how to get students up to speed who might have gaps,” said Sarah Cardoza, a former resident and social studies teacher at Wasilla High School in Wasilla, Alaska. “What do you want students to know, and how do you know if they know it? It takes that simple concept and gives you a roadmap for it.” 

Cardoza said her first year as a resident teacher, her class had eight students with mandated special education support, three English language learners and several Ukrainian refugees  — a lot for a new teacher to handle. 

“I appreciated having a plan for how you are going to handle those situations when everybody’s needs are so different,” she said.

New teachers often don’t have the experience to know how to execute these techniques in a classroom full of students, said Zach Groshell, an independent coach and teacher trainer in Seattle, Washington. Giving them step-by-step specifics — like how to gather students on the rug in an organized way or how to capture attention with a simple arm gesture — might seem basic, but can make the overwhelming first days of teaching much more manageable. 

“The generalities of ‘build relationships,’ ‘have a positive classroom climate,’ ‘plan your lessons effectively,’—they’re just too nebulous and vague for new teachers to act on them,” Groshell said. “You need to get more specific.” 

A  ‘gradual release’ to full teaching responsibility 

Traditional student teaching offers new teachers two stark realities: practice lessons in controlled environments, and then full responsibility in a classroom of students. But residency models emphasize “gradual release” to full independence, especially in hard-to-staff areas like special education. 

“My first year as a teacher, I cried almost every day,” said Geri Guerrero-Summers, a special education teacher at Mariner High School in Everett, Washington. New teachers went from “you’re going to observe” to “jump right in,” she said. “Student teaching was unpaid. … It’s really a rough type of process in becoming a teacher.”

Guerrero-Summers now works as a mentor teacher with the Washington Education Association’s , the first teachers’ union to step into training and licensing teachers. Originally funded with federal pandemic relief money, the union residency launched in 2023 and has recently obtained status as a registered apprenticeship program with the U.S. Department of Labor, which comes with an investment of $3.4 million. 

“We strive to make sure our residents are classroom ready, no matter where they’re placed,” said Jim Meadows, dean and director of educator career pathways center at WEA.

Future educators begin with 18 weeks working as a paid assistant in special education classrooms, often called a paraeducator, followed by seven weeks of classes, finishing with 36 weeks of clinical rounds, slowly taking over responsibilities as full-time teachers. 

Apprentices spend time in a variety of special education settings and age groups. The residency was created to address a specific challenge, an of special education teachers in Washington state. A found that 1.5% of special ed teachers were unqualified to teach, nearly three times the state average for other types of teachers. in the state make up more than all other vacancies—including STEM teachers and English language teachers—combined. 

Gradual release has been critical for learning the detailed skills of a special educator, said current resident Beck Williams. For example, writing, reading and interpreting Individualized Education Programs, which lay out a student’s classroom supports and accommodations and their learning goals, are covered in coursework but look much different when working with families and young people.   

“In special education teacher training, there’s not enough practice with IEPs and parent interaction,” said Williams’ mentor teacher, Angela Salee. Special education teachers often have to play several roles in IEP meetings, advocating for the student’s best interest while explaining accommodations to other teachers, administrators and families. 

In Mississippi, where have a teacher shortage, alternative licensure programs like the Mississippi Teacher Corps offer two-year residencies and accompanying master’s degrees to get more teachers up to speed as quickly as possible. 

Residents jump right into classrooms and start teaching summer school. They plan lessons and figure out classroom management, all under mentors and supervisors, right away. 

“Part of the difficulty of teaching is that you can’t fully prepare someone for the classroom,” said corps director Joseph Sweeney. “So part of it is that experience they need in the classroom. You have to get them on their feet to show them what it’s like.”

The report by , an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young job seekers, revealing that not all networks are the same. 

It’s particularly crucial to have a network that includes senior professionals, said Sheila Sarem, Basta’s founder. These people unlock resources for first-generation job seekers, like getting a referral or bypassing the typical application. A candidate with a referral was four times more likely to be hired, according to the report.

“The importance of peer and near-peer networks — those networks do matter for a ton for different reasons … [but] the best and fastest and most effective way to [get a job quickly] is to have senior professionals in your network and in your corner,” Sarem said.

First-generation, low-income and underrepresented students have limited access to this type of high-impact social capital, according to the nonpartisan think tank .

“Young people from the top socioeconomic quartile report nearly double the rate of non-family adults accessible to them compared to young people from the bottom quartile,” says a July 2020 institute report. “This gap should be troubling to anyone trying to support students’ success not only in school, but also in accessing high-quality jobs down the line.”

Another major takeaway from the Basta report: Exposure to a broad array of careers counts heavily when trying to land a job, seemingly more important “than just about every other factor we can isolate, including GPA, college major, and having had prior internships.”

The report’s findings were gathered through a career navigation survey software that Basta created in 2020, . More than 10,000 people have used the tool to learn about their strengths, career goals and job search strategies. The majority of Seekr participants are first-generation college students.

Specifically for the report, the data was collected from 3,195 young adults between July 2020 and December 2021. Some 57% were low-income Pell Grant recipients, 62% were first-generation college students, 17% were Black, 21% were Latino, 12% were East Asian or Asian American, 12% were South Asian or Indian American and 6% white. The respondents leaned slightly female — 51% versus 46% who identified as male.

Basta found that most survey participants had a network consisting of personal connections — neighbors, family and friends — and this group asked for career help less often.

Participants with more professional connections asked for help the most, but the ones who sought help most often and converted that assist most successfully were those whose professional networks included senior professionals — professors, managers, mentors. 

Sarem said these findings, plus other Seekr results, help institutions become smarter about how they serve various populations, like first-generation students, and professionals and investors learn more about elevating these critical networks for young people.

Created in 2016, Basta has served more than 9,000 young people and had $3.9 million in annual revenue, according to its most recent 2021 .

“If we believe first-generation college students have everything it takes to succeed in the world of work and we really believe that employers do want to hire across lines of difference, then what’s the problem?” Sarem said. “We built our program model to create some connective tissue across those two audiences.”

A 2023 Center for First-Generation Student Success found that even after earning their bachelor’s degree, first-generation college graduates were less likely to land a job that required it than their peers. One year after getting their bachelor’s in the 2015-16 academic year, 44% of first-generation college graduates had a job that called for the degree versus 52% of graduates who were not the first in their family to finish college.

Basta also offers a free, four- to six-month fellowship program that includes career education and coaching in preparation for a student’s first job out of college. Roughly 81% of fellows secure full-time jobs with an average salary of $62,700, according to Basta. 

Hadler Raymond entered the Basta fellowship in 2020 while attending New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He credits the fellowship for him landing a job at Bloomberg after his 2021 graduation.

Raymond said he would meet with a career success manager once a week to craft resumes and learn transferable skills for future jobs.

“Basta fosters a very strong community,” he said. “Everyone being first-generation is something that helps with that, because everyone could relate to that struggle of having to figure things out by yourself, because your parents can’t necessarily help you with it. The Basta community itself was the perfect network.”

The report, Sachem says, affirms how important social capital is while adding nuance and understanding to what it looks like in practice for first-generation students like Raymond.

“I think over the last four years, there’s just been questions about, like, ‘What does this mean? Do we keep investing in this?’ ” she said. “Well, this is a really important moment to show exactly how critically important the social capital concepts are, when we’re trying to drive economic mobility, which is what education is really designed for — to create more opportunity for more people.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Heckscher Foundation for Children provide financial support to Basta and ����Ӱ��. 

The nation’s largest group of K-12 charter schools said last week that the will provide four years of mentoring, summer internship assistance, financial literacy training, networking advice and funding to defray college costs — supports valued at $60,000 per student. The grant covers 50 students a year, up to 250 students over five years.

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For KIPP students such as Harlem-raised Airam Cruz, who landed a spot in a prestigious high school as a result of attending a KIPP middle school, and then entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, these networking-assist scholarships mean everything.

Cruz, who was chosen for a similar (which inspired the Rales) got a summer internship at a computer gaming company as a result of meeting the company’s chief executive officer at a 2018 Silicon Valley dinner hosted at the house of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Goldberg is her late husband.

Also as part of that Goldberg scholarship program: Cruz, now 21, had his own mentor for four years of college, former Samsung Chief Innovation Officer David Eun. “I texted him almost any day about anything. Life advice, school advice.”

What’s truly newsworthy about the Goldberg and Rales scholarship programs is why they are needed in the first place.

Two decades ago, KIPP and other top-performing charter networks started out with a simple promise to parents: Send your sons and daughters to our schools and we will get them enrolled in college. As years passed, however, every charter network found out that enrolling in college wasn’t the same as graduating.

As early as 2009, KIPP leaders realized their college-going students were falling short on actually graduating, and in April 2011 released a starkly worded revealing that only 33 percent of its KIPP middle school students were graduating from four-year colleges within six years.

While that rate was three times the national graduation rate for low-income, minority students, it was far below what KIPP had predicted: a graduation success rate of 75 percent. That was a wake-up call for KIPP, which launched aggressive changes including expanding its network to opening elementary and high schools to give students more time on task with KIPP teachers and counselors.

While those changes, and similar ones at other college-focused charter networks around the country, succeeded in boosting college graduation rates, KIPP and others soon discovered yet another unpleasant reality: simply earning a college degree wasn’t enough. Too often, their graduates settled for jobs that fell short of the kinds of professional opportunities landed by white and Asian college graduates.

That amounts to underemployment, explains Tevera Stith, senior director for National Alumni Impact at KIPP.

“We see more and more students not having access to proper networking who then struggle to get the kind of work experience needed to land the perfect first job that will propel their career,” said Stith For college students coming from middle- and upper-income families, those internships and first-job connections often come from family connections.

A 2016 survey of KIPP college graduates revealed that roughly half felt they were underemployed. The most common reason is having to pass on unpaid internships during their college years.

“When they can get a paid job at a local supermarket they are absolutely going to take that supermarket job,” said Stith.

Programs such as Rales offer students salaries for summer internships that don’t pay.

Underemployment is what I saw first hand when reporting the book, , which documented the first graduating class at KIPP’s Gaston College Prep, a school in rural North Carolina located in a town where college graduation is not an expectation. But in this class, 61 percent of the graduating seniors earned four-year degrees within six years, a rate that exceeds the degree attainment rates for middle-class students.

While that success rate was impressive, it soon became clear that a fair number of those alumni didn’t consider themselves successes in life, at least not when compared to middle-class college graduates. While they were all employed, their jobs often fell into the category of underemployment, such as a finance major working as a bank teller.

These latest iterations in the learning curve around what it takes to get low-income minority students into college, through college and into a job commensurate with their skills, explains the multiple name changes for KIPP’s college promotion programs. It began in 1998 as Kipp To College, then in 2008 became KIPP Through College. In 2021 it became which acknowledges both the need to help students with non-college careers and that even college graduates need ongoing assistance.

Other charter networks make similar efforts. The New York City-based Success Academy schools, for example, have their .

The Northeast-based , which usually turns in the top college graduation rates, rivaling the success rates for middle-class students, also recognizes the need for follow-up support. Uncommon is building a network to link all its alums and connect them to outside organizations for career support.

Chicago-based Noble Network of Charter Schools offers one-on-one career counseling and networking events as well as employer programs like .

Aide Acosta, Noble’s chief college officer, said a 2016 survey of their alums showed that six months after earning college degrees only 41 percent had full-time employment or were in graduate school. Compared to middle-class college graduates, she said, “our students were having different career exposures.” After launching Noble’s coaching/job placement efforts, that number is now up to 80 percent.

Some students get exposed to multiple programs. Kourtney Buckner, for example, attended a KIPP middle school in Atlanta. KIPP then helped her win acceptance at George Washington University. Buckner, a junior who plans on being a lawyer, has a KIPP college adviser who checks on her and the network helped her land a KIPP-supported summer internship at a Washington-based nonprofit.

At the same time, Buckner is also a scholar, a program that ensures first-generation students find a network of similar students to support them in college. “Having a Posse cohort here has made all the difference,” said Buckner. “I have nine other (Posse scholars) here and I also have a Posse mentor.”

Applications for the Rales Scholars Program opened Oct. 1 to KIPP high school seniors or KIPP middle school alumni now in their senior year. The first group of Rales scholars will join the program in May 2022.

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to KIPP and ����Ӱ��.