Traditional high-impact tutoring can cost upward of $2,000 per student a year, and staffing is the single biggest constraint. At the same time, shortages of qualified teachers persist, with districts struggling to recruit and retain the educators students need most.

These two crises, a tutoring access gap and a teacher pipeline shortage, are usually treated as separate problems, but they shouldn’t be. Among the full landscape of education interventions, high-impact tutoring is one of the most consistently effective, evidence-based strategies for accelerating student learning. The results are replicable, offering up a solution to both crises that is currently hiding in plain sight.

Each year, more than 600,000 aspiring teachers are enrolled in educator-preparation programs across the country. Another 600,000 college students are employed through as well as state programs, such as . We can, and must, activate these people as tutors for the students who need them most. To do that, policymakers should act on two fronts.

First, unlock Federal Work-Study dollars for tutoring. The infrastructure already exists. Work-Study employs 600,000 college students annually in federally subsidized campus jobs. Redirecting even a fraction of these positions toward high-quality tutoring would create one of the largest, most cost-effective tutoring workforces in the country without requiring new appropriations.

This is already happening. Step Up Tutoring engages college students paid through Federal Work-Study or College Corps at 40 colleges and universities across 15 states, making it one of the fastest-growing Work-Study–powered tutoring programs in the country. Step Up delivers one-on-one virtual tutoring and mentorship to over 5,000 underserved students annually in more than 40 districts across four states. Its students are outperforming peers by wide margins; an independent evaluation found that students receiving tutoring with Step Up gained two to four additional months of learning in math compared to a control group.

Critically, this model both expands the tutoring workforce and strengthens the educator pipeline. This year, 73% of Step Up’s college and high school-aged tutors reported that they are somewhat to strongly interested in pursuing a career in education, and 82% said their Step Up experience increased that interest. As one tutor shared: “Step Up confirmed my desire to go into teaching. I wasn’t sure before, but working with my student has been the most fulfilling part of my week.”

Second, require tutoring experience as a core component of teacher preparation. Many aspiring teachers enrolled in prep programs don’t have an opportunity to regularly practice what they learn until a culminating student teaching experience or a year-long residency near the end of their program. Tutoring can be the lab where theory meets practice earlier in their preparation, allowing candidates to begin working directly with students to practice instructional skills and identify and use high-quality instructional materials in real time.

Deans for Impact’s partnerships with nearly 300 prep programs demonstrate that aspiring teachers grow more skilled, confident and effective when they have structured opportunities to engage in on-the-job learning early and often. Through a pilot designed to prepare aspiring-teacher tutors to identify and effectively use high quality materials, there was an average 20-plus percentage-point growth in instructional skills and knowledge among participants. Findings also showed an average overall increase of over 49% in tutors’ feelings of preparedness to teach.

When tutoring is embedded into preparation, and not treated as an add-on, aspiring educators build instructional skills earlier, with support, before stepping into the complexity of full-classroom teaching. Districts gain a steadier, stronger pipeline. And states produce teachers who know how to accelerate learning from day one.

There is another reason to be optimistic about the effectiveness of these novice tutors. Increasingly, AI-powered tools can provide real-time instructional guidance, helping tutors decide what to teach, how to explain concepts and how to respond when students struggle. This is not about replacing the human relationship at the center of effective tutoring; it is about ensuring that every willing tutor, regardless of prior experience, can deliver consistent, high-quality instruction.

If we act on these two priorities — unlocking Work-Study funding and embedding tutoring in teacher preparation — we can solve two critical problems at once. Students gain the academic support and human relationships they desperately need. And more young adults can build their confidence and skills in teaching from the start. In the process, they establish a habit of service that will shape the rest of their careers.

Despite the sunset of ESSER funds, the federal government has continued to foster momentum by elevating tutoring as a priority in existing and future grant competitions. In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Education awarded $256 million via the to scale tutoring and improve literacy. Also in December, a growing bipartisan, bicameral coalition of Congressional leaders re-introduced the PATHS to Tutor Act to scale local partnerships working to embed tutoring into teacher training. 

But the next step must be bolder: we need a comprehensive, national strategy that integrates tutoring into the fabric of teacher preparation and channels federal dollars toward improving academic outcomes while simultaneously cultivating the next generation of educators. 

A published Wednesday from the National Council on Teacher Quality found that teacher preparation programs have contributed to the stagnant growth in educator diversity, which is lagging behind the diversity of the nation’s adult population. While roughly of U.S. working-age adults identify with historically disadvantaged racial groups, such as Black, Native American or Hispanic, only 21% of teachers do.

The NCTQ analyzed 1,526 U.S. teacher colleges from the 2018-19 school year to 2022-23 in its report and found that 40% don’t produce graduating classes that are as diverse as their state’s educator workforce. 

About 21% of teachers in Alabama come from historically disadvantaged groups, versus 16% of candidates who graduate from preparation programs. In Washington, D.C., the educator workforce has a 69% diversity rate, but its teacher college graduates are at 32%. 

The most diverse programs are alternative certification pathways run by companies or nonprofits, but research shows that these options have lower standards than traditional colleges and lead to higher teacher turnover.

A diverse teacher workforce at schools improves academic performance, attendance, discipline and sense of belonging for students of color, according to the study. For example, who have one Black teacher are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to go to college than their peers who didn’t have a teacher of color.

Too many teacher colleges are failing to produce diverse graduating classes and causing students to lose out, said Heather Peske, NCTQ president. 

“We know that a diverse teacher workforce benefits all students, and it especially benefits Black and brown students,” she said. “There’s a lot that we can do right now — on the part of teacher prep programs and states — to reduce the obstacles that particularly discourage Black and brown candidates from coming into the profession and becoming teachers.”

The NCTQ report has three recommendations for state policymakers, schools and teacher colleges to increase workforce diversity: bolstering program enrollment by increasing teacher salaries, providing college stipends and introducing younger students to the education field. 

The report said teacher candidates also need more support to earn their certification, such as flexible course schedules and pay for completing required hours in the classroom before graduation. Districts should also improve hiring practices by developing strategies to recruit more school leaders of color, providing mentors to new teachers and improving work culture so educators from historically disadvantaged groups feel welcome, according to the report. 

Teacher preparation programs that have been the target of the federal government this year. In February, the Trump administration canceled millions of dollars in teacher training funding, a decision that’s still wrapped up in .

Peske said many of the NCTQ recommendations are race-neutral and can help all teacher candidates while improving workforce diversity. 

“We really need to focus on the fact that having a diverse teacher workforce means having a high-quality teacher workforce and thinking of practices that can support those goals,” she said.

Taken at face-value, these are all admirable efforts to rectify America’s teaching and learning crisis – where students are and subjects and only would recommend the profession to future generations of teachers. But if we’re serious about building a strong and sustainable teacher workforce capable of accelerating student learning, we need to step back and ask a more fundamental question: How do we end the revolving door of underqualified teachers working with our students?

This is a question my colleagues and I at Deans for Impact have grappled with over the past decade. 

We’ve seen states expand scholarships for aspiring teachers. We’ve seen investments in residency programs that provide longer culminating clinical experiences. We’ve seen calls for better alignment to evidence-based instructional methods. We’ve seen programs mobilize aspiring teachers as tutors. Each of these is important. But too often, the impact is shallow and short-lived. 

Scholarships get people into programs but not the right ones. Residency programs remain prohibitively expensive for many. Requirements and accountability to new standards don’t shift practice on their own. Programs worked but were funded by one-time investments without appropriately planning for financial sustainability. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. 

Through our work with states, educator-preparation programs, and schools nationwide, four conditions rise to the top when designing pathways that deliver: 

• Instructionally-focused: Pathways should be aligned to the scientific evidence of how students learn 
  
• Practice-based: Pathways should fully prepare teachers for the broad range of realities of the classroom.
  
• Accessible: Pathways should be affordable and supportive so that all who aspire to teach can enter and complete quality preparation
  
• Innovative & Responsive: Pathways must continuously evolve to meet local needs and emerging research.

When taken together, these four conditions can create a holistic system that better prepares teachers, sustains them in the profession, and, most importantly, accelerates outcomes for students. The aim of DFI’s is to chart a course of action policy leaders can take to ensure all pathways are affordable and high-quality. 

In communities across the country, we are beginning to see efforts that move beyond piecemeal fixes toward more holistic reform efforts that bolster these four conditions.

In Louisiana, the recommendations made and adopted by the statewide Teacher Recruitment, Retention, and Recovery Task Force helped modernize entry into educator-preparation programs, strengthened mentor teacher support, expanded scholarships for aspiring teachers, and built momentum for the state’s first . These policy changes, paired with new investments in high-impact tutoring and a longstanding commitment to ensuring all students access grade-level content, have helped bolster the pipeline of teachers and drive growth in student learning.

In the most recent NAEP results, Louisiana was one of only two states to surpass pre-pandemic reading performance. It was also one of just a few states to experience an increase in the number of individuals enrolling to become new teachers. Thanks to these new policies, aspiring educators don’t have to find themselves in a situation like , a Mississippi college student who chose social work over his dream of becoming a teacher because he couldn’t pass an entry exam.

In Indiana, the University of Notre Dame’s trains high-impact tutors, many of whom are on track to become teachers, on principles of cognitive science and equips them to deliver literacy instruction aligned to the state’s new science-of-reading standards. For example, Alliance for Catholic Education Teaching Fellow said she feels much better equipped for the realities of the classroom because of her experience as a Tutor-ND tutor. 

These efforts are reinforced by statewide requirements that preparation programs align literacy instruction with research-based approaches, ensuring that aspiring teachers are prepared to deliver rigorous, effective instruction. These mutually reinforcing efforts recently contributed to the state’s largest year-over-year growth in third grade literacy rates on . 

Other states are also leading the way. From HB2 in Texas to strategic staffing in Arizona, these examples of policy and practice working in tandem point the way forward. School communities in Texas will now have flexible funding to prepare talent in quality pathways that address specific workforce needs. Arizona schools are rethinking the role and work of teachers in ways that make teaching more attractive, collaborative and effective. Together, these examples show what happens when we ditch fragmented, one-off investments and embrace building a foundation of what works.  

Teacher preparation can no longer be an afterthought. The talent, ideas, and innovations we need are already here. What’s been missing is a system designed to connect them. By focusing on making pathways instructionally focused, practice-based, accessible, innovative and responsive, policymakers and advocates can build and scale pipelines of teachers with the skills needed to ensure every student succeeds. 

Advocates are hopeful that change is coming: This June, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law , a historic $8.5 billion piece of legislation devoted to increasing education funding across the state, with a particular focus on teacher training and retention. It includes almost $190 million specifically devoted to teacher preparation and certification programs, as well as $4 billion for teacher and staff pay raises to keep high-quality teachers in the classroom. 

“I don’t think about this being your kind of traditional state policy, which tends to do a lot of patchwork reforms,” said Jacob Kirksey, associate professor at the College of Education at Texas Tech University. “This really tackled the teacher pipeline from its inception.”

The teacher pipeline issue “was a Texas-sized problem,” he added, “and this [bill] is a Texas-sized solution.”

Before this legislative session, Texas lawmakers hadn’t raised schools’ base funding or passed a comprehensive education finance package , leading to what some called a dire situation. Last year, the K-12 school system was ranked overall and 44th for reading scores.

The certification crisis became a major focus of the bill once lawmakers “started to recognize that the [resulting] learning loss was a statistic that you couldn’t turn away from,” Kirksey said.

In response, House Bill 2 will also limit some components of a which allowed the vast majority of Texas districts to hire fully uncertified teachers, experts told ����Ӱ��. Initially designed with a goal of opening educator pathways for industry folks to teach career and technical education courses, consequences of the bill really exploded post-pandemic, when schools were struggling to hire teachers, according to Kirksey.

Ultimately, over schools statewide applied for and received Districts of Innovation designation, allowing scores of them to hire uncertified teachers. By the , the share of all new public school teachers in Texas who are uncertified reached 56%. That share has increased significantly over the last decade, worrying advocates, experts and district leaders across the state. The previous year, when just under half of new teachers were uncertified, almost had no prior experience working in Texas public schools. 

That lack of preparation has real impact, both for the teachers themselves and the students they serve: 64% of uncertified teachers leave the classroom after just five years — compared to about a third of traditionally certified teachers, according to the  

“It was really creating a revolving door of teachers that sort of became a self-fulfilling prophecy,”  said Ryan Franklin, managing director of policy and advocacy at Philanthropy Advocates and former associate commissioner for educator leadership and quality at the Texas Education Agency.

Students with new, uncertified teachers lose about in reading and three months in math each year, comparable to and compounding the learning loss kids experienced during the pandemic, Kirksey’s research found.

The new legislation gradually mandates that all core subject teachers are fully certified by the 2027-28 school year, with an option for schools to apply for an extension until the 2029-30 school year. It also provides incentives for teachers who are currently in the classroom to seek out certification quickly with a $1,000 bonus.

In addition, the bill looks to promote high-quality training programs since “all preparation is not created equally,” Franklin said. 

A ‘chance at sustainable growth‘

While the scale of House Bill 2 is unprecedented in Texas, the desire to introduce innovative and high-quality pathways to teaching isn’t new.

Clifton Tanabe, the dean of the College of Education at The University of Texas El Paso, has been working on this for quite some time. Six years ago, he introduced a residency program to his university to train teachers differently, so they were not just certified but truly prepared to enter some of the most difficult-to-staff urban and rural classrooms.

Residencies are a year-long, intensive form of training that pairs pre-service educators with a mentor teacher and single school site, allowing them to be fully immersed in a classroom environment and learn through doing. Teaching responsibilities often ramp up for the residents throughout the year, allowing them to “get their hands dirty,” as one researcher put it, with training wheels. 

Although essentially full-time jobs, they are often unpaid and done while the resident is simultaneously attending their own classes and paying tuition, making them historically inaccessible to a predominantly low-income student body like Tanabe’s. So, he started “pounding the pavement, asking for money,” and ultimately, in 2018, was able to launch a pilot program that offered all residents a yearly stipend.

Despite the program’s success, it wasn’t sustainable. Without COVID funding, Tanabe wouldn’t have the necessary money to keep paying residents. Already, this year, he’s had to cut back yearly stipends from $20,000 to around $14,000.

That changed this June with House Bill 2, which Tanabe called “massive” for his program and the students they serve.

“It’s what we think about as our chance at sustainable growth for this model,” he added.

The legislation will use a to get money into schools, ranging from an expansion of the a merit-based pay program, to the creation of a Teacher Retention Allotment, which will provide significant raises to core subject educators who have been in the classroom for more than three years. Teachers in smaller districts will get even bigger bumps. 

In addition, the sweeping bill expands career and technical education, introduces special education reforms and increases funding to charter schools. 

On the preparation side, the state will pay the cost of training teaching candidates, up to 40 in residency programs or 80 traditional student teachers in each district. Districts will receive up to $39,500 a year for each teacher resident and $21,500 for each student teacher. Along with the additional funds comes tightened requirements for program content — including mandatory reading and math academies and a ban on any critical race theory-related curriculum. 

Historically, around 20% of certified Texas teachers were prepared fully online, asynchronously, meaning they accessed the materials on their own schedule and without real-time live instruction, according to Kirksey’s research. Candidates could get a temporary certification in a matter of weeks and immediately enter the classroom. 

“That just shows you the incentive structure that was happening,” Kirksey said. 

“What [the new funding] does is it allows them to choose quality and not have the same kind of economic loss that they would have,” he added.

Wes Corzine, superintendent of Huckabay Independent School District, a small, rural district south of Fort Worth, said because of the bill, he’s able to give raises up to $8,000 a year to his more experienced teachers. While he’s excited about the increase in pay and the funding for his district’s residency program, he did push back on one element of the legislation, noting he wished there was a bit more flexibility in how districts could spend some of the money.

Tricia Cave, a lobbyist at the Association of Texas Professional Educators, also argued that the Teacher Retention Allotment funds only support raises for core content classroom teachers, excluding scores of other school-based staff like librarians, counselors and school nurses. Still, she is optimistic about the changes this bill can bring.

For the residency at El Paso, and others like it, the money can’t come soon enough. This year, Tanabe has 200 residents working in schools across seven urban and rural districts that are particularly challenging to staff. The vast majority of the student teachers receive federal Pell grants, and about a third come from families making less than $20,000 a year. 

“It’s a student population that’s tenacious, looking for opportunities, working hard and if you give them a realistic program, with the kinds of supports that a residency model with a stipend has, we can succeed at a very high level,” he said.

In the first six years of the program, they’ve already seen promising results and a high percentage of residents are ultimately offered full-time teaching roles at their school sites. Last year, leaders in one district that Tanabe’s program partners with told him the residency program had solved their teacher vacancy problem. This is particularly significant in rural districts, where in the uncertified teachers were hired at a rate four times higher than the rest of the state.��

And, because of their intensive training, these teachers “start day-one ready,” and remain in the classroom “because they’re not crying in the parking lot after week one, saying this was the worst decision of their lives. They know how to teach from the get-go,” Tanabe said.��

Corzine echoed this point, noting that whenever his district has an opening, they make an effort to hire a resident, “because you’re really hiring a second-year teacher … It creates this huge talent pipeline. It’s a yearlong job interview.”

Experts across the field are hopeful that these across-the-board investments will ultimately have a substantial positive impact on schools, teachers and their students. 

“I think we know with the teacher education pieces, this is about the long game,” said Franklin, the Philanthropy Advocates managing director, “and this is about long-term, sustainable ways to ensure that our students have the teachers they deserve, and that the teaching profession is an attractive profession to the end.”

But the attention that math actually gets, from classrooms to statehouses, doesn’t reflect the gravity of its long-term impact. The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed that math scores for fourth-grade students saw the largest drop in the assessment’s 50-year history, with declines the steepest for students furthest from opportunity.

Just as the science of reading has sparked in how literacy is taught, the science of how early math must be taught deserves the same attention and action. 

Too often, the issue starts with how we prepare future teachers. A recent found that most teacher-preparation programs devote insufficient time to key math concepts. When new teachers lack confidence and skills in early math instruction, their students risk falling behind, setting off a chain reaction that can limit students’ long-term potential.

As a nation, we can change this reality by teacher-preparation programs –- one of the first and most important junctures to shape mindsets, beliefs, and practices. Ensuring that future teachers receive high-quality, evidence-based preparation in teaching math to young children is one of the most powerful steps we can take to improve learning outcomes.

In 2024, Deans for Impact (DFI) launched the Early Numeracy by Scientific Design (ENbSD) Network to support programs that bring evidence-based instructional practices to the forefront of teacher training. The network convened three Texas educator-preparation programs – Sam Houston State University, Texas A&M University Texarkana, and Stephen F. Austin State University – to redesign how future educators are prepared to teach math in PreK-3 classrooms. This network builds on DFI’s decade-long work to help programs redesign preparation experiences grounded in evidence-based instruction; since 2015, DFI has supported more than 260 programs to ensure 110,000 future teachers across 45 states are better prepared for the classroom.

In our first year of the math initiative, we kicked off conversations with faculty, both in mathematics departments and in colleges of education, to understand the current state of early math instruction in their programs and identify critical next steps to redesign coursework. We observed instruction in K-3 classrooms, reviewed data on teacher-candidate knowledge and skills, analyzed course materials, and gathered expert feedback to reveal current strengths and opportunities for growth. We also used three research-based instructional practices to guide our work: balancing conceptual and procedural knowledge, focusing on mathematics language, and implementing explicit and systematic instruction.

Over the course of the year, faculty used this framework to examine their syllabi and coursework and to begin co-designing improvements. Through the first year of this work, we uncovered critical insights that can inform how more teacher-preparation programs can support the success of Pre-K math teachers and their students:

1. While math anxiety is real and widespread among teachers, thoughtful coursework design can alleviate concerns.

Many teacher candidates arrive in preparation programs with negative experiences or insecurities about math. affects how they engage with the material and how they’ll eventually teach it. Addressing this challenge requires thoughtful design of coursework that builds confidence and reinforces math as something aspiring teachers can understand and teach well.��

2.��Early math classrooms cannot be underestimated as a critical lever for students’ long-term success.��

There’s a persistent assumption that early math is “easy,” but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. While many children may have a basic grasp of counting upon entering school, research tells us that they can benefit from teachers not only reinforcing these skills but also exposing them to more advanced mathematical concepts . Doing so ensures that more students access and cement foundational skills, which is essential given how much academic math on prior knowledge. While aspiring teachers may find basic number sense and operations skills easy to grasp, the knowledge and skill required to assess where students are in their learning and make effective instructional moves can lead to early success and confidence. As a result, we’re designing instructional modules that ensure learning opportunities that bridge content and instructional knowledge.

3. Collaboration across teacher-preparation programs and K-12 partners is essential for stronger preparation.

In many universities, math content is taught separately from math pedagogy, sometimes in entirely different departments. As a result, future teachers may learn about mathematical concepts in one class but not learn how to actually teach them until a course several semesters later. They also might not get any opportunities to observe or practice in real PreK-3 classrooms during their preparation, losing out on real-world experiences to hone their skills. Without intentional collaboration across these areas, future teachers experience disjointed training. Our network sought to address this misalignment by creating space for mathematics faculty and teacher educators to meet regularly, give each other feedback, and align their instruction to support teacher candidates more holistically. These bridges unlock enormous potential for program-wide change. In one instance, a math and education professor were compelled to co-teach a course together, an unprecedented collaboration in the program that supported candidates to meaningfully connect the dots between content and instruction.

Looking ahead to year two of the network, we hope to strengthen the way we prepare teachers with new instructional modules ready to be piloted in the fall and stronger collaboration across faculty, partnering K-12 schools, and programs. We’re working with faculty across departments to build a strong, cohesive arc for how early numeracy is taught across entire preparation programs. Most importantly, these programs are modeling what’s possible in teacher preparation.

Improving math instruction is not just a job for prep programs and K-12 school districts. State policymakers can uphold high standards for effective preparation aligned to evidence and require or incentivize ample on-the-job learning opportunities for aspiring teachers to put knowledge into practice. Philanthropy organizations and funders can invest in emerging efforts and lift up promising models of effective practice.

When teacher-prep programs are empowered to make evidence-based early numeracy a priority, all teachers and students stand to benefit.

From hundreds of surveys and in dozens of interviews of school leaders conducted over the last year, researchers from the Centers on Reinventing Public Education have heard a consistent message: Teachers urgently need help shifting their mindset on AI, moving from reflexive fear and resistance to curiosity and hands-on engagement with the technology. Many still see AI primarily as a tool for cheating rather than as a transformative force in education. However, AI is not going away, and teachers must understand both its potential and its risks. Thoughtful educators are already wrestling with questions of plagiarism, bias and privacy, but they are also finding AI invaluable for reducing paperwork, tailoring instruction for different student skill levels and creating accessible documents for English learners and their families.

Beyond the classroom, teachers must also prepare students for a future workforce shaped by AI, helping them navigate a world of hallucinating chatbots and algorithm-driven decision-making. AI literacy is quickly becoming as fundamental as reading and math, yet higher education is nowhere near ready to meet this challenge.

paints a sobering picture: Few education schools are making serious moves to incorporate AI training into teacher preparation. Faculty resistance, the inability to change longstanding institutional policies and lack of expertise about teaching with generative AI y are major barriers. Where AI is mentioned, it is usually in the context of student plagiarism rather than as a tool that could reshape teaching and learning. The result is that future K-12 teachers are entering classrooms unprepared for the AI-driven realities they will inevitably face.

Perhaps the most telling sign that colleges of education are becoming irrelevant to the work of preparing teachers for AI is the silence from district leaders. When we asked 15 district administrators about higher education’s role in AI training, none of them even thought to mention teacher prep programs. Some districts maintain longstanding partnerships with education schools, but not one superintendent we spoke with considered higher education a resource for AI-related professional learning. That is a damning indictment. If teacher prep programs want to remain relevant, they need to start listening to what schools actually need.

Superintendents are not waiting for support or direction from higher ed institutions to tackle AI. Many are taking a hands-on approach, leading AI workshops themselves, offering opt-in training for teachers and prioritizing practical, immediate applications over abstract concerns. This is the kind of leadership teacher prep programs should be providing, yet we are seeing the opposite: inertia, skepticism and a frustratingly slow pace of change.

Education schools could start by mirroring what innovative districts (and a few colleges of education) are already doing:

• Meet faculty where they are. Districts do not force AI training. Instead, they hold optional information sessions and give teachers multiple opportunities to learn about and experiment with AI tools designed to, for example, assist in completing administrative tasks or generating individualized assignments for students. Education schools should do the same, starting with faculty workshops on using AI for research, grading and lesson planning before moving into pedagogy.
  
• Build AI leadership teams. Just as some districts are identifying “AI champions” among teachers, education schools should form internal task forces to experiment with tools, train colleagues and develop curricula.
  
• Forge real partnerships with K-12. Teacher prep programs should work directly with districts to co-develop AI coursework that aligns with what schools actually need rather than making assumptions from the ivory tower.

Higher education has a choice: adapt or risk irrelevance. If colleges and universities cannot step up to equip future teachers with the skills, tools and mindsets needed for an AI-infused education landscape, districts will find other ways to fill the gap. Once that happens, teacher prep programs may find themselves permanently sidelined.

State legislators should consider policy action, including assessing and updating accreditation requirements for education schools. During a focus group with ed school faculty gathered to discuss preparing teachers for AI in the classroom, one dean told us, “Ultimately, we do what the state tells us.” States also might consider bolder action, such as allowing leading districts to offer AI courses to ed school students and other aspiring teachers as a potential income stream. 

Philanthropy, nonprofits and alternative teacher preparation programs should take note as well. They have an opportunity, and arguably a responsibility, to step in where higher education is falling short. might be extended to teachers in training, for example. 

Generative AI is the canary in the coal mine for teacher preparation. It is revealing, in real-time, the ways in which higher education’s slow-moving shifts in programs and policies are failing to keep up with the world their graduates will enter. The colleges that recognize this moment for what it is — a chance to lead, innovate and evolve — will shape the future of teaching. Those that do not may soon find themselves obsolete.

But if classroom instruction isn’t improving, we shouldn’t be surprised that test scores are stagnant or dropping. 

How teachers are taught to teach—along with what curriculum materials they use with students and how they use those materials—are the most critical factors for improving student learning. Many state education leaders are doing their part to ensure school districts adopt high-quality curriculum materials and help teachers use them well. The colleges and universities that prepare teachers to enter the profession largely have not. 

Back in 2017, the Council of Chief State School Officers formed a of interested state departments of education – called the High Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development Network – to put good curriculum into the hands of teachers.

The network is getting its job done: According to and that of the states themselves, more teachers are using curriculum materials for English language arts and mathematics that are aligned with rigorous state standards. More schools are also providing professional development to teachers that is grounded in their curriculum materials. 

Louisiana – a network state that is also for state curriculum reform efforts – was the only state to see gains in fourth-grade reading scores on NAEP since 2017. Louisiana and Mississippi, another network member, were two of only four states that have seen gains in fourth-grade mathematics since 2017.

But one area where we consistently have seen little change is in college and university teacher preparation programs. In surveys every year since 2019, RAND has asked teachers across the nation which approach their teacher preparation program emphasized: 

(a) “how to develop my own lessons and unit plans,” or

(b) “how to skillfully use and modify curricula provided to me.” 

Year over year, only about 10% of U.S. teachers indicate that their program emphasized helping them use curriculum materials. A little less than half say the emphasis was on how to develop their own lessons and unit plans. The balance say their program emphasized both or neither.

These percentages hold regardless of the teacher’s state, whether the teacher is in an elementary or high school; in an urban or rural school; in an English language arts/reading, math or science classroom; or was trained 20 years ago versus in the past five years. 

All teacher preparation programs should show teachers-in-training how to skillfully use the curricula they are given. This is a prerequisite to ensuring that most children meet state academic standards. Think about it: If every teacher uses a school-provided curriculum that is aligned with their state standards, the chances of meeting those standards is better than if teachers are reinventing the wheel by developing their own lessons.

Other data beyond our surveys underscore this point: Teacher preparation is slow to incorporate what we know about good classroom instruction. 

For example, the and confirmed that elementary schoolers need instruction in five key components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. Yet, in NCTQ’s 2023 nationwide of the elementary reading course syllabi of nearly 700 teacher preparation programs, they found that only 25% of those programs adequately addressed those five core components of reading instruction. Another 25% didn’t adequately address any of those components. 

The idea that teachers should write their own curriculum is outdated and ill-serving; it’s a holdover from the era before the advent of academic standards in the U.S. and growing knowledge about what makes a good curriculum material. These days, according to a recent RAND American Instructional Resources Survey, encourage teachers to develop their own curriculum. Instead, most principals expect teachers to use their required curriculum materials.

At their best, professional curricula are developed by experts in subject matter and pedagogy, are written to build students’ knowledge over time, and have been endorsed by third party organizations such as that deem the material aligned with state academic standards. 

Adopting a prepared curriculum needn’t turn teachers into robots; it takes considerable skill and subject-matter knowledge to use any materials thoughtfully and productively. Teacher prep programs should give teachers ample, hands-on training on how to use their grade-level curriculum materials and the expertise to make just-in-time adjustments that help students catch up when they are struggling to master those materials. 

States and school districts know that curriculum matters. Many have revamped their policies accordingly. It’s time for teacher preparation programs to do the same.

Minority-serving institutions, or MSIs, are one place to look in order to fix that.

A recent analysis by the found that between 2012 and 2019, the number of prospective teachers completing their preparation programs dropped by 20%. That number recovered slightly in subsequent years, but a state-by-state analysis shows wide variations. Some states, like California and Washington have seen enrollment and completion increase in recent years. Others, like Louisiana and Texas, have seen big declines.

But In states across the country, teacher prep programs in minority-serving institutions, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities, are producing higher percentages of completers than non-MSIs.

An analysis of conducted by the Branch Alliance for Educator Diversity, the organization I lead, found that between 2018 and 2022, minority-serving institutions saw the number of program completers increase by 5.5% on average, across all 50 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories. Meanwhile, non-MSIs saw an average 0.7% decline.

At the state level, those numbers are even more glaring. In Louisiana, completion at MSI programs rose by 6% over that time period while declining 25% at non-MSIs. In Texas, MSI completion grew by 5% while non-MSI completion dropped by 17%, while Maryland saw an increase of 10% versus a decline of 23%. In Arkansas, Montana, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Puerto Rico and South Carolina, the trend was the same.

Headlines are dominated by statistics showing fluctuating and declining enrollment in educator preparation programs, teachers colleges and universities, as well as staffing shortages in schools. But enrollment is an input and staffing shortages a lagging indicator. The percentage of enrollees who actually complete their training — those who are truly prepared to stand and deliver in the classroom — is an essential data point that leaders and policymakers should pay focused attention to.

As a former HBCU school of education dean and the leader of an organization focused on supporting high-quality teacher preparation, my experience tells me MSIs are so successful at this because of their focus on student care and identity.

They, and HBCUs specifically, have seen in recent years. Much of this can be attributed to the political volatility around issues of diversity, equity and inclusion as well as the Supreme Court’s ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. In response, Black and brown young people are actively seeking places where they can pursue their education in ways that are empowering and culturally affirming. 

Within MSIs, students are increasingly looking to pathways that enable them to positively impact their communities and students back home. Teaching is rightly viewed by Black and brown educators as a primary means of doing exactly that. A study by Donors Choose and the Center for Black Educator Development found that teachers of color — the majority of whom received their education from MSIs — are far more likely than their white counterparts to to “affirm the racial and ethnic identity of students of color.”

Aspiring teachers at MSIs, then, are engaged in an effort to build something better, to be the transformational teacher that either they were fortunate enough to have or perhaps never had themselves. They see that the route to making change in the public education system is to be part of it: to become educators and improve the system from the inside.

They see themselves as the carriers of the torch, the tellers of a necessary story to foster the development of a sense of agency and a positive cultural identity in students who grew up in circumstances similar to their own. And they learn to do this at schools whose very existence is premised on the belief that their identity is valuable and demands care. 

It is that culture of care, combined with that spirit of possibility and change-making, that has enabled MSI educator preparation programs to excel amid broader declines. These are features of teacher preparation that can exist beyond MSI campuses. Non-MSIs can and should work to create a similar culture of care for their aspiring educators. That means ensuring their preparation program instills a positive sense of their own identity — who teachers are and where they are from can be valuable assets in their vocation. And it means their experience in teacher prep inspires them to work as builders of community and agents of progress in the public schools for the benefit of all students.

Public schools need teachers who are well prepared to deliver the high-quality learning required for a rapidly changing world and who have the cultural competency to teach the full diversity of America’s students.

In response, states instituted a variety of short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling their normal requirements. Those policies helped candidates who would have otherwise been prevented from teaching, while aiding school leaders in filling open positions.

Were teachers worse for this lack of training? 

New research from and suggests maybe not. In both states, teachers who entered the profession without completing the full requirements performed no worse than their normally trained peers.

Starting June 2020, Massachusetts began temporarily letting anyone with a bachelor’s degree teach. According to by a team of researchers at Boston University, roughly 5,800 individuals received one of these emergency licenses. 

Like other first-year teachers, those granted emergency credentials were disproportionately assigned to work with children with disabilities, English learners and low-income students. And, in fact, they had more such children in their classrooms. Even so, their students saw in math and reading as children taught by regularly licensed educators. Because most did not teach tested grades and subjects, the researchers also looked at evaluation ratings. Both groups of teachers received similar marks from their supervisors.

When the Boston University team asked principals and administrators why they hired emergency-certified teachers, they reported using them to fill shortage areas, especially in special education. 

The teachers working under these licenses also helped diversify the state’s classrooms, as they were about twice as likely as other beginning educators to be Black, Hispanic or Asian.

New Jersey’s waiver policy was similar. Candidates could earn a temporary credential before passing the normal licensure exams or completing a teacher preparation program. The licenses were good for one year, at which point candidates would need to go back, pass the tests and complete their training. Still, found similar outcomes as in Massachusetts: Teachers without the normal training and testing were at least as effective in reading and math as other novices. 

One preliminary explanation from the New Jersey study was that the emergency licensed teachers were working in schools that had a record of helping students make strong academic gains. It’s possible that the schools had supports in place, such as teacher coaching, a strong curriculum or something else that compensated for less training. 

Another recent study, out of Oakland, California, backs up this theory. Parents with high school diplomas who were given 10 weeks of training on a structured literacy program helped students produce strong early literacy gains, roughly on par with those made under fully credentialed teachers. 

The better question now is why these temporary waivers aren’t being made permanent. The New Jersey policy after one year, and Massachusetts is trying to its version out this year. But with such promising results, policymakers might want to reconsider.  

The results are, in fact, part of a pendulum swing in teacher preparation. A decade ago, states were trying to raise the bar. The supply of had risen steadily throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and there was a regular of teacher candidates. There were regional and subject-area shortages, of course, but in general, school districts could be choosy about whom they hired. 

Given this backdrop, policymakers of all stripes came together to focus on quality over quantity. 

National leaders like then-Secretary of Education and American Federation of Teachers President pushed for higher barriers to entering the profession. At the same time, the national accrediting bodies charged with overseeing teacher preparation programs pushed of quality. And states adopted tougher licensing exams. 

Did these policies work? That’s a mixed bag at best. 

There’s some evidence that teacher licensure tests are of who will be a good educator. All else equal, a school would be better off selecting candidates with a higher test score, especially if they’re going to be teaching math or science. But that general rule would a lot of teachers — some test well but don’t have great classroom management or interpersonal skills, while others may not test well but are effective at working with children. 

What’s undoubtedly true is that making it harder to become a teacher reduced the supply. Researchers found that the adoption of reduced the supply by 14%, disproportionately hitting minority candidates in less selective or minority-concentrated universities. Another new finds that in 21 states and D.C., shifting to the Praxis Core as their licensure test in 2013-14 led to a 12.5% decrease in teacher preparation completions.

In other words, making it harder to become a teacher will reduce the supply but offers that those who meet the bar will actually be effective in the classroom. The recent COVID-related waivers should cause policymakers to re-evaluate whether barriers into the teaching profession actually serve a meaningful purpose, or if they’re keeping potentially talented educators out of the classroom. 

Teaching science to young students should spark creativity and joy; to do so requires a well-prepared teacher who can engage kids effectively as well as deliver essential content knowledge.

Science education in the elementary grades is to encouraging young children’s interest in science-related careers, developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills and building reading comprehension. It is even more urgent for the nation’s most vulnerable students — Black and Latino children, English learners, students with disabilities and those living in poverty — who have disproportionately low rates of and are most likely to be to the broad curricular content that can help them establish the knowledge and skills they need for later grades and to succeed in the 21st century world.

But investments in new science equipment, curricula, textbooks and activities are moot if education leaders don’t also attend to the science preparation of aspiring elementary teachers.

There’s a lot of work to do. A found that only 31% of elementary teachers reported feeling very well prepared to teach science. When the survey broke it down to look at specific topics, the picture was even worse: Fewer than a quarter reported feeling well-prepared to teach any specific science topic, such as life science, earth science and physical science, and only 3% reported feeling well-prepared to teach engineering — despite the inclusion of these topics in state elementary standards for students.

A key reason is that, too often, teacher preparation programs do not explicitly require future elementary educators to take courses that cover essential science topics, even when those courses are available. A finds major gaps in required science topic coverage for future elementary teachers.

For example, every state and D.C. includes science topics in elementary student standards, such as “forces, waves and energy,” “Earth’s systems and processes” and “interdependent relationships in ecosystems.” Yet NCTQ found only about half of teacher preparation programs require future elementary teachers to take courses covering these topics. The good news is that since nearly all programs offer courses covering these topics as options, most teacher preparation programs don’t need to create new ones. They just need to direct future elementary teachers to the right science courses by making them mandatory.

NCTQ data show that aspiring elementary teachers are required to take an average of four science courses for graduation. However, teacher preparation and general education programs typically offer long lists of course options to choose from — with varying degrees of relevance to what the new educators will be expected to teach students. As interesting as “Calculus-Based Analytical Physics” or “Literature and Environmental Science” may be, surely a future elementary teacher should take “Physics: Forces, Sound, Momentum & Energy” and “Principles of Living Systems” instead. By guiding aspiring educators to courses that cover essential content, programs can make sure their graduates have a firm foundation in the science topics their future students need to learn.

The only key elementary science topic that NCTQ did not find available as an option in most teacher preparation programs is engineering design, although it is a critical subject in today’s world and appears in the elementary science standards of more than 40 states. We found only 10% of programs require future teachers to take a course that covers engineering design, and only 19% even offer courses in the topic. Fortunately, some programs, such as those at Castleton University, Drexel University and the University of Central Missouri, are specifically for future teachers. More need to follow suit.

It is vital to ensure all children have access to science content early in their education, and this can only happen if future elementary school teachers are trained to understand the science themselves. Individual results for the preparation programs included in the NCTQ analysis are available in the , with detailed course analysis, topic coverage and recommendations to guide programs in making improvements. We hope the national findings here will illuminate an urgent need and clear solution: By bridging gaps in science content requirements, the schools that prepare future educators can ensure teachers go into elementary classrooms confident and ready to provide our children with the science instruction they need and deserve.

Wyoming is vast and sparsely populated. Its only public four-year university is located in Laramie, in the southeast corner of the sharply rectangular state. Those factors can make educator training complicated, explained Laurel Ballard, director of innovation and digital learning at the Wyoming Department of Education. Would-be teachers often are turned off from the profession because of the cost or commuting required for training programs.

“All of our districts are struggling with finding teachers and counselors,” she said. 

Now, to combat the problem, her state is rolling out a program designed to eliminate key barriers to becoming an educator — and doing so with the help of a network of more than a dozen other states at the vanguard of what many consider a . 

Wyoming and its peers in the are applying a decades-old, on-the-job training model long associated with trades like plumbing or welding to educator preparation. They say the technique has the potential to make becoming a teacher more affordable and hands-on.

“I think it’s going to change the face of what teacher prep looks like,” Ballard said. “We’ve seen [apprenticeships] work really well in other industries. So I don’t know why education would be any different.”

The strategy is brand shiny new. Though the federal government has run a skilled apprenticeship program for 85 years, teaching was only of approved professions in 2021.

But rather than attempt to navigate uncharted turf on their own, officials from 14 states and counting have banded together to share tips and tricks from the field. The network launched in August and is led by David Donaldson, one of the architects behind Tennessee’s teacher apprenticeship program, which was the nation’s first federally approved model.

“The group’s made up of the implementers, the people who actually get things done,” Donaldson said. “Everybody is learning from one another. I hope people avoid the mistakes I’ve made [in Tennessee] because I’ve made plenty. We say we want people to start at second base, not home plate.”

Teachers, on average, make compared to similar college graduates, meaning those without access to generational wealth may have difficulty paying back student loans. That’s one of several reasons the nation’s teaching force, which skews white and female, of its students. A broken teacher pipeline also helps explain the educator shortages aggravated by COVID, experts say. 

Apprenticeship advocates believe the new model has the capability to knock down many of those barriers, especially those associated with cost.

“We are going to create a world … where an aspiring educator can become a teacher for free and get paid to do so,” said Donaldson.

Once a month, the network meets over Zoom. During each session, two states give a brief presentation about how their model works and the challenges they’ve overcome in bringing it to life. 

For Ballard and her Wyoming colleagues, it’s a chance to glean lessons they can bring home. A recent presentation from West Virginia, for example, helped her team imagine a teacher preparation pathway that begins during students’ junior year of high school, she said.

“We took copious notes so that we can apply a lot of what they’ve done. … I don’t want to recreate the wheel,” Ballard said.

Laurie Matzke, in North Dakota, feels similarly. The assistant state superintendent works in a 77-person office — the country’s smallest state education agency, she said — so she appreciates any help from out-of-state colleagues.

“To participate in those calls and hear firsthand from other states how they’re moving forward to create their teacher apprenticeship program, that has just been an invaluable experience,” she said.

The U.S. Department of Labor currently recognizes the teacher apprenticeship programs of 16 states, including 10 that participate in Donaldson’s network: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. Several other states in the network are in the process of applying for state or federal approval.

West Virginia was the second state with a federally approved teaching apprenticeship program after Tennessee. There, 250 high school juniors across the state this spring will take part in a that gives them a jumpstart on college with dual enrollment courses in their last two years of high school as well as paid student teaching opportunities. The credits they earn allow the apprentices to start college as sophomores, where they complete two full years of undergraduate coursework in tandem with more student teaching. Finally, to culminate the apprenticeship, they return to their home K-12 district when they are college seniors for a salaried position as a full-time teacher under a veteran educator’s tutelage. At the end of that year, they receive their bachelor’s degree and their teacher certification.

The program will open the door for more West Virginia students to stick around and help future generations of students, predicts Carla Warren, director of educator development at the West Virginia Department of Education.

“It’s a very rural, family-oriented state [and] these individuals want to stay,” she said. That’s important, she pointed out, because those who grew up there are the ones who best understand the issues their communities face, such as opioid abuse and rural poverty.

“This pathway has the potential to level the playing field for our students and allow our best and brightest to say, ‘Hey, I think I want to be a teacher and I can afford to be a teacher in West Virginia,’” the education official added.

“Coming from a community that is so impoverished and rural, it helps a lot,” said Teanna Stubbs, a senior at Mount View High School in McDowell County, West Virginia who grew up in a low-income family. 

The student this year began a vocational track that, like the forthcoming apprenticeship program, gives her an early start on college credits and student teaching. Colleges are already offering her scholarships for next year, she said. When she completes her studies, she intends to return to McDowell County to work with youth.

“I’ve lived here my entire life. I’ve seen how impactful it is to have somebody who’s willing to come in and help the community,” Stubbs said. “A lot of times, the kids here end up struggling because they have nobody to go to. … I just want to change the lives of kids who grew up like me.”

West Virginia, like many other states in the network, has cobbled together several funding sources to offset the costs for students, minimizing debt and compensating them for student teaching. Being an approved apprenticeship program unlocks both state and federal dollars, Warren explained, and her office has also sought out philanthropic funding.

How to build financially sustainable models is a recurring conversation topic at the monthly meet ups, Donaldson said. 

The most common problem states face is “funding, 100%,” he said.

At least four states in the network have ensured tuition, books and licensure exams are fully funded, Donaldson said, meaning no out-of-pocket costs for candidates. At the same time, students can earn a salary for their student teaching roughly equivalent to that of a paraprofessional, around $20,000. In West Virginia, the price tag is a bit higher. Warren estimates apprentices who begin in high school would pay roughly $11,000 per year of higher education, offset by a roughly $32,000 salary in the clinical year before finally earning a teaching certificate.

Some officials, like Matzke in North Dakota, have used COVID relief dollars to foot the bill for grow-your-own programs that, rather than recruiting high schoolers, provide paraprofessionals with the continuing education needed to become full-time teachers. But as stimulus cash dries up in the coming years, states will have to find other funding streams for ongoing programs.

Still, Donaldson is confident that leaders will be up to the task so long as they continue to lean on and learn from each other. It costs nothing to join his network, and every month since its launch, new states have joined, quickly swelling from seven to 14.

“I definitely see this spreading,” Donaldson said. “It’s become a movement.”

As teachers nationwide face “an increasingly disrespectful and demanding school workplace culture,” and compensation concerns, the GAO charged in a report released last month failed to establish a timeline and measures to gauge progress in resolving regional teacher shortages. 

The challenge of cost of entry into the profession and concerns of return on investment, the GAO report found, is also significantly straining the country’s supply of teachers. Compounding the financial reality, many candidates fear being overworked and mistreated. 

“The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare teachers’ discontent with aspects of their jobs, including a lack of support for their safety and value as professionals and an increasingly disrespectful and demanding workplace culture—and exacerbated teacher shortages nationwide,” the GAO stated, pulling data from focus groups held throughout the pandemic. 

Shortages, the agency confirmed, are most concentrated in urban and rural areas, schools predominantly serving non-white students, and key subjects like science and foreign languages.

Without clearer policy and benchmarks to address the crisis, “the effect of its efforts will be unknown and [the department] will miss an important opportunity… to help ensure that all children have access to high-quality teachers…” The GAO’s recommendations include raising public awareness about the value of teachers to combat negative perceptions of the profession; and providing information to states on how to address recruitment and retention challenges, via competitive grants and research-backed guidance on residencies, for example.

Researchers and federal policy analysts who study teacher workforces said the report confirms their understanding of vacancies and puts more pressure on the Department of Education to inform state policy.

But it will take more than just a public awareness campaign to combat negative perceptions of teaching: Addressing the systemic challenges that contribute is key, the experts said.

“School culture and support I think can tie into perceptions of teaching,” said Michael DiNapoli, deputy director of federal policy with the Learning Policy Institute, adding that “smaller class sizes, facilities that are up to date (and) supportive school leadership” will all make a difference in the lives of teachers.

Key Department programs that elevate pipelines and cut down cost barriers for those looking to lead classrooms have gone without updates for years, DiNapoli said. The , for example, which provides scholarships to teacher candidates, was last updated 15 years ago. 

“We’ve seen a whole generation of students go through K-12 with no updates,” DiNapoli said, adding, for instance, that the teacher loan forgiveness program also hasn’t been updated since 2004 amid climbing college tuition.��

The department may have limited power to change trends “overnight” given that states control their own policy, said Chad Aldeman, policy director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. But what they can do, he said, is utilize their position to guide strategy that can make the difference in addressing acute shortages. 

“They have a bully pulpit they can use and they can collect better data,” Alderman said. “If they pushed harder on the other things around licensure, compensation, things that policy actually can change, I think that is where the bully pulpit can matter from the federal lens.”

The Department will “continue to give this area priority attention,” but did not confirm it will act on the GAO’s recommendations, Deputy Assistant Secretary Mark Washington said in response included in the report. A Department commission to examine how to elevate the profession is pending, proposed in their current budget now under Senate appropriations review.

A scholar on education leadership at John Hopkins University, Anderson grew frustrated as district officials stayed quiet about mounting vacancies. Meanwhile, in Maryland, the number of teachers with — good for two years as new teachers gain classroom experience and work toward full licensure — had doubled in under 5 years. Uncertified teachers make up over 13% of Baltimore City Schools’ educator force, the second-highest rate in the state. 

The impact would be catastrophic, Anderson believed, particularly for low-income children. 

“There is a cumulative price for society to pay because we have neglected this issue for far too long. And our most vulnerable students and families will always lose the most…” Anderson said. “We have doomed an entire generation of poor children, because we didn’t care enough to get ahead of a coming storm.” 

New research suggests Anderson’s instincts were right: U.S. schools currently employ at least , teachers working without state certification or outside of their subject area. In to be in classrooms.

The underqualified group comprises roughly 5% of the U.S. teaching force. of these hires relative to the student population include Washington, Utah, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, , Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and . 

In the last pre-pandemic school year, nearly a were instructing out of their field or uncertified, mostly in math and science.

Black, brown and low-income students are still more likely to be taught by underqualified educators than peers, research shows, despite this by requiring states receiving Title I funding to make plans to address disparities.

Fueling the rise in uncertified teachers is a dramatic drop in teaching candidates — America lost at least a third in the last decade, with some states facing enrollment declines . The trickling pipeline of new educators coincided with the — of over organizations countrywide where candidates may not have to take on as much debt or devote as much preparation time to lead classrooms.

“It is actually life and death for many students when they receive an unprepared teacher,” said Jacqueline Rodriguez, vice president of research at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. “Their life outcomes are dramatically different and we need to be taking those students … into account when we deprofessionalize the field.” 

Experts further caution against current efforts to fill vacancies with adults who have no experience in schools or with children, who may have completed shortened preparation programs. In Florida, without degrees can now obtain a 5-year temporary teaching certificate. 

These types of short-term solutions may be appealing in a crisis, but present long-term funding and equity problems. 

“The dilemma becomes a Catch-22: You lower the requirements for entry, you put an unprepared person in a classroom,” Rodriguez said. “They do not feel like they can meet the needs of students in their classroom, and then they depart.”

The churn of unprepared, early career educators who had little intention of becoming career teachers, or may not feel set up to succeed, can strain local budgets and make it so that students don’t benefit from experienced teachers, she added.

Even in states that seem to be managing staffing challenges well, numbers can be deceiving. Utah, for instance, appears to have bucked teacher preparation enrollment declines, seeing the most growth of any state from 2010 to 2018. But Mary Burbank, University of Utah’s associate dean for teacher education, thinks the is not an indicator of a boom in quality teachers. 

A “floodgate” of underqualified teacher candidates opened in 2016, Burbank said, when Utah made it possible for any to teach via — so long as they eventually pass licensure exams. Last school year, the state had one of the in the nation, according to researchers at Kansas State University and the University of Illinois the population.��

“There’s tension there… I don’t know that anyone’s thrilled,” Burbank said. “We want a teacher’s classroom ready on day one. We don’t want the classroom to be a testing ground.”

In Arizona, where over are vacant or filled by underqualified staff, districts have taken to hiring student teacher candidates in their senior year of college to fill vacancies. Teachers colleges, unhappy with the practice, have asked districts to stop. 

“We’re saying you can’t put these people in classrooms by themselves — you’re doing them a disservice. They’re not going to stay. And you’re doing their learners a disservice,” said Carole Basile, dean of the teachers college at Arizona State University. 

The toll that underqualified and inexperienced teachers has on students is also a key concern for parents like Anderson. A child with their heart set on becoming a doctor, for instance, could lose foundational years of STEM learning: 

“By sixth grade your science teacher is a long term substitute [and] when you try to take a magnet test for your district high school … your composite score doesn’t make the cut. You take vocational courses instead, where the teachers are also not highly qualified. So you don’t quite make the grade to pass the state assessment to graduate,” Anderson told ����Ӱ��. 

Researchers told ����Ӱ�� the fascination around shortages ignores a critical consideration when it comes to making quality education a reality for all students. 

“‘Is there really a shortage, because schools are fully staffed?’ What they should be asking is, ‘who are being staffed in the schools?’” Rodriguez said. “The question needs to be why are states allowing people who are unprepared to be in classrooms when they could be working towards short- and long-term solutions to addressing shortages, so we don’t have to be talking about this in 2030.” 

Nearly every state lost a large proportion of teaching candidates between , according to a Center for American Progress report — and the pandemic has further strained traditional colleges and universities programs, many of which face and were forced to . 

Programs like the University of Michigan’s Masters of Teaching are feeling the effects. Their middle and high school cohort is down to about 28 students for the Fall 2022 semester from the usual 45. In Oklahoma, which had over , will end its elementary teacher preparation after its final three students graduate. 

“We have had basically at least an orange flag that’s been waving for the past 10 — and in urban and rural areas, well over 20 years — to say we’re not doing enough to recruit teachers,” said Kendra Hearn, associate dean for educator preparation programs at the University of Michigan. “…Everything has just been exacerbated by COVID.”

Experts believe a combination of economic and social factors are contributing to the decline: High stress working conditions, restrictions and political influence on what can be taught and low wages. In some parts of the country, the acute teacher shortage has been in part attributed to too few teaching candidates in the pipeline. Declining community college enrollment and transfer rates, a common pathway for low-income, Black and brown teachers, have also affected pipelines. 

The storm has given rise to many — run by nonprofit and for-profit organizations, sometimes in collaboration with universities — that are typically less costly and lengthy. 

Simultaneously, public perception of teachers during the pandemic have been overwhelmingly negative, intensifying disinterest in the profession. 

“Unfortunately, we had a very narrow window of public understanding of teacher’s work that closed rather quickly after the COVID realities started to become more commonplace,” Jacqueline Rodriguez, vice president of research for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, told ����Ӱ��.  “So there was a groundswell of interest and support and empathy for teachers’ work. And then that faded rather quickly.”

Carole Basile, dean of Arizona State University’s teacher’s college, agrees, observing the emotional toll of the current climate is steep. She believes it will take much more than recruitment efforts to bolster pipelines and make the profession desirable and sustainable.  It may also take a cultural shift in how Americans see and invest in public education. 

“We can’t keep preparing them, even if we change our preparation program, to be more flexible and accessible if we don’t also help schools to change to keep them,” said Basile. “It’s a pipeline issue, but then it’s also ‘we’ve got to change schools.’ It’s not okay that teachers sit in their cars crying in October.”

The enrollment lags are impacting historically hard-to-staff subject areas in particular: Interest in special education, STEM and foreign language is . Over the last decade, degrees and certifications conferred in each area are down by 4%, 27% and 44% respectively, adding to concerns about localized teacher shortages.

Top of mind for many contemplating the career amid a recession is compensation. Teachers’ weekly wages have remained relatively flat for 25 years; and educators earn about 24% than peer grads, according to an August Economic Policy Institute report that looks at wages through 2021. 

“People want a great return on investment in terms of a career and how their career will compensate them relative to the cost and especially any debt that they incur… Unfortunately, teaching is perceived as a low prestige, low paying profession,” Hearn said. “Prospective teachers are having to go into quite a bit of debt … that’s  a huge pain point for people who are interested.”

Some teaching candidates are discontinuing their programs under financial stress, according to Mary Burbank, the University of Utah’s associate dean for teacher education. It was her first time witnessing the trend in her nearly three decades with the University.

“Instead of continuing their academic program, even with additional financial support, they could not afford to do that. [They’d] consider degree-only or alternative routes because the family needed support,” she said.

In the fall of 2020 and 2021, about said the pandemic caused enrollment drops by 11% or more among undergraduates. 

The pipeline in Oklahoma, which has some of the lowest average teaching salaries in the nation, is further limited by pandemic-era challenges.  

“There are multiple distractions and disruptions thrusting Oklahoma educators in a whirlwind of pressures, dystopian narratives, and harassment from groups that know little if nothing about what it means to be a professional educator,” Shelbie Witte, head of Oklahoma State University’s school of teaching and learning, told ����Ӱ�� by email. “Does this impact the state’s teacher pipeline and retention? 100%.” 

Historic declines in community college enrollment, particularly among students of color, inflame a sense of urgency to strengthen pipelines. Nearly 40% of students who eventually study education at 4-year universities ; at schools like Arizona State University, with transfers comprising  more than half of enrolled students.  

Making pathways to the profession more accessible, without sacrificing quality

Yet there are attempts to build up pipelines — states sponsoring or limiting certification; undergraduates flooding introduction to teaching courses; and district partnerships to find possible candidates as early as high school. 

At the request of rural districts and candidates seeking better access, Oklahoma State University recently launched an online program for elementary education. Arizona State University similarly made their pandemic-era hybrid options permanent, for rural and working students who need more flexibility to persist through graduation. 

ASU has seen consistently strong enrollment, with the 2,841 students enrolled this fall being about 150 more than in Fall 2019. There, the threat of going into substantial debt is less pressing, thanks to the state’s Teacher Academy, a program that covers tuition and fees at participating universities.

The school has been on the forefront of innovations to teaching – piloting a with the state’s largest district to reduce shortages and help new teachers feel belonging. 

The school’s northern neighbor, the University of Utah, had similarly stable enrollment numbers this fall. 

The state’s unique culture could be helping the situation — teaching is seen as a worthwhile, popular profession, Utah’s Burbank said. Their program works with five school districts to identify prospective teachers in high school, offering tuition support for a 2+2 program with a community college and the University. 

They’ve seen growing interest in the field, even among non-education majors: This fall, 60 students are enrolled in the University’s Introduction to Teaching course — interest has grown stronger over the years. 

“Honestly I was very surprised to see that,” she said, “I asked them why are you here and there is a spirit of wanting to make a difference.”

Rosemely Osorio is swiftly becoming the educator that, years ago, she wished for.

When, at age 9, she and her family came to Rhode Island from Guatemala, Osorio recalls struggling academically as she navigated an unfamiliar system.

“When I came here and I started at the schools, I remember, I didn’t know how to speak any English. … I didn’t have a mentor who told me, ‘Hey, it’s really important that you work extremely hard in high school so then your GPA is good.’ I didn’t know what a GPA was,” she said.

In 2014, she graduated high school, the first in her family to accomplish the feat, but college remained out of reach because of finances and her immigration status — Osorio is a DACA recipient, the Obama-era program that provides deportation relief and work permits to undocumented residents brought here as children.

Now, years later as an adult learner in College Unbound and the Equity Institute’s TA to BA program, she’s just a semester away from earning her bachelor’s degree and teaching certification, key steps toward becoming exactly the role model she yearned for as a young person. At the same time, she works as a paraprofessional in the Central Falls high school she once attended, which serves a high share of Central American immigrant students.

“They see in me someone that they can count on,” said Osorio. “They’re like, ‘Oh, she knows how to speak Spanish. She looks Hispanic. So I can actually talk to her.’”

After only two years in operation, the teacher training program that opened doors for Osorio has scaled up more than six times beyond its original capacity and is launching cohorts in a second city, with talks underway to expand to a third, leaders say.

“The program has grown pretty tremendously,” said Carlon Howard, who helped launch the TA to BA fellowship and is chief impact officer at the Equity Institute. “There’s a lot of interest in initiatives such as these given that, across our country, schools and districts are challenged to find enough educators to staff their buildings.”

The Rhode Island program, which served 13 fellows in its inaugural 2020-21 class, will train 75 paraprofessionals this year. Two new, 10-student cohorts will launch in Philadelphia, where College Unbound already operates other programs, thanks to funding from the school district. Over 40 people remain on the waiting list, said David Bromley, College Unbound’s Philadelphia coordinator. In nearby Camden, New Jersey, the college is working with the teachers union to roll out programs there, too, he added.

“Investing deeply in our staff who already work closely with our students to bring them to the next stage of their career is a shining light of positivity in the midst of a difficult few years,” Larisa Shambaugh, chief of talent for Philadelphia public schools, said in an emailed statement to ����Ӱ��.

‘Untapped talent’

Many paraprofessionals are highly skilled educators with years or even decades of classroom experience, Howard said, but still may feel like they have a “glass ceiling above their head” because they lack college degrees and financial resources.

Participants in the fellowship often study tuition-free thanks to the Equity institute’s “last dollar” scholarships covering costs not offset by federal Pell grants.

“We target folks who already work with kids … and all we’re trying to do is help them realize their greatest potential,” Howard said.

TAs are an “untapped talent” pool from which to recruit and train high-quality educators, agreed David Donaldson, managing partner for the National Center for Grown Your Own educator pipeline programs.

Students take two College Unbound courses a semester, scheduled outside of the work day, plus a lab component specifically geared to prepare them to lead a classroom. Thanks to a process at the college for measuring and awarding credits for prior learning experiences, some students are able to take an accelerated path to graduation. Osorio, for example, will finish in under two years.

“It’s been a lot of work,” she admits, cramming in classes while also working full time and taking care of family responsibilities. “But I don’t regret it.”

Addressing diversity, combatting shortages

Educators like Osorio — those who reflect their students culturally and linguistically — are in short supply in Rhode Island’s schools and nationwide. Roughly 1 in 10 teachers in the Ocean State are people of color while 4 in 10 students identify as Black, Hispanic, Indigenous or Asian. Meanwhile, educators of color and those who speak multiple languages improve outcomes for all students, but provide a particular boost to students whose identities they match, research shows.

Classroom aides, on the other hand, tend to be much more racially and linguistically diverse than teachers. The positions generally do not require a college degree and can be more accessible to people from low-income backgrounds. All her fellow teaching assistants, Osorio said, speak Spanish and the vast majority are people of color, whereas the teachers at her school are predominantly white and speak only English.

“To be honest, everything we see is all these teachers in the classrooms with a bunch of Hispanic kids, but the teacher doesn’t speak their language,” said Osorio. “That’s what my biggest motivation was to apply and getting certified was that students need teachers in the classroom that they can relate to.”

David Quiroa is joining the TA to BA fellowship this fall and works as a paraprofessional in his home community of Newport, Rhode Island.

“So many TAs who are in the [Black, Indigenous and people of color] community already have been putting in the work for several years … and they’re never given the opportunity to pursue higher education,” he said. “With TA to BA and College Unbound, it really is showing these communities, ‘Look, we are here, we are federally approved, we have all of the accreditations, we have so (many) established connections here in our community. You guys have been doing the work. We just want to give you your proper salary.’”

Meanwhile, districts across the country are facing acute staffing shortages and going to extreme lengths — including tapping college students or dangling $25,000 bonuses — to entice new hires.

In this climate, the grow-your-own approach is “getting a lot of attention now,” Donaldson said, even though turning to programs that provide a work-based pipeline to train new teachers is a longer-term solution.

His organization recently announced that seven states with existing or emerging apprenticeship programs to train educators launched an all-new National Registered Apprenticeship in Teaching Network. It comes on the heels of a June announcement from Education Secretary Miguel Cardona urging states to invest in grow-your-own programs, including those that begin in high school and with apprenticeship programs.

“Missouri, like other states, is struggling to address staffing issues created by teacher shortages. The Teacher Apprenticeship is an additional, innovative model to help address this issue,” Paul Katnik, Missouri’s assistant education commissioner, said in a release after the network was announced.

The other participating states are California, Florida, North Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.

‘We got you’

The relationship faculty build with participants is a secret to the program’s success in Rhode Island, and soon in the new Philadelphia cohorts, fellowship leaders and students say.

Osorio’s advisor “has played a big role in the way that I have been able to develop in this program,” said the College Unbound student. In addition to checking in academically and emotionally, the faculty member who runs her teaching lab class allowed Osorio to make up credits when she fell behind after a devastating miscarriage. And when Osorio was short on cash to renew her Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status and fearing she would lose her work permit, she again asked for help.

“Don’t worry about it. We got you,” was the response from College Unbound. “And they actually sent me a check home so I could pay for that application.”

That support is by design, said Howard, who explained that the program trains its faculty to uplift participants and be there for them. Even as the fellowship scales up, he’s confident the family-like culture among cohorts will remain.

The TA to BA leader believes it’s within the program’s reach to train 200 paraprofessionals into full-time teachers in the next three to five years. If all goes according to plan, he hopes to serve 500 by 2030 and may also add a high school teaching apprenticeship component.

Quiroa, the Newport TA, is “thrilled” about the expansion, he said, because there are “absolutely” others in his field who could benefit from the opportunity. “Having this organization, this program, thrive … I think is the best thing we can do to move forward and break a lot of these inequities.”

Osorio, for her part, can visualize the impact that seeing someone like her at the helm of a classroom could have for immigrant students. Hispanic role models were vital in her professional life after graduating high school, she said, and now she can finally pass on the favor.

“I get how important mentors are so now I can be that for those students.”

Mapping the vacancies nationally, a recently published and crafted by three education researchers offers the latest, though incomplete, snapshot of reported teacher shortages. 

The data suggest the pandemic has exacerbated shortages in specific teaching areas and some states that have faced persistent and well-documented shortages for years, creating a patchwork of different education realities in the United States that vary from district to district and across state lines. 

Of the nine where vacancy rates are highest, Mississippi faced the highest vacancy rates, with 68 missing teachers per 10,000 students for the 2021-22 school year. In contrast, Utah’s vacancy rate was less than 1 per  10,000 students. The report does not yet compare these rates over time, because of differences in state data reporting and urgency to understand the most up-to-date vacancies.  

The report also identified another critical issue: Currently there are 163,650 “underqualified” educators — about 5% of the force nationally  — teaching without certification or outside of their subject area.  More state-level data is available for this group, showing the number of “underqualified” teachers  in some states exceeds 20,000, which has risen in the last several years.

“There are substantial vacant teacher positions in the United States. And for some states, this is much higher than for other states…. It’s just a question of how severe it is,” said Tuan Nguyen, lead author on the working paper and education researcher at Kansas State University. “The pandemic has just exacerbated the situation that was already starting to build up…just made it worse for some states.”

Nationally, an estimated 36,504 full-time teacher positions are unfilled, with the number potentially as high as 52,800, the report found.  

The vacancy estimates from Nguyen and co-authors Chanh Lam and Paul Bruno are significantly lower than the 300,000 reported by the National Education Association and (the higher estimate includes non-teaching staff such as bus drivers and school counselors). They join a host of academics attempting to make sense of shortages in the absence of , which would put vacancies, which vary school to school and district to district, into context. 

Published with the Annenberg Institute for Education Reform at Brown University, the report raises concerns about teacher education program pipelines; staffing historically hard-to-staff positions in rural areas, STEM and special education; and the lack of accurate data. 

Their work marks the first time vacancy numbers have been documented for all 50 states and Washington, D.C. as reports flow in about districts shifting to , or calling in the and to teach. 

“A lot of the things that they’re doing right now seem to be a little, quick band-aid to stop the bleeding. But it’s not going to solve this long term issue, particularly for states that have persistent shortages like Kansas, Florida and Mississippi,” Nguyen told the 74.

The highest raw numbers of open teaching positions are concentrated in the south and lower Atlantic, where about 22,000 positions are open, triple the picture in midwestern states. Alabama, which had over 3,000 vacancies in 2021-22, sits in stark contrast to Illinois, where 1,703 positions were left unfilled. 

Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi also experienced high raw number of vacancies in the 2021-22 school year, each missing at least 3,000 teachers. 

Nguyen described vacancies and staffing challenges as “ubiquitous,” but constituting a huge range. Beyond the nine states facing highest vacancy rates, another 19 have modest shortages, between 0 and 12 vacant positions per 10,000 students.  Nine others face moderate shortages, missing between 12 and 15 educators comparatively. 13 states did not share complete data and could not be compared, the researchers found.

Estimates are conservative. Not all districts provided vacancy data to their state agency. And while some states include “underqualified” teachers in their definitions of vacancy, Nguyen and coauthors only considered unfilled positions in their final tally, relying on state and federal education data along with news stories. 

Factors driving vacancies

Thousands of open posts does not mean that teachers left the classroom in droves during the pandemic, researchers at Rand, Kansas State University and Brown University told ����Ӱ��. 

Rather, three trends are unfolding simultaneously: teacher preparation programs face declining enrollment; respect for and interest in teaching has plummeted; and most districts beyond pre-pandemic numbers with federal relief aid. 

“It’s only in this year two, and really, in year three [of the pandemic] that we’ve seen an uptick in turnover, but nothing like a mass exodus, the attrition that we were concerned about,” Nguyen said.  “The teacher supply pipeline seems to be stagnating or decreasing over time. Over the last 10 years or so there has been a substantial .”

Concerns about public disrespect, low wages and legislation restricting classroom content may help explain some of the pipeline challenges and high vacancies particularly in southern states, Nguyen hypothesized.

“There’s also been increased attention to what it means to be a teacher…particularly about what teachers can or cannot teach in the state; whether or not social emotional learning is an important issue that we need to teach; how teachers may not teach anything about racism in America,” Nguyen said.

“It’s like, hey, there are these multitude of factors that are overlapping each other,” he said, “and they seem to be concentrated in the South.” 

Across the country, schools serving predominantly Black students have 5 percent than schools with fewer Black students, according to analysis from education advocacy nonprofit The Education Trust.

In a quarter of states, gaps are even wider: Predominantly Black schools have at least twice as many novice teachers as schools serving the fewest.

In two particularly egregious cases, researchers found in Mississippi, a quarter of Black students attended schools with high percentages of novice teachers, compared to just 7 percent of non-Black students. And in Louisiana, one in three Black students attend schools with high percentages of inexperienced teachers.

“Our findings reveal that our education system is failing Black students, as they find themselves more likely than any other group of students to be in classrooms with teachers who are in their first years of teaching or teachers who are uncertified,” the focused on Black and Latino students separately, stated.

Little progress in efforts to retain teachers in these schools has been made since federal data showed similar disparities in 2014 — so stark then that the . 

Novice teachers said they leave their posts because they receive little training or mentoring. As a result, students could go years without an experienced educator — the .

Gaps in access to quality teachers can have long-term consequences on students’ . 

Without action, the churn of inexperienced teachers will have long-term, negative impacts on students of color at a rate not experienced by their peers in predominantly white schools, Education Trust researchers said. 

“…The pattern of Black and Latino students getting assigned to brand new teachers year after year after year — attending schools with a majority of teachers who haven’t had the time to master their craft and need more support — is at its heart a racial justice issue,” said Sarah Mehrotra, who co-authored the .

“If we care about equity in education, we have to pay attention to who is teaching our Black and Brown students, and what we can be doing differently to support them,” she said.

In 32 states, there are more first-year teachers in schools serving the most Latino students. Three – Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and Washington – have the biggest gaps, with Latino students at least twice as likely to have a novice teacher.

In Massachusetts, access to certified teachers is particularly inequitable: 29 percent of Latino students attend schools with high percentages of uncertified teachers, compared to just 12 percent of their peers. 

The findings bring states’ commitment to teacher development into question at a time when many face educator shortages and allocate billions in pandemic relief aid to accelerate learning.

“This disparity… means that groups of students are missing out, by no fault of their own, on the critical learning opportunities necessary to prepare them for success in college and/or the workforce,” the reports stated, analyzing the U.S. Department of Education’s 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection.

In the predominantly Black and Latino schools analyzed, where there are fewer experienced educators, teachers of color are “over-represented” and have higher turnover rates than their peers — a “disruption” for students and communities, Mehrotra said. 

Teachers of color experience “antagonistic school culture, [are] deprived of agency/autonomy, navigating unfavorable working conditions and carrying an “invisible tax” – the extra work they take on (being a translator for families, being a disciplinarian) without additional compensation,” she added. Vacancies are filled by substitutes or novice teachers. 

One New Orleans teacher told the Education Trust: “The teaching profession was built on altruism, and many folks have taken advantage of this to bring in teachers on lower salaries.”

Though 2020-21 data is not available, Mehrotra predicted schools serving predominantly low-income students and students of color, where teachers double as counselors or manage larger classes, “are bearing the brunt of these pandemic related exits, teacher burnout and these alarming shortages.” 

Stronger statewide data systems — to track teacher departures, demographic data and professional development opportunities — tops the reports’ policy recommendations to retain experienced teachers for students of color.

Researchers say while there are bright spots like — where new teachers enter a three-year mentorship program and can access loan forgiveness for working in high-needs schools — the problem and its solutions have been widespread and well-known.

 “We could have predicted the data in a lot of ways,” Education Trust researcher Eric Duncan said, adding the have persisted for years. States and districts must double down on their commitment to engage teachers directly to, “go a little bit more under the hood and say, ?”

Further recommendations from the reports include investing in mentorship, and grow-your-own programs; incentivizing work in high-need schools and subjects; and hiring earlier in high-turnover districts.

Disclosure: Marianna McMurdock was an intern at the Education Trust-West in the summer of 2020. 

With repeated controversies erupting this year over how schools teach issues of race, gender, and sexuality, Republican lawmakers in state after state have proposed and passed laws focused on classroom discussions of “divisive concepts.” The movement — only the latest to ensnare local education officials in national political debates — has won the approval of some families, who fear their children are being taught anti-American propaganda about systemic oppression and the sins of whiteness. But many teachers say the bans trample on their free speech and risk sanitizing the realities of American society.

To Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder, a fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), the pushback against what she calls “thought reform” in the classroom is overdue. A former teacher and school counselor, she is the author of Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools — and What We Can Do About it, by Bombardier Books. And while she proclaims herself somewhat uneasy with the prospect of legislating what can and can’t be said in the classroom, she also believes passionately that teachers in too many communities have lapsed into preaching about politics.

It’s an accusation that has at board meetings and led to calls for some teachers to be . But the controversies also vary widely in substance. On the one hand, critics point to to describe their identities in terms of privilege and oppression, and major school districts ; on the other, educators around the country are earnestly attempting to refocus some lessons on long-neglected episodes from American history, such as the Tulsa race massacre.

The struggle over politics in teaching is typically associated with higher education, which is where FIRE focuses most of its efforts. The nonprofit often represents faculty members suing their colleges over restrictions to free speech on campus and of students accused in Title IX investigations of sexual misconduct. It also takes a nuanced view of the proposed restrictions on classroom speech, with Kerrigan Snyder and organization president Greg Lukianoff that many are “probably constitutional,” though not above criticism.

FIRE does not presently take on K-12 cases, but Kerrigan Snyder — who helps lead FIRE’s high school outreach program — argues that K-12 educators are becoming increasingly willing to indulge their own ideological predispositions, in large measure because of teacher preparation programs that have developed into what she describes as political “monocultures.” When it comes to the teaching of intrinsically controversial subjects, she adds, instructors need to ask themselves: “Is it age-appropriate? Is it aligned with the curriculum? Can I be even-handed? And could the discussion become inflammatory?”

In a conversation with ����Ӱ��, Kerrigan Snyder discussed her views on how schools began to drift toward “indoctrination.” The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: FIRE is an organization I associate with the cause of free speech on college campuses. Where does K-12 teaching, and controversies around its content, become a free speech issue? A lot of your book focuses on protecting the rights of kids to be able to speak their minds in the classroom. But many argue that the state laws being proposed to curb discussion of “divisive concepts,” such as race or or gender, just end up censoring teachers. Where do you stand on that?

Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder: At FIRE, we’re paying close attention to this legislation that seeks to ban certain ideas in K-12. We support what the First Amendment says and what the Supreme Court has ruled on freedom of expression. We’re very concerned about the thought reform aspects of this, where teachers are attempting to enter the private realm of thought and belief and try to compel students to affirm views that they might not wish to. And we’re concerned about students who self-censor. When children are afraid that if they say something the teacher doesn’t like, there’ll be retaliation, then everybody is being inauthentic in the classroom, and nothing meaningful is being discussed.

Students are showing up on college campuses with some very strange notions about the First Amendment, their rights, and other people’s rights; they seem to think they have the right to censor other people if they don’t like their speech. So a lot of what we try to do is educate teachers, students, and parents to counteract this, and generally, we’re in favor of more speech versus enforced silence. That’s why we would prefer that these disputes over curriculum be settled through persuasion, not coercion. When the government gets involved, it’s a matter of might making right.

That being said, at the end of my book, I warn teachers that if they lose the trust of the community, they’re going to be micromanaged and see greater supervision than they have before. I submitted the book earlier this year, and already what I said is coming true: With these laws coming down from legislatures, we now see that teachers could lose professional discretion in ways that will limit the scope of their operations within the classroom.

When there is goodwill and trust between parents, teachers, and the community, teachers can operate with a great deal of flexibility. But I’ve unearthed some teacher communications where they call themselves “co-conspirators,” or they talk about “creative insubordination.” I wrote giving the example of a district official in Missouri that was getting complaints about some of the lesson plans; the official just instructed teachers to so that parents wouldn’t know what was being taught. When these sorts of duplicitous means are being used, it does not surprise me that the state gets involved. [Editor’s note: The district placed private security at the home of the literacy coordinator in question following what the local teachers union described as “personal attacks and outright threats of violence” in response to the incident.]

In the end, checks and balances come into play. Teachers are going to speak their minds, it plays out at the school board, and we get to vote for the people in our legislatures. These bills have been proposed, not all of them have been passed, and we’re going to see where it goes. But the phrase that comes to mind is, “When you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.”

But aren’t you concerned that if whole areas of inquiry are banned from the classroom, it will prevent students from becoming informed participants in democratic discussion? It strikes me that if teachers are nervous about initiating any uncomfortable conversations, kids will just be living in an intellectual safe space.

Teachers should absolutely have some flexibility, and it goes back to the issue of trust. The more professional you are, the more trust you build, the greater the latitude you should have in addressing those controversial subjects.

in the Journal of the Middle States Council for the Social Studies about guardrails for educators. I know teachers are concerned about this, so I looked at the existing legal precedents from when teachers have found themselves in hot water. Based on what the law shows, one of the guidelines you should follow is, “Is it age-appropriate?” If you’re an elementary school teacher, should you be talking about, for instance, Afghanistan? What would make you think that you’re the right judge of what’s happening? Maybe it’s too recent for you to have sufficient perspective.

Another question is, “Is it aligned with the curriculum?” Do you even have a curricular mandate to be talking about current events? Possibly in social studies, but unlikely in other classes, so you might have to ask yourself why a certain topic is coming up. Then you ask, “Is it even-handed?” If you’re going to talk about something that’s going to ruffle feathers, it needs to be done in a way that gives the perspectives of competing sides. Teachers are expected to be honest brokers — are you doing that? If not, you’re liable to hear from angry parents.

And the last question is, “Is it inflammatory?” Which basically means that people get so upset, you can’t meet your learning objectives for the day. I tell teachers that sometimes you can hit a tripwire, and there’s no predicting that you just stepped into some inflammatory material. But anything that’s trending on Twitter or in the op-ed pages of your local newspaper probably won’t make for the best learning experience. Adolescents in particular can become very emotional, especially with things that are really personal to them, and then your rational faculties go out the window.

So you do have to exercise a certain amount of professional discretion, but that doesn’t mean that you steer away from every topic that might be considered controversial. You want to be somewhere between “So boring that the kids fall asleep” and “So incendiary that an argument breaks out and no learning takes place.” A lesson can work in four classes and then just explode in a fifth because of the maturity level of the kids. That’s what professional experience helps teachers to navigate. So those questions I put forward are guardrails, but teaching is a practice; educators are not just functionaries, they have to apply their accumulated wisdom to an ever-changing array of circumstances. That’s what makes it a challenge.

Some of the backlash against what’s being called “critical race theory” in schools has been directed at efforts to broaden the curriculum and educate kids about the history of America’s racial problems. In one instance, the teaching of a curriculum that includes one of the first African-American students to integrate an all-white school in New Orleans. Are you concerned that casting too wide a net can hurt learning?

I absolutely agree that so much negative attention has been attracted by some of the more objectionable aspects of CRT that reasonable attempts to broaden the curriculum could be undermined. On the other hand, all of the negative attention focused on CRT — they call this the “” — might just make it more appealing, more alluring to students. If you tell somebody they can’t study something, the natural instinct of a young person would be to defy that, so it’s important to be careful not to overstate the dangers of it. The theory at FIRE is that more speech, not enforced silence, is the best way to deal with what might be deemed bad speech. While I could argue that other things should occupy more curricular space, the wholesale banning of an idea typically can backfire.

I’ve actually worked with [an educational project launched by the nonprofit Woodson Center in 2020 what it described as the “dangerous and debilitating message” of the New York Times’s 1619 Project], which includes a lot of African American scholars, as they develop lesson plans around these topics. And I discovered in that process many gaps and deficiencies in my own education on topics such as these. I learned about the , which were some of the schools that Brown vs. Board of Education eventually decided were separate and inherently unequal. I’ve lived in South Carolina, and this was in plain sight, but it was just invisible to me because I grew up in a different part of the country and didn’t know anything about it.

I would love for kids to learn more about Native Americans in the curriculum, not to mention women. I’m a woman, and probably 95 percent of the U.S. history I’ve studied has been either written by or about men. That being said, it never really stopped me from looking for the common threads that are relatable to me. There are lots of stories about people, or by people, who look different from us, but we all want to see ourselves reflected to some extent in what we learn. That’s completely understandable.

Going back to your book, could you describe the problem you address? You refer to it as “thought reform.” In your view, how prevalent is it in K-12 schools, as opposed to university settings, where FIRE is most active?

I would describe it as teachers exceeding the boundaries of their prescribed role in the classroom and commandeering the classroom for personal or partisan ends. When we’re talking about public schools, they’re a public good that’s paid for with tax dollars, so that really is a misuse of public funds.

I think this is much bigger than the current controversy. It’s not actually new; this problem has been with us for decades, and it’s been low-grade and chronic. But recently it’s become acute, like an underlying condition in your body that you’re able to ignore until you have some sort of sudden medical incident. It’s pretty well understood that this year, there was just a lot more transparency and ability for parents to see what’s going on in the classroom. And with all the cultural upheaval, some educators felt emboldened to do what they’d been inclined to do anyway, and what they’ve been doing in classrooms for quite some time.

As to how much of this is going on, I think it varies from district to district, school to school, and classroom to classroom. It’s partly a function of location and partly one of demographics. At FIRE, we’ve seen a lot of anecdotal evidence that the problem is most acute in affluent areas and private schools, and seems more common in cities than in rural areas. Certainly I’ve mentioned this problem to people in a few places, and they didn’t even know what I was talking about.

I suspect that it is increasing because of the retirement of Baby Boomers, who were themselves educated by teachers from older generations with more traditional ways of instruction. I was educated by people who were probably trained in the ’50s. So you have to think not just of the age of the educator, but the age of the educator who educated them! It seems like the younger teachers coming out of ed schools are much more activist-minded, so I think this problem is increasing rapidly.

​​You’re arguing that a big pedagogical change has occurred over the last few generations, as older teachers have been replaced by younger, more radical ones. Isn’t it possible that the movement toward “anti-racist” pedagogy is driven by a much broader change in racial attitudes among whites along with a desire by younger, more diverse Americans to see themselves more reflected in schools and classroom materials?

There are some demographic changes that are driving this. One would probably be the decreasing number of white people in the population, but there’s also this who were born in the ’40s and ’50s. So it’s a confluence of demographic forces. I think the Baby Boomers have tended to portray themselves as being radical, but having been taught by prior generations, their education very much was not. That said, the Baby Boomers had a big hand in educating this generation, so maybe their radicalism is now showing through somewhat.

Historically, whenever there is a large group of young people, you tend to see big movements form. What we have now is a Baby Boom-let, the Millennials, who are their own bubble in the population. In the same way that Baby Boomers created something more than a ripple, partly because of their huge numbers, I think part of what we’re seeing now is a large generation that is of an age where people tend to be inclined to upend the existing order and make dramatic changes. It’s a stage that people pass through as they mature. In that sense, it’s not surprising, and it’s probably a factor in the appeal that these ideologies hold with such a large group of young people.

Where do you think these intellectual trends came from, particularly in K-12? For most of our history, it seems like public schools promoted a view of American history and society that was essentially patriotic, if not chauvinistic — certainly not one that questioned existing power structures.

FIRE where we talked about how common schools in America were established by the government to promote government speech and ensure domestic tranquility. It’s not surprising that they would teach a view that promotes cohesion and patriotic ideas.

So there is a dominant position on American history that is open to interrogation, and I certainly would never want to interfere with a student’s right to critique it or with exposing kids to a reasonable amount of competing views; that’s part of what a thorough education provides. But when the critique seeks to become the dominant narrative, it’s giving kids a pre-digested conclusion and asking them to retrofit all the information they haven’t yet been given to this preconceived conclusion.

I’d also say that this critique seeks to suppress competing narratives and disallow dissent, which short-changes kids’ education and, really, trains them not to question authority. I just think this isn’t a healthy learning environment, and it doesn’t let kids develop the intellectual muscles they need to prepare them for self-government.

FIRE often defends the rights of university professors who say they’re being censored by their institutions. You’re not part of the legal team, but can you see a role for FIRE, or other organizations like it, in coming to the aid of teachers who are disciplined under laws restricting discussions of divisive concepts in K-12 classrooms?

We have people who ask FIRE to jump into the K-12 legal realm all the time, and I’d say it’s something that is under consideration. Teachers have the unions, which will obviously help to defend them. My understanding is that [leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association] have come out to say that they will defend teachers who teach CRT.

I would say that parents have rights, and students have rights, but teachers have responsibilities. That’s why they’re paid. Teachers’ speech in the classroom is hired speech, and it’s really government speech; the government is hiring you to deliver a curriculum that’s democratically adopted by districts, in accordance with state legislatures. So I think that teachers have to realize that their instruction needs to be aligned with the learning standards that their state has adopted.

Anything you’re teaching, you should be able to relate it to the published learning standards for the grade and subject that you’re teaching. You don’t want to present a conclusion to students and work backwards from that because these are open-ended questions that we’re trying to figure out as a society. Critical race theory is a lens through which to view the world, but it’s not the only one. If I were going to talk about it, I would always want to present it in the context of competing versions of how to interpret historical and current events.

I want to pose another argument I’ve seen, even from those who are probably sympathetic to your views: There may be some teachers mixing ideology into their history or social studies lessons, but the fundamental issue is that too many kids just don’t reach proficiency in those disciplines at all, according to year after year of standardized test results. Given that the overall academic performance is so poor, shouldn’t we be more concerned about just providing kids with basic knowledge?

Yeah, it’s kind of amazing that teachers have time to be discussing these esoteric, advanced perspectives. I just don’t consider most of it to be introductory, it’s more in the realm of a late-night graduate study session. It’s not a good way to introduce students to basic material, so it really serves teachers’ needs more than students.

One of the problems we’re seeing is that teachers are covering content that is of interest to them but isn’t necessarily what their students need, and that’s poor pedagogical practice. The teacher is paid to meet the needs of the students, and the learning outcomes we’re seeing show that these ideological itches that are being scratched are not serving students in the classroom well.

I also think that the way these ideologies are being expressed in the classroom is being perceived by students and parents as abrasive and, in some cases, tantamount to bullying. As Maya Angelou said, “People forget what you said, but they remember how you made them feel,” and I suspect that a lot of students don’t feel good about what’s going on in their classrooms. Kids are not a means to anyone’s end, they’re ends in themselves; their compulsory presence in your classroom is not to serve some partisan goal that you cherish. The word education means “to draw out” — to draw from the student what is inside of them. Each one is a unique, autonomous being, and you’re there to find out what they are capable of, not to enact your worldview.

Parents are mobilizing around this issue. There have definitely been some heated school board meetings this year, and state lawmakers seem happy to make this a campaign issue, but do you think it’ll go further than that?

Parents are certainly coming forward, and they’ve obviously had a great impetus to want to come forward: These are their children, and nothing’s nearer to their hearts.

I’ve been following this problem as a sort of unpleasant hobby for over a decade. Going back years, I’ve heard anecdotally about incidents all over the place, though I’ve focused on the ones that appear in the press. But for a long time, the strategy has mostly been to say, “It’s just a few more years, I’ll get my kid through and fly under the radar.” But it’s suddenly become very acute, so parents are speaking up — some would say too much, though I happen to think that we’ve been complacent too long, and people should have always been more involved with their school boards. Some of them are being too aggressive, but I do get it. They feel like their children are being targeted.

I think I’m optimistic at this point, mostly because I see parents asserting themselves. It doesn’t mean they’re right about everything they say, but it’s good that everyone is in the conversation and the checks and balances are operating as they should. Parents have been way too uninvolved, handing everything off to the teachers, and now they realize they’re going to have to pay closer attention to what’s going on in school board meetings.

If you’re ambivalent about the laws being passed in legislatures around divisive concepts, what do you think education authorities should be doing to address the concerns of parents? One of the avenues I’ve usually heard discussed involves changes to teacher preparation programs.��

FIRE has previously when it came to [the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education] trying to impose “social justice dispositions” on educators — meaning that you’d have to believe in certain political ideas in order to be certified as a teacher. We fought back on that because of the aspects of thought reform, and we won. [Editor’s note: In 2006, following protests from FIRE and other groups, NCATE — formerly a leading accreditor of teacher education programs, and since reorganized as the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation — referring to “social justice” in its glossary of recommended dispositions for future teachers.]

Definitely, we recognize that the best way to change this is in the ed schools. It’s going to be a tough climb, but it’s necessary at this point. Teachers are licensed for the same reason that doctors and dentists are licensed: They’re in a position to do real harm to vulnerable people, and no one in our society is more vulnerable than children. States have all the power they need to award or withhold licensure, and I think they’re going to have to apply more oversight.

One of the recurring questions in this book is, “Where’s the oversight?” Department chairs and principals and curriculum directors should be applying more consistency throughout schools. The subtext needs to be that this isn’t a free-for-all; you can’t have one teacher who’s a freewheeling zealot doing whatever they feel while the rest of the classes are teaching to the end-of-year tests. That’s just a failure of administration.

Any time you have a one-party monoculture, things go awry. Things have definitely gone awry, and we’re overdue for a correction in our ed schools.

The thing is that teacher prep programs are themselves downstream of the larger intellectual culture. In the book, you talk about a need for a return to “normative social agreements” — basically, ideological restraint and respect for diversity in thought from all people, not just educators. It seems like it will be a lot harder to develop those traits than to just pass a law saying what teachers can and can’t say.

I actually think it’s kind of easy to legislate how contentious issues should be handled, which is that they should be approached from a variety of angles, leaving room for dissent. There are some things on which I think we’ve achieved cultural consensus — for example, that we were the good guys in World War II. I suppose somebody could advance a counter-narrative, though I wouldn’t give a lot of class time to that because I think we have a near-unanimous consensus. But when it comes to current issues under debate, you have to show some epistemic humility and leave room for the possibility that you might be wrong.

When you have this unscholarly certainty that you’re in possession of the absolute truth, that’s where you’re likely to get in trouble, because it’s a very un-academic stance for an educator to take. It’s that old John Stuart Mill idea, “He who knows only his side of the case knows little of that”: You have to give the devil his due.

Across the country each year, thousands of teaching candidates get ready to begin their classroom careers. They finish up their graduate coursework, start scanning excitedly for job openings — and then fail their states’ teacher licensure exams. Dejected and daunted by the prospect of retaking the test, many never become teachers.

It’s a distressing pattern that has been documented for years and increasingly draws the focus of policymakers attempting to diversify the profession. As more experts point to the improved academic performance of students who are assigned to even one instructor of the same racial or ethnic background, some advocates have called for states to modify, or , their licensure tests, which are more likely to be a stumbling block to African American and Hispanic candidates.

by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a reform-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C., puts the issue in perspective. Data gathered from 38 states and the District of Columbia show that a huge portion of prospective elementary school teachers don’t pass their licensing exam on the first try. Of those that fail, non-white teachers are much less likely to re-take the test than their white classmates. And within states, students at different institutions faced radically different odds of ultimately securing a teaching credential. The conclusions will lead many to wonder whether novice educators are receiving enough training before being hired, and what can be done to assist those who weren’t adequately prepared.

NCTQ president Kate Walsh, a longtime and often critical observer of teacher prep programs, said in an interview that while the results were themselves “terrible,” a more pressing concern was the sheer difficulty of obtaining the evidence. State authorities should be active in publicizing that information, she argued, but many don’t even bother to collect it, and even federal efforts to investigate these questions have been “mired in confusion.”

“What’s interesting to me is that states didn’t have this data,” Walsh said. “We thought they did, but almost all states said that this was the first time they’d ever seen this data.”

The national findings, encompassing program-level exam results between 2015 and 2018, demonstrate clearly that large numbers of graduate students struggle to reach the finish line and become licensed teachers. Across all states that provided data, the average “best-attempt” rate for prep programs — the rate at which test-takers ever pass the test, whether or not they fail on their first try — is 83 percent, meaning that roughly one in six don’t realize their ambitions. And certain programs do much better than others: The average gap between the highest-performing and lowest-performing institutions in each state was 44 percentage points.

What’s more, 29 percent of all prep programs reported that less than half of their teaching students passed the licensing exam on their first try. Six states (Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia) were home to at least one program in which no teaching candidate did so.

Florida, which the fourth-most teachers of any state, offers a revealing example. In the three years studied, two different teacher prep institutions saw no teaching candidates pass the Florida Teacher Certification Examinations their first time, though both are tiny programs serving roughly a dozen students between them. Many others — including Florida International University, Florida Gulf Coast University, University of North Florida, and University of Central Florida — reported first-time pass rates of 41 percent or less. All of those schools, which collectively produced over 2,300 test-takers, were rated by NCTQ as among the most selective in the state.

At the same time, a huge number of Florida’s prospective teachers who failed their licensure tests the first time go on to pass in later attempts, likely with the support and encouragement of their prep programs. And a substantial number of programs enrolling large numbers of low-income students (measured via their eligibility to receive Pell grants) report higher first-time pass rates than the average across the state.

Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who directs the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), called the data “compelling,” adding that researchers might fruitfully study which institutions are able to work best with teaching candidates who initially stumble with the exam.

The findings “begin to open up the teacher preparation black box a little bit and point to where we should be looking for different supports, curricula, interventions that seem to be able to help teacher candidates while they are in teacher preparation,” Goldhaber said.

Dodging the ‘heat’ of publication

In order to reach their findings, NCTQ first had to receive the data from states. A 2019 study, using national results for the commonly used Praxis exam that were provided by the testing vendor ETS, offered somewhat similar findings, but did not delve into differences by state or institution.

Acquiring results at that more granular level was much harder, Walsh said, because some local authorities “didn’t want the heat of being the ones to publish this data.” In all, seven states did not provide timely data on licensure exam performance, and eight provided only partial data. Of the states that did share their data with NCTQ, some had to be subjected to public records requests.

Meagan Comb, director of the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University and a one-time NCTQ fellow, said she wasn’t particularly surprised at the challenges posed by a third-party examination of test results. In a two-year stint as the director of educator effectiveness at Massachusetts’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Comb oversaw the state’s policy on both teacher preparation and licensure. She recalled that many in the state — considered a national leader in the collection and dissemination of education data — had ached for more information because “it was really hard to know how our pass rates compared with other states.” This often included program heads themselves, who didn’t always have a clear picture of which student groups were struggling or what aspects of the test gave them trouble.

“This report shows that you have to invest in data infrastructure,” Comb Said. There are a lot of states that can’t even link their teacher workforce with their teacher prep candidates, or there’s a state statute prohibiting them from looking at the efficacy of their teacher candidates. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in states across the country to think a lot about the data infrastructure they provide to teacher preparation programs for continuous improvement.”

Goldhaber noted that bottlenecks on data can arise in different areas. While some state education departments are “more inquisitive than others,” he acknowledged, schools of education would often prefer that low pass rates float under the radar.

“I think that, sometimes, the politics are really hard,” he said. “You have important political constituencies — deans, and everything they bring — who sometimes don’t want these data to be out there.”

Lack of transparency can be damaging not only to state authorities, and prep programs themselves, but also to prospective graduate students, some of whom will enroll unwittingly in a teacher prep program where they stand a significant chance of not gaining a license. The risk of failure is especially great for teaching candidates of color, who are significantly less likely than white candidates to retake the exam if they fail. The stress and expenses associated with the test, often amounting to hundreds of dollars in fees or preparation materials, can act as a roadblock to attracting more diverse teachers.

Walsh said that on grounds of consumer protection alone, that had to change.

“The whole point is, you’re supposed to be preparing candidates for licensure. And nobody points out to the kids going into these programs, ‘Your chances of getting a license at this institution are nil.’ So they take their money, take their time, and that’s it.”

Disclosure: The Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation provide financial support for both the National Council on Teacher Quality and ����Ӱ��.

Luckily, there’s a proven resource for helping students to learn and thrive: high-quality teachers. What characterizes a high-quality teacher workforce? Among the many sets of knowledge and skills that great educators possess, a teacher workforce that benefits all students is both racially diverse and academically selective.

has made it clear that a diverse teacher workforce benefits all students, but it has a profound impact on Black students when they see teachers who look like them. This research has found that having same-race teachers increases academic achievement, improves the likelihood of graduating high school and attending college, and can lead to lifelong benefits for students of color. In a public school system where students of color are now the majority and yet fewer than 25 percent of teachers identify as people of color, increasing diversity is a crucial step to improving student outcomes.

Research also shows that than those who were not. Greater selectivity in admissions to teacher preparation programs provides students with access to the highest-quality educators, helps to raise the status of the profession and supports the push for higher salaries.

Unfortunately, the twin goals of increasing racial diversity and academic selectivity for the teaching profession have , despite . Now, from the National Council on Teacher Quality .

NCTQ looked at how more than 1,200 prep programs contribute to teacher diversity in their communities by comparing the racial diversity of their enrollment to the current diversity of their state teacher workforce, as well as the community population in which the program is located. Programs enrolling cohorts of future teachers that match or exceed the diversity of their current state teacher workforce and/or the diversity of their local community population were considered to be contributing to greater teacher diversity. (See the full methodology and scoring rubric .)

We also looked at the selectivity of program admissions. There are multiple ways for teacher preparation programs to earn high scores on NCTQ’s measure of academic selectivity, including through minimum grade-point average requirements, average cohort GPA, cohort SAT/ACT scores, minimum SAT/ACT scores, GRE/MAT scores, teaching audition requirements and Barron’s selectivity ratings. (See the full methodology and scoring rubric .)

What we found is that racial diversity in program enrollment and academic selectivity in admissions are not mutually exclusive. Nearly three times as many programs in the sample succeed in being both diverse and selective than are neither (15.8 percent versus 5.6 percent).

In fact, of the 420 programs that contribute to greater teacher diversity in their communities, nearly half () are doing so while ensuring that, at a minimum, most of their admitted cohort comes from the top half of the collegegoing population — proving that teacher prep programs don’t need to lower standards to achieve greater diversity. Our interactive tool () shows how programs scored in these two areas.

Along with the release of these data, several of the teacher preparation in maintaining high academic standards and enrolling racially diverse cohorts of future teachers shared their strategies and recommendations for recruiting and supporting teacher candidates of color. Here are some of their key recommendations:

• Recognize that higher academic standards are likely to make a teaching major more attractive to many college students, including students of color.
• Set ambitious goals around recruiting diverse teacher candidates.
• Establish partnerships with racially diverse school districts interested in operating “grow your own” programs and with local community colleges.
• Offer grants, scholarships or other financial support aimed at encouraging enrollment in teacher preparation programs or to ensure persistence through graduation.
• Establish mentorship programs for teacher candidates of color.
• Support affinity groups or clubs for teacher candidates of color and others interested in pursuing a career in education.

Students need high-quality teachers more than ever, and it is up to all of us — education advocates, federal, state and district policymakers and teacher preparation leaders — to make increasing both teacher diversity and selectivity a national priority.

Kate Walsh is president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.