Accessible prep programs increase due to teacher shortage

A rapidly expanding series of teacher training programs are being set up to recruit and retain more teachers. These programs include internships, residencies and other fellowships. They are intended to fill the gap in the number of teacher vacancies in the country, which has more than tripled since 2010.

That void exists in part because the supply of new teachers dried up in the wake of the Great Recession, leading to national conversations about ballooning student debt and concerns that the cost of earning a degree in some fields, including teaching, isn’t worth the relatively low-paying career prospects. Between 2010 and 2021, enrollment in traditional teacher education programs fell 45 percent, according to a report released earlier this year by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE).

But the long decline that followed the 2008 recession now appears to be picking up again: Teacher education enrollment and completion rose 3 percent between the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, the most recent data available.

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“We don’t know yet whether that’s statistical noise or whether this is perhaps the beginning of a shift,” said Jaci King, research, policy and advocacy consultant for AACTE. “What we do know is that there has been a tremendous amount of work done to make teacher preparation programs more accessible to a broader range of students.”

Under a directive from President Biden, the Department of Labor has increased investments in addressing the teacher shortage over the past two years. More than $100 million in student grants have been provided to state and local initiatives that partner with higher education institutions and other nonprofits to ease the financial burden of teaching.

Between 2018 and 2023, the number of federally registered teacher education programs increased 247 percent, to 7,450, the DOL said. They support an “earn-while-you-learn” model that allows aspiring teachers — including paraprofessionals already employed by a school district — to get paid to work in classrooms under the supervision of a mentor while earning a teaching degree or credential at little or no cost.

“The idea is to both lower the financial barrier and expand the amount of clinical preparation,” King said, adding that such initiatives also aim to diversify the overwhelmingly white teaching force, which serves the nation’s increasingly racially diverse student population. “It’s not the traditional one semester or less of student teaching, which is almost always unpaid and poses a huge financial challenge for many students, because if you’re student teaching and going to school all day, it’s very difficult to have a paying job.”

‘Education is tailored to the working population’

Like apprenticeships, teacher residency programs offer an alternative path to becoming a teacher and have become especially popular among those looking for a career change.

Residencies combine coursework with long-term, intensive clinical training under an experienced classroom mentor. Unlike apprenticeships, however, salaries and other financial aid for resident faculty can vary. And such programs have historically offered people with a bachelor’s degree in another field a low-cost option for earning a master’s degree in teaching.

While teacher residency models have been in use for more than two decades, the number of programs has increased by 88 percent since 2020, according to the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR). During the 2023-2024 school year, 77 teacher residency programs in 26 states and the District of Columbia were covered by the NCTR.

“Residencies are where education meets the workforce,” said Kathlene Campbell, CEO of the NCTR. “The days of just learning theory and then putting it into practice are over. A residency brings both of those things together, so you’re learning about the content while also being in a classroom with kids and an experienced teacher helping you make those instructional decisions to help kids achieve academically.”

In exchange for tuition waivers, stipends, and other financial support, graduates of tenured teacher programs typically pledge to work for a specified number of years in a local school district, often at a school where there is a high need, after earning their full credential.

Retention is also important

Graduates who break that contract and leave their teaching job early must pay back the money they were paid. That financial incentive to stay, combined with the extra support teacher assistants receive, has proven to be a successful model for retention and training. Studies show that inadequate preparation not only leads to poorer student outcomes, but remains one of the factors that drives more than 44 percent of new teachers to leave the classroom within five years.

“If you know you’re more effective and feel better prepared to teach students, you’ll stay in the field longer,” Campbell said, adding that the vast majority of principals say residency graduates are more effective teachers than those who graduated through other paths.

According to the NCTR, of the approximately 9,000 cumulative graduates of teacher residencies, 78 percent return to the classroom for a third year. And data also shows that when a teacher survives the first few years of teaching, he or she is more likely to stay in the field long-term.

The Boston Teacher Residency, one of the oldest teacher training programs in the country, launched in the early 2000s and is an example of the long-term success teacher education programs can have in building a supply of teachers who reflect the diversity of the students they serve.

Half of the program’s 762 graduates over the past 21 years have been people of color, said Jesse Solomon, executive director of Boston Plan for Excellence, which runs BTR. And the job retention rate for BTR teachers is about 20 percent higher than for teachers in the district who graduated from other teacher preparation programs.

About 80 percent of BTR graduates were still teaching after three years, mostly in high-need subjects such as mathematics, multilingual education and special education. After five years, 68 percent were still in the classroom.

“Twenty years later, many of those people are not only teachers and teacher leaders, but principals and principals in the district,” Solomon said. “That’s powerful, both in terms of what it does for kids, but also professionally: They hire each other, they coach each other, they help each other develop.”

Financing of teacher training

Such results are the goal of the Arizona Teacher Residency, which launched in 2022 at Northern Arizona University to help alleviate what the state Department of Education described as “a critical teacher shortage.”

The average teacher in the Grand Canyon State earns about 33 percent less than other college-educated workers, and they teach classes that receive the second-lowest per-pupil allocation in the country. As a result of decades of disinvestment in public education, nearly 30 percent of teacher vacancies remained unfilled more than a month into the 2023-24 school year, according to a report from the Arizona Personnel Administrators Association.

Many of those positions are filled by frustrated beginning teachers, which is where the guidance and support of the Arizona Teacher Residency comes in. “We’re preventing that hemorrhage when teachers are most vulnerable to burnout,” says Victoria Theisen-Homer, the program’s founder. “Once we get them past the first few years, they’re much more likely to stay.”

The program was launched with a one-time $5 million federal grant from the pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund. It’s still relatively small, with about 20 preservice teachers in each of the first three cohorts, all of whom have agreed to teach in a Title I school for at least three years after completing their courses.

Although the original ESSER grant expires in September, the residency program has since diversified its funding streams with other grants, philanthropic support, and support from a much larger state-funded program called the Arizona Teachers Academy (ATA). That organization pays tuition for the dozens of students who have enrolled in the Arizona Teacher Residency Program, as well as hundreds of other aspiring teachers across the state.

The ATA, which was passed by the state in 2017, eliminates tuition for students at Arizona universities and community colleges pursuing a teaching degree, provided they agree to teach at a local school for the same number of years after graduation as the number of years they received support for their education.

The ATA’s support is “critical” to sustaining and expanding the teacher residency program at NAU, Theisen-Homer said. But it’s far from clear whether lawmakers will continue to invest in it.

Though the ATA began as an unfunded legislative mandate, it received $15 million from the state’s general fund in 2020. The following year, it received $15 million, plus $6 million in federal pandemic relief and a one-time $15 million from the state’s medical marijuana fund. Last year, the state appropriated $30 million in general fund money for the program.

All that extra investment has enabled the teacher academy to scale. Between the 2018-19 and 2022-23 academic years, ATA enrollment increased from 479 to 3,255 students, according to a report from the Arizona Board of Regents; more than 900 students completed the program last year.

Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, said the investment in the ATA has had a “significant impact on building a pipeline and helping close the teacher shortage gap.” This time last year, her district had 140 teacher vacancies, compared to 80 this past July. “This is the first time we’ve put significant resources into closing the gap (of the teacher shortage) and building that pipeline.”

But the teacher education program’s momentum is in danger of slowing. Facing a $1.4 billion budget deficit—largely caused by the state’s $332 million in private school vouchers—the Arizona Legislature slashed the ATA’s budget in half to $16 million for fiscal year 2025.

That funding cut “will likely impact both our new enrollment numbers and our retention rates,” said Carole Basile, dean of the Arizona State University Department of Education, in an email.

And the result of fewer well-prepared teachers entering the profession — in Arizona and elsewhere — is a widening gap in student achievement, said Linda Darling-Hammond, president and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute.

“When we have shortages, we hire people who are not trained to teach. They are less effective, they are usually assigned to students with the greatest needs, and they leave more quickly,” she said. “We create this problem by the way we manage the teaching profession.”

But if new teachers have had high-quality preparation, such as through a teacher residency or apprenticeship program, she says, “it gives them a flying start, which in turn helps them stay.”