Black and Asian candidates both struggled to clear early hurdles, such as being classified as minimally eligible for a position by a district screening protocol. But Asians faced the biggest obstacles to hiring, ultimately receiving job offers at half the rate of their counterparts.

Study author Dan Goldhaber, an economist and director of the , said the disparities for Asian applicants were particularly striking once he and his coauthors accounted for factors that should have made them more competitive, including greater teaching experience and a higher likelihood of earning an advanced degree.

“Once you control for those differences, then it looks like they’re doing even worse because they look like better candidates on paper,” Goldhaber said.

takes up the key question of how schools can achieve greater racial diversity within their teaching ranks. Education leaders have worked toward that goal for decades, citing a need for minority students to have access to role models of their own background. A series of from the last few decades shows that children see higher levels of academic achievement after being assigned to a same-race teacher.

School districts have rolled out designed to attract and retain more teachers of color, hoping that the result will be a teacher group that more closely resembles their student demographics. But these reforms to the teacher “pipeline,” including sizable investments in alternative teaching pathways and “grow-your-own” programs, don’t address the individual hiring decisions of districts and schools. 

To put a spotlight on those choices, Goldhaber and his collaborators gathered data from Nimble Hiring, a to schools. The service supplies hiring teams with information on the gender, race, and ethnicity of their applicant pools, along with detailed work histories including applicants’ prior job titles and descriptions, highest academic degrees, and reasons for separating from their former jobs.   

In all, they assembled records for over 46,000 job aspirants between 2019 and 2024. Applications were drawn from 18 school districts and 24 charter school organizations across multiple states. Each application was tracked across four escalating steps, from an initial screening by a district central office to the final decision to make a job offer.

With each successive stage, the pool was narrowed further, but not all groups saw the same degree of winnowing. For example, Asian and African American candidates were somewhat less likely to make it through the primary screening (80 percent and 86 percent, respectively) than whites (92 percent). But the next step showed a huge divergence between groups: Black candidates had their applications passed to school-level hiring managers at a rate of 63 percent, measurably less than the 80 percent chance for whites; Asian candidates saw the lowest rate of all, just 46 percent. 

By the final phase, they were substantially under-represented relative to other job seekers. Between 15 and 18 percent of white, Hispanic, and African American applicants received job offers, compared with 7 percent of Asians. Even that proportion shrank to just 5 percent when controlling for professional qualifications that should have made Asians particularly attractive: Sixty-four percent reported holding an advanced degree, while just 38 percent of white applicants said the same. 

Evidence of bias?

Goldhaber warned that the paper’s findings should be interpreted with care. Such a large difference in hiring rates between racial categories certainly “lends itself to concerns” about bias, he acknowledged, especially given the research team’s efforts to directly compare candidates with similar credentials applying for similar roles.

Yet even the broad dataset they assembled differed from that used by school administrators. 

For instance, the authors knew more than hiring managers about the race of individual applicants; that information was not directly reported to district and school officials, though they could develop intuitions based on factors like candidates’ names. On the other hand, the researchers knew less about what facts came out in the course of the hiring process, such as applicants’ self-described teaching styles or the perceived quality of their colleges or graduate programs.

“‘Discrimination,’ to me, is that if all else is equal, there are still differences in hiring rates by demographics,” Goldhaber said. “We did our best, given the data we had, to make all else equal, but we’re not looking at quite as much information as the school systems are looking at.”

Still, he added, a hypothesis of either conscious or unconscious discrimination would be supported by evidence from other research examining racial hiring differences. Those “audit studies” have found that companies — including those to their job postings — are with evidently Asian surnames.

Chris Chun is a private school administrator in Berkeley, California, and the treasurer of the , a group aimed at expanding opportunities for educators of Asian descent. In an email, she argued that working in K–12 schools may contribute to a “chicken-and-egg” problem.

“People do not have Asian teachers growing up and don’t see Asians as teachers,” Chun wrote, citing her own experience. “Then, when it comes to hiring, Asians aren’t seen as teachers because the people doing the hiring haven’t had very many Asian teachers.”

Making matters even more complicated, there is little reason to think that hiring decisions are the only, or even the primary, reason why comparatively few Asians take jobs as teachers. Melanie Rucinski, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, that Asian college students in Massachusetts were less likely than those of other racial extractions to pursue education at the undergraduate level. They were also less likely to gain a teaching license after passing their licensure test — and less likely to be hired at a school after receiving their license. 

Rucinski cautioned that her studies of teacher labor markets focused on applicants’ behavior rather than that of employers. Yet she added that it was possible that a dearth of Asian educators could be somewhat self-perpetuating, and that that theory “would track with what we know about discrimination in employment in other settings.”

“Asian teachers are just less represented, even compared with African American or Hispanic teachers,” Rucinski said in an interview. “So it’s very easy for me to imagine, based on broader literature on discrimination in hiring, that that will generate feedback loops for who gets hired into teaching.”

The nonprofit released its analysis alongside a . Previously, they’ve tracked the racial makeup of teachers as compared to their students; this year, for the first time, they’ve added a new metric: the diversity of the college-educated workforce nationally.

“Comparing teacher diversity to student diversity is meaningful, and it is important for students to see themselves reflected in their teachers,” said Heather Peske, president of the organization known as . “But we also have to make sure that as we’re setting goals for diversifying the workforce, [that] we set goals based on who we can … attract into the teacher workforce right now.” 

Historically, teachers have been slightly more diverse than the population of college-educated working adults, a trend which shifted around 2020. As of the most recently available data, teachers from historically disadvantaged groups make up 22.6% of working-age adults with degrees but 21.1% of the state teacher workforce. 

While the 1.5-point gap may seem small, Peske told ����Ӱ�� that it’s significant and points to what she called a “troubling trend:” increasingly people of color are either choosing other professions or are leaving the classroom. 

“We’re really using [the] dashboard both as a rearview mirror … but also as a way to forecast the possibilities of where we’re going. We worry that the gap could grow larger, and so that’s why we think it’s really important to pay attention to it now,” she said.  

The authors of the NCTQ report hypothesize this points to long-standing issues in the teaching profession, including low pay and status, inequitable hiring and the uncompensated and added responsibilities teachers of color often face — like mentoring or interpreting for families— known as the “invisible tax.”

These numbers also shed light on where in the pipeline the disparity originates, according to Sharif El-Mekki, founder and CEO of the , who also contributed to the report.

“I think sometimes if we’re only looking at the student and teacher parity … there’s a tendency to just be hypnotized by the problem,” he said, “where this analysis that NCTQ was doing through this dashboard actually gives us even more concrete steps to take to inform our planning.”

El-Mekki said it’s not only important to incentivize people of color to become teachers but also to focus on their retention once they enter the classroom — teacher turnover is higher for teachers of color (22%) than white teachers . Black teachers have some of the highest levels of student loan debt, he added, so offering scholarships or debt relief can make a huge difference. 

“We didn’t want our pursuit to rebuild a Black teacher pipeline to be disconnected from the social and economic realities that Black youth may face,” he said, so his organization designed a Black Teacher Pipeline Fellowship, which provides support to educators socially, professionally and financially. They also emphasize the importance of early exposure, offering career and technical education courses to high schoolers who may be interested in becoming teachers later on. 

NCTQ’s new dashboard continues to show a persistent gap in diversity when comparing the teacher workforce to student populations.  The report cites 48.8% of students nationally who come from historically disadvantaged groups vs. 21.1% of teachers who do. That number was actually two percentage points closer in 2014, with 18.3% of teachers and 44.2% of students.

The organization defines historically disadvantaged groups as including all teachers of color except those who identify as Asian. “While Asian people have certainly experienced discrimination in U.S. history, we haven’t seen the effects of discrimination show up in terms of their educational experiences or earnings outcomes. Asian students often outperform white students, and, as a demographic group, are least likely to suffer from a poor education,” an NCTQ spokesperson told ����Ӱ��.

That being said, Asian students are less likely than many of their peers of color to see themselves represented in their teachers’ racial identities. Almost 11% of working-age adults with degrees and 5.4% of students are Asian, yet only 2.2% of the state teacher workforce is.

While the percentage of Black educators largely mirrors the population of working-age Black adults with degrees (both at roughly 9%), the percentage of Black students at 15% is six points greater. 

To El-Mekki that demonstrates that there is an untapped Black teacher potential in the number of Black students who could — and do — choose teaching as a career if and when they get the opportunity to go to college. This allows advocates to then probe a little bit deeper, and focus on how to get more Black youth to and through college, so a larger pool is eligible to join the teacher workforce down the line.

An even starker trend exists for Hispanic teachers: Just over 10% of both working-age adults with degrees and the teacher workforce identify as Latino, while 28% of students do. 

The dashboard also includes more granular analysis at the state level, where researchers explored the racial makeup of teacher preparation programs in order to better understand their contribution to diversity between 2019 and 2021. This serves as a roadmap, Peske said, demonstrating which teacher preparation programs are “leading the way towards a more diverse teacher workforce, and which teacher prep programs may be adding roadblocks to diversity by actually making the workforce more white.” 

Extensive research has pointed to the benefits of a diverse teacher workforce, both for students of color and for white students, according to Constance Lindsay, a and assistant education professor at the University of North Carolina.

“For particular populations, it’s very important to have access to a teacher of color or teachers demographically similar to them.” she said, “I would say, particularly for Black boys, definitely on both the quantitative and qualitative side, it’s been demonstrated many times [that] it’s super important for them.”

Some other research highlights:

• Teachers of color produce additional positive academic, social-emotional and behavioral outcomes for all students, On average, students of all races (in upper-elementary grades) show stronger gains in reading and math when they have a teacher of color. 
  
• Black students in Tennessee randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in kindergarten through third grade are 13% more likely to and 19% more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who were not. Additional data from North Carolina revealed similar findings. For the most disadvantaged Black males, conservative estimates suggest that exposure to a Black teacher in primary school cuts high school dropout rates by almost 40%.
  
• Black students in North Carolina matched to a Black teacher tend to have and are less likely to experience , such as expulsion and suspension.
  
• Black students matched to Black teachers are less likely to be identified for .
  
• Student–teacher race and ethnicity matches were associated with for Latino students in a California high school district.

“We have this rapidly diversifying public school student population that is tomorrow’s workers, citizens, etc,” Lindsay added. “We know that of all of the different things that we’ve tried to do to get rid of achievement gaps, having diverse teachers is … a very efficient and effective intervention.”

Disclosure: Charles & Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, The Joyce Foundation and Walton Family Foundation provide funding to the National Council on Teacher Quality and ����Ӱ��.

When TyKesha and Dedrick Cross met in fifth grade, neither of them could have known that decades later they’d be married and working as dedicated educators serving kids that look like them in .

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, people see education as a way out. Many of the Cross’s classmates moved on to nearby Little Rock, to Texas.

Their city has changed drastically over the last decade, its population dwindling from 49,000 to between 2010 and 2020. Businesses left alongside residents, leaving rusting signs and boarded windows in what once was a thriving . Two main school districts consolidated; school buildings remain vacant.

But for educators who’ve stayed to hold down the fort like the Crosses, there’s no question why Pine Bluff is still, as TyKesha calls it, a “diamond in the rough,” where they’ve raised their own and their neighbors’ children. 

“The community and the kids we serve is why we stick around. This is home,” said Dedrick, now an assistant principal at James Matthew Elementary. “Rearing these students and trying to have them beat the odds is what keeps us in this area.” 

The Cross’s spirit is not unique. Countless local educators and leaders, retired and early career, reared in Pine Bluff or not, share it and are beginning to see signs that stronger schools are not wishful thinking.

In a sprint to make schools families can trust, Pine Bluff is learning what it takes to build up their core: a strong educator workforce.  

Educators are quick to point to the : Quality teachers are the most important factor for student success. Local alternative and traditional university preparation programs are making teaching more financially and emotionally sustainable — expanding class offerings, child care or mental health grants. Programs are leaning into grow-your-own models, too, recruiting locals who understand students’ lived experiences to teach and lead schools. 

The momentum to revitalize has never been stronger. The district has regained control after a state takeover. The district’s new superintendent is committed to making the community a part of changes. A pandemic, local gun violence and new statewide investments have lit a fire for better quality education. 

While many rural schools nationwide face persistent challenges in staffing schools, Pine Bluff offers a different story, starting the 2023-24 school year 99% staffed. 

Pine Bluff’s educators admit there’s much more to be done, like ensuring training matches what teachers are struggling with, most recently student behavior and discipline. 

And superintendent Jennifer Barbaree is not one to sugar coat. 

“Systematically, our academic achievement is very poor. Classroom instruction is not where it needs to be. We have parents telling us that, we have community members telling us that,” Barbaree said. “It’s a process … We’re not going to go from an F school from the last 10 years to suddenly an A school.” 

Though many were skeptical at first, when a white woman from out of town took the reins, Dedrick thinks it is fading. “We needed somebody with some vision and some transparency.”  

The Crosses remember their first meeting with Barbaree fondly. Her frankness was the “breath of fresh air” Dedrick had been yearning for, especially from administrators. 

“She said, I’m gonna tell you, we ain’t got no money,” Dedrick recalled.

“That’s exactly how she said it, ebonics and all,” TyKesha added, smiling. 

TyKesha is hopeful for the future — in their small but mighty district of about 3,300, “love and untapped potential,” are abundant. 

She and Dedrick know intimately why investing in educators, particularly Black educators and those who reflect the student body’s demographic, is critical for student success. 

“It’s a process … We’re not going to go from an F school from the last 10 years to suddenly an A school.” 

Jennifer Barbaree, Pine Bluff Superintendent

After surviving a gunshot wound to the head and becoming pregnant by her senior year, it was an educator who knocked on her grandparent’s door and urged TyKesha to come back and finish high school. The same person recruited her to become an educator two decades later. 

Now a 9th grade business teacher, TyKesha introduces the next generation of homeowners and entrepreneurs to the pillars of marketing and finance. Her family members were some of the first free Black farmers in Arkansas, to this day running one of Pine Bluff’s oldest businesses and local favorite for fried catfish: . 

Before teaching, she and Dedrick had careers in banking, real estate and counseling, and job offers out of state. But instead of joining the thousands who have left their hometown, they forged new careers in education. 

Having worked for a decade as a parole and substance abuse counselor, Dedrick knows the range of experiences children have in Pine Bluff, too. Some, he said, have been in survival mode since they were ten. Passing through the front door of one student’s home, he stepped on a dirt floor. 

Knowing what students go home to has reinforced their decision to stay and make their schools a safe haven for the next generations. Dedrick, now in his first year as an administrator after eight years teaching, has one rule for James

Madison Elementary’s teachers: that they get to know their students and not holler at them. They get enough of that, he said. 

The couple still wrestle with big questions, like how to curb the gun violence that claimed the lives of one of their students and nearly a child a month last school year. But, Dedrick said, “it keeps tugging on us to make that impact here.”

He’s not alone in his dedication and optimism. More and more, signs show Pine Bluff is rising to strengthen schools’ core.

Pathways to bring in more local talent are growing. This fall, more candidates than ever applied to the same 3-year preparation program the Crosses completed: Arkansas Teacher Corps. The partnership with the University of Arkansas provides community members, many already working in schools as paraprofessionals or substitutes, a path to being licensed. 

The district re-assessed all uncertified or emergency certified teachers to ensure they were completing preparation programs or exams. Those without adequate progress by the end of last school year were let go.

And Barbaree’s candor has shifted how the district has built partnerships with traditional university preparation programs. With a doctorate in the science of reading, she’s started asking: what textbooks are you using in your reading foundations courses?

“We need to do a better job partnering with universities and saying,” she said, “what do your teacher prep courses look like? How does that meet the needs of what we need in our districts?”

Kimberley Davis feels the Pine Bluff difference. Dean of the education college at University of Arkansas Pine Bluff, the local HBCU, Davis is no stranger to teacher preparation, having worked at four other universities.

She and Barbaree are on a texting basis. This is what she calls her first “true partnership” with a K-12 district. 

“We need them, and they need us,” Davis said.

Recruitment for rural realities 

Eyes are on Arkansas’s teacher workforce in part because of the state’s 2023 LEARNS Act, which boosted the salary floor from $36,000 to $50,000, requiring all teachers complete a yearlong residency guided by a mentor. 

“[LEARNS] was a huge wake up call … It disrupted the status quo enough that now people are trying something different,” said Brandon Lucius, Arkansas Teacher Corps’s executive director.  

Instead of recruiting far and wide, local preparation programs are now leaning into a grow-your-own approach to help capture community members working in and around schools, local leaders like the Crosses. 

Offering social-emotional support from the start of teacher preparation has made the difference for educators like TyKesha. Between her network of Arkansas Teacher Corps alumni, local mentors, and tools learned through ATC including yoga certification, she’s feeling a “five year fire,” not an itch to leave as many do by this milestone. 

More day classes, hybrid offerings and a free multi-day bootcamp for required licensure exams has become the norm at the local HBCU to ensure candidates graduate classroom ready. 

The district is switching things up, too, recruiting at the state’s flagship public university in Fayetteville and keeping a close feedback loop with local ones. Job posts in key subject areas stay open all year, in anticipation of vacancies. A teacher cadet program helps interested high schoolers matriculate into education classes at local colleges. 

Before its historic population decline, Pine Bluff’s teacher pool were mostly white graduates from traditional 4-year programs. Now, they usually come out of programs bringing career changers, parents and community members to the classroom through shorter, and more affordable teaching residencies like Arkansas Teacher Corps.

After embracing the grow-your-own model, the district’s pool flipped to nearly 75% parents of color, 97% first generation college graduates and older career shifters. The program now offers a $2,500 stipend; candidates can apply for grants for mental health services, child care, or personal computers. 

A similar transformation is happening in the administrator pipeline. 

“We’re saying we don’t want to drop someone in and hope that they stick,” said IMPACT Arkansas director John Bacon. The 18-month fellowship prepares teachers to become administrators in low-income districts, heavily subsidizing a masters in educational leadership.

‘The time has always been now’ 

To ensure Pine Bluff’s educators can stay in the field for the long haul, rising and longstanding teacher leaders name two needs: mentorship and social-emotional support. 

Burnout is the common culprit for departures or a dip in teaching quality — combinations of financial strain, frustration with student behavior that grew more concerning during COVID, and grief from trauma in the community. 

Local teachers in training have heard tales of Mattie Collins, one of Pine Bluff High School’s revered history teachers known for her firm but fair approach.  

She, like many informal mentors reared in Pine Bluff before and after her, was never interested in waiting for local or state leadership to catch up to the investment she saw as critical — teachers.

“Well, the time has always been now to Ms. Collins,” said Collins, who retired after 35 years and now leads a nonprofit for youth to explore STEM careers and prepare for the ACT. 

Her solution to some of the burnout and behavior concerns is relatively simple: have good lesson plans that keep everyone engaged, and make sure that young people know their teacher respects them. 

“It’s a two way street. It’s not just, respect Ms. Collins cause she’s the older person in the room. It’s that Ms. Collins respects you and thinks you’re great and wants you to do your best. They’ll do anything for you if they know that you really care.”

That pedagogy lives on in the classroom through her former students turned teachers like Kendra Jones. The type to “snatch you up,” in a caring way. 

Alongside classics, she uses literature she knows will keep attention and speak to what students care about. Dear Martin and Dear Justyce, two books focused on the experiences of young Black teens experiencing police brutality and navigating the justice system, are on the syllabus this semester. 

But even the beloved Jones has had thoughts about leaving, perhaps to be an administrator and make bigger waves or earn more. To sustain her family, she’s done hair and meal prepping on the side. 

Many Pine Bluff teachers work multiple jobs. Though LEARNS boosted the floor for teachers, it didn’t bake in funding or planning to level set pay for more experienced educators. With a master’s, Jones now makes the same as a first year teacher. Once she finishes her doctorate, she’d only see about a $3,000 increase annually.

On top of it all, Pine Bluff is a community in grieving. 

Jones went to five student funerals last year alone. In the back of her classroom shines a framed photo of one student, murdered six days after his birthday, a gift from his mother. 

“I look at the crime rate. I look at how our babies are being taken from us,” she said. “It’s things like that that make you say I can’t do this.” 

In those moments, she calls on her mentors. “But then you have people that have been here who also had those opportunities to leave like Ms. Collins and Mattie Glover and Virginia Hines. They’re retired and could be at home on the beach, but they’re still advocating.”

So is Jones, who has a reputation as the “trouble teacher” for making noise on behalf of students. When people speak ill of Pine Bluff, she’s quick to remind them where their roots are. 

“Somebody’s got to say something because right now what we need for our kids is not what it should be,” said Jones. “… I know what it could be and I have positive aspirations that greater is coming.”

To TyKesha, who teaches down the hall, the common denominator that anchors her, Jones and Pine Bluff’s “community of fighters” is love. 

Many of her students grew up in the same projects she did. Her classes start in the dark — a few minutes of free time with overhead lights off: listen to a song, watch a game, just pause for a moment. The only sound is the slow drip of water from a decorative fountain on her desk. 

As students settled in one morning, Cross asked for a weather report — a social-emotional check-in learned from the Arkansas Teacher Corps. She’ll never forget one response: “acid rain,” with things falling from the sky. The phrase raised red flags for Cross, her innate sense of familiarity with her community’s challenges kicking in. 

She quickly emailed the student’s counselor, then the principal: their class was headed outside. 

Chalk in hand, students took turns writing on the sidewalk: “you’re not alone,” and “yesterday is not ours to recover but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.” 

It wasn’t until later the student whose response sparked the activity shared what was on his mind that day—  he had thoughts of taking his own life. The activity gave him encouragement, he said, and opened the door to talking more about his life with Cross and his counselor. 

For Cross, the incident confirmed why she became a teacher  in the first place — to  make schools the safe haven they were for her growing up. It’s a stark reminder, too, of the impact of investing in teacher development, to develop talent whose radar would go off like hers did that day. 

“Why do people stay here? That’s why,” Cross said tearfully. “To know that something I did, passed on to me from a program … I could have left and went to another big town or city and found another bank to work for, probably made $200,000. But I wouldn’t have been here for that day.”

]]> /article/breaking-down-the-walls-to-teaching-alternative-pipelines-boom/ Wed, 09 Nov 2022 12:15:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=699443 From recruiting high school students to expanding programs similar to medical residencies, states are spending millions in federal aid to recruit teachers as regional shortages continue, particularly people of color who may find traditional programs costly or inaccessible.  

Teaching residencies have exploded in popularity in recent years, with the National Center for Teacher Residencies’ network nearly since 2018. Nationwide, at least 2,025 candidates are enrolled in residencies this school year, a sharp increase from the 792 four years ago — with 57% of candidates being people of color. By comparison, just of the nation’s teaching staff is made up of educators who are not white.   

Maryland, Texas, Missouri, Nevada, Georgia and Tennessee are among states using federal funds to boost recruitment via community-focused grow-your-own programs, according to a from the Education Trust. 

---

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

---

The residencies and grow your own models are and advocates as promising ways to recruit and retain teaching candidates and lower financial barriers to enter the profession as some regions are urgently looking to fill vacancies. The models are considered a far cry from other certification programs run by organizations which sometimes provide just weeks of training before new teachers are responsible for their own classrooms, and often result in higher turnover.

A 2019 report from the Learning Policy Institute and UCLA found the residency model, “holds promise for both recruiting diverse individuals and retaining effective teachers.” 

Grow-your-own programs in particular target staff already working in schools, a more diverse group than current teachers, who often have a . This includes individuals such as parent volunteers or paraprofessionals, said Meg Caven, an education sociologist with the Education Development Center, a global health and education nonprofit.

“How do you create a career ladder for the adults who are more likely to be folks of color,” said Caven, “from those uncertified positions into the classroom?” 

Some may have had years of experience with students as education assistants, as is the case with many of . The 300-plus cohort now in the two-year program receive paid leave to complete bachelor’s degree coursework and coaching to pursue licensure. Currently, 17 are building experience as instructional aids in Zuni Public schools.

“And the majority of those are local individuals who are part of the Zuni Pueblo, and so that is a move to begin to have more representation in our classrooms,” said Amber Romero, program director. , though at least of public students statewide are Native American.

The efforts come at a critical moment, particularly as rural and urban districts face acute shortages in special education, math, foreign language and English language learner positions. Early analysis of states’ American Rescue Plan funding revealed staffing to be a priority nationwide. 

are among the 27 nationally utilizing a State Department program to welcome foreign language exchange teachers this fall, sponsoring teachers’ travel, salary, and living expenses. 

South Carolina and Iowa are looking to another force already entrenched in classrooms: . South Carolina’s Teaching Fellows Program, funded by $1.2 million in relief aid, provides up to $6,000 in annual scholarships for young people pursuing teaching careers. Nineteen in Iowa will support high school students and existing paraeducators in earning credentials through the state’s “Earn & Learn” Registered Apprenticeship. 

The strategy — recruiting younger adults to stay in their community — is appealing for states with large rural populations, where shortages are even more severe. Roughly said too few candidates applied to vacancies for the 2022-23 school year. 

“Part of the problem in Pennsylvania is we have teacher preparation program deserts, where it might be four counties over to the nearest college, so if you send somebody to college, they may never come back,” said Ed Fuller, education and professor at Pennsylvania State University. “They may want to stay near their college, so [districts] have been trying to recruit their own K-12 students. But that’s a long-term solution.” 

In California’s rural central valley, serving many students in poverty has seemingly combined approaches — seeding interest among high schoolers, launching a grow-your-own program for staff and a residency program for recent grads. Lindsay Unified’s yearlong residency supports educators to complete a master’s in teaching and full credential.

Staff and students can have their loans forgiven after teaching in Lindsay for 5 years; 120 have taken them up on the offer. 

Apart from encouraging growth in the pipeline, the interpersonal benefits of residencies have impacted communities for years. 

CREATE, a three-year residency hosted by Georgia State University since 2015, has seen of new Black teachers stay in the profession by their fifth year, the point at which .

Because residencies are grounded in their specific local context, programs can dig deep to understand what priorities are for families and schools in the district as opposed to a whole state. Seattle, for instance, hones elementary teachers to support Title I schools serving high proportions of students in poverty. 

“Providing a fellowship and stipend to these future educators opens doors to teachers who would not have been able to acquire the appropriate classroom credentials otherwise,” said founding director of the Seattle Teacher Residency Marisa Bier. “This work has proven imperative in bridging the demographic divide between teachers and students by recruiting and retaining BIPOC educators in the Seattle community.”

New York University’s one-year residency, which has grown from about 12 prospective educators in 2016 to now 160, similarly stays focused on districts’ and families’ priorities. About half of their current cohort are specializing in special education and many more are seeking TESOL certification because of NYC’s student population and priorities.  

“It’s sort of a needs-based shuffle,” said professor and residency co-director Frank Pignatosi. At NYU, as with many higher-ed housed residencies, there is no GRE requirement for applicants. The decision is intentional, an acknowledgement of the resources, financial and otherwise, involved. 

The reality is not lost on New Mexico’s Romero, who supports educator assistants exceptional at their work, eager to become teachers, yet navigating economic and family realities. 

“Many of them are women of color. Many of them are mothers and so they don’t have the luxury of not working and going to school. They have to have this job for the benefits,” she said. “And then they can only take one or two classes at night while they’re trying to raise a family.” 

Stipends, personalized professional development, and social support can make all the difference for prospective educators looking for a way in, and for the districts eager to receive them. 

“It doesn’t make it easy,” Romero said, “but it certainly makes it possible.”

]]>