A Closer Look at Minnesota GYO Programs: Local Work

The following three programs, two in the Twin Cities region and one in the southwest corner of the state, demonstrate how drastically different GYO approaches can be. Program organization and structure depends on available resources, the challenges faced by teaching residents, and the strength of the partnerships between district(s) and postsecondary institution(s). But all three are driven by a common goal: diversifying the teacher workforce.

The Saint Paul Public Schools Urban Teacher Residency Program (SUTR) is a partnership between the University of St. Thomas and Saint Paul Public Schools (SPPS). While the program is not exclusively for SPPS paraprofessionals, the program gives heavy admission preference to SPPS employees. To be eligible, an individual must have a bachelor's degree from an accredited institution and must commit to teach for a minimum of three years in SPPS after successful completion of the program.¹ At 15 months long, the program is a full teacher residency, with coursework over two summers, as well as on Mondays during the fall semester and Fridays during the spring. The other four days, residents work under the guidance of a trained mentor teacher. Once candidates complete the program, they earn a master’s in education and, upon successful passing the Minnesota Teaching Licensure Examinations (MTLEs), a Tier 3 teaching license.² Graduates have earned licenses in elementary education and special education. Between 25 and 30 residents are in each cohort, with the program currently finalizing its sixth cohort.

SUTR traces its roots to the Twin Cities Teaching Collaborative (TC2) in 2010, a collective of six Twin Cities colleges and universities working together to improve teacher preparation.³ While the partnership did not formalize a region-wide GYO program, it did help SPPS build relationships with universities in the region. When SPPS won a $150,000 teacher residency planning grant from the Bush Foundation in 2014, it chose to partner with St. Thomas.⁴ Guided by the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR), SPPS and St. Thomas developed a program model and received a three-year, $3 million grant⁵ in December 2015. SUTR established additional funding streams from federal and local sources and continued support from NCTR to help sustain the program, including significant matching funds from SPPS.⁶

In the most recent fiscal year, SUTR had a combined $1.5 million in funding from multiple sources, including a federal Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP) grant, NCTR grant, and school district partnerships.⁷ The money allows SUTR to provide substantial supports for its residents: each resident receives a $26,000 stipend, health and dental insurance, and $1,000 in books for their courses. The TQP grant funds a full-time recruiter, a data analyst, and one elementary and one special education specialist. Navigating pairs, affinity groups, and mentor stipends are also funded by NCTR’s Black Educators Initiative. St. Thomas also provides in-kind contributions, reducing tuition for students (residents pay $21,000, less than traditional tuition), giving students merit-based scholarships, and supporting a .5 full-time equivalent SUTR coordinator, as well as other faculty and staff that work with SUTR students.⁸ Residents are required to pay back a portion of their stipend if they do not complete their three-year teaching obligation.⁹

SUTR developed its approach as a response to the challenges faced by paraprofessionals and other non-traditional candidates in three core areas: recruitment, training, and retention. Housed within SPPS’s human resources department, the full-time recruiter is tasked with finding a representative cohort of educators annually to reflect SPPS’s student diversity. She does not just “sell” the SUTR package, but also builds relationships with potential candidates and helps make the program manageable. For example, she looks for additional scholarships. The stipend and benefits are essential for recruitment (and persistence through training), as it is very difficult for candidates to work an additional job while enrolled in the program. During training, technical assistance from the NCTR assists SUTR in assessing and improving its program. Significant investment in staff, and support days in the program calendar, are direct responses to struggles balancing challenging coursework with other responsibilities. As one example, residents pursuing special education licensure get one day a month with their mentor teacher to focus on completing state-required paperwork.

Most recently, SUTR built retention supports for graduates after program completion, providing newly licensed teachers with induction resources and a mentor. It found that while candidates may be equipped to teach after graduation, significant learning curves still exist. The special education license, for example, is generalized to grades K–12, so new educators may need more grade-specific guidance. SUTR’s BIPOC educators often benefit from support navigating their new environments as they enter schools where the majority of educators and staff are white.¹⁰

Relationships with SPPS officials and schools lead to high rates of graduate placement in schools, where the starting salary hovers around $52,000 for new teachers with a master’s degree. And SUTR residents persist at higher rates. Eighty-six residents from cohorts one through four were hired by SPPS through the 2020 school year. Ninety-three percent of SUTR’s graduates in cohorts one through four were retained after one year, 83 percent in cohorts one through three were retained after two years, and 64 percent in cohorts one and two were still teaching in SPPS after three years.¹¹

While SUTR has yet to reach its goal of 80 percent candidates of color (to reflect SPPS’s similar 79 percent BIPOC students), SUTR’s first five cohorts were between 54 and 64 percent BIPOC,¹² compared to the 20 percent of licensed teachers of color at SPPS. Available data indicate that 100 percent of graduates in cohort one were hired, as were 86 percent of graduates in cohort two.¹³ These numbers are a marked improvement over SPPS norms, and SUTR hopes that they can be a model for broader SPPS approaches to recruit, train, and retain a teacher workforce that is more reflective of its student demographics.

The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities’ (UMTC) Grow Your Own Teachers (MNGOT) program traces its roots to the Minneapolis Residency Program (MRP). Formed in 2015, the MRP was a partnership between the UMTC and Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS), focusing on recruiting non-licensed MPS employees to increase the diversity of the district’s educators.¹⁴ Available to any staff member with a bachelor's degree, three cohorts of residents from MPS have completed their 15-month residency and a 30-credit, three-semester pathway to a full license and master's degree.¹⁵ The program started strong (the first cohort was 75 percent BIPOC), and was well supported by district, state, and philanthropic funding. The MRP was funded by a commitment from MPS, a seed investment from Minnesota Comeback (a Minnesota organization investing in programs improving the state’s K–12 education system), and, as one of the two original programs eligible for state grant funds, $750,000 from the Minnesota Grow Your Own Grant.¹⁶ Of the 47 MRP graduates whose employment records were found, 43 are still at MPS (37 in teaching roles), with four more graduates in teaching roles in other districts.¹⁷

The program transitioned from the Minneapolis Residency Program in 2017 to MNGOT in 2018 due to a lack of available funding from MPS and limited teaching placements for program graduates.¹⁸ State funding was also reduced, due to increased demand for grant funding from other school districts.

MNGOT launched using the existing MRP framework and curriculum with some modifications. Now the program is two years in duration, rather than three semesters, and is for non-licensed district employees with bachelor’s degrees. Successful completion leads to a license in secondary sciences, K–6 elementary, and, as of the fall 2022 cohort, K–12 ESL.¹⁹ Any school district with at least 30 percent BIPOC students is eligible to participate.

Limited grant and district funding means that the program operates at cost. MNGOT does not receive federal funding. Its state funding is limited to money granted to districts that include MNGOT as a partner and, most recently, a $56,000 Collaborative Urban and Greater Minnesota Educators of Color (CUGMEC) Grant for FY 2021.²⁰ In lieu of tuition, candidates pay a fee of $10,800 a year, or $21,600 in total. Like other programs, stress, time, and money are significant barriers for residents.

MNGOT’s program leadership and staff are proactive about helping reduce these obstacles. First, MNGOT is relentless in gaining additional funds for its residents, working with each one to help them find private donations and grants to cover their fees. It relies in part on individual private donations from individuals and family foundations to the university for specific candidates. For example, Laura Mogelson, director of the Multiple Pathways to Teaching Office at UMTC, described how MNGOT staff cobbled together seven different sources of aid for one resident. The program is designed to be job-embedded so that candidates continue to be employed full time by their districts as paraprofessionals. Coursework is Tuesday evenings and every other Saturday, rather than during the school day, and over two years rather than three semesters.²¹ Residents hail from nine districts in the area.

The district with by far the largest cohort is Anoka-Hennepin Schools (AHS), north of the Twin Cities. The partnership between Anoka and MNGOT is fruitful, and instructive, for several reasons. First, Anoka has a designated recruitment and retention specialist—Julie Phillips—who serves as the primary recruiter for Anoka MNGOT candidates, visiting schools, promoting the program, and leveraging relationships with district principals to identify paraprofessionals that could be a good fit.²² Anoka is alone among the partner districts in helping fund its candidates, with the help of grants from state and local sources.²³ Starting with four candidates in the first cohort, AHS staff now account for 18 of the 30 teacher candidates in the 2020-2022 MNGOT cohort.²⁴ Most significantly, the Anoka and MNGOT teams work together. As Phillips observed, “communication is probably the biggest part of that partnership.” The team at UMTC have been “instrumental in helping us write our grant proposal to solidify our program,” she said, adding, “at the end of the year as we write our summary…and our report on how the year went, we do that together. It’s a conversation and it's a collaboration.”²⁵

By contrast, MNGOT Program Administrator Jennifer Clifden noted that maintaining communication and consistency among the program contacts can be a challenge due to staff turnover in some of their partner school districts. ²⁶ These partnerships are all the more important because MNGOT educators keep their full-time roles as paraprofessionals. Districts and principals must be willing and able to coordinate with MNGOT to ensure that participants are meeting the expectations for their full-time positions and their teacher residency.

For the first cohort (2018–20), 17 of the 18 candidates (23.5 percent BIPOC) from 10 districts completed the program, 13 of whom are now employed as fully licensed teachers. In the 2019–21 cohort, 21 of the 23 candidates (56.5 percent BIPOC) from nine districts are on track for completion. All 30 residents from the 2020–2022 cohort (36.6 percent BIPOC) are currently on track, half of whom are preparing for K–12 ESL.²⁷ Including MRP from 2015–17, UMTC GYO programs have averaged more than 50 percent BIPOC.²⁸

The Southwest Teacher Preparation Program (SWTPP) is a partnership between Minnesota West Community and Technical College (MNWest), Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU), and Worthington Public Schools. Worthington is a rural school district in southern Minnesota that also happens to be one of the most diverse in the state, with 78.7 percent of its students being students of color and 36.8 percent being classified as English learners.²⁹ The district’s licensed educators are far less diverse (by one count, 97 percent white³⁰) than the student body, and Worthington faces the already-difficult challenge of recruiting and retaining educators in a predominantly rural community.

Rather than take a deficit-minded approach, the SWTPP looked at its diverse paraprofessional staff as a candidate pool with experiences in the schools that reflected the experiences of its students. Recognizing the opportunity, it worked backwards, identifying the obstacles that hindered paraprofessionals from gaining full-time teaching licenses. Many of their paraprofessionals only have their associate degrees, so SWTPP built a program where that was the baseline credential necessary to begin. SWTPP cohort residents start their coursework at MNWest in Worthington to complete any prerequisites, before transferring to SMSU. But Worthington educators do not have to drive the more than 60 miles to SMSU. Instead, the SWTPP partnership arranged a SMSU satellite campus at MNWest. Candidates can also remotely attend SMSU.³¹

Because paraprofessionals cannot afford to stop working to be full-time students or student teachers, the SWTPP applied for a waiver from the state that let its residents teach half-time, year-long (rather than the state-required full-time over at least 12 weeks), and over two years. Worthington Public Schools also committed resources to the program, allowing paraprofessionals to retain their paid positions with the necessary flexibility to complete their residency hours. Upon program completion, residents receive their elementary education license (with the option to also pursue licensure in ESL and/or K–12 reading), and are guaranteed a job interview at a Worthington school. The partnership leans heavily on Worthington principals, through the region’s principals’ association, to identify and recruit paraprofessionals that they believe would be a good fit for the program.³²

SWTPP has four other non-traditional pathways to teaching, illustrating the many situations that individuals may approach pursuing the profession: for current MNWest students, for candidates with a prior bachelor’s degree/Tier 1 teaching license, for community members interested in becoming teachers, and for high school students.³³ The program will have its first cohort this coming fall.³⁴ Currently, the SWTPP does not access state or federal money, instead using grants from the McKnight Foundation and Southwest Initiative Foundation (SWIF) to help pay scholarships and grants for candidates. SWTPP and Worthington also fund stipends for mentor teachers who work with educators their first three years in the classroom to promote retention of BIPOC educators.

Similarly funded by SWIF and the McKnight Foundation, high school students in the secondary pathway take an introduction to education course at MNWest. Taught by a local high school teacher, students get exposure to the teaching profession and a 15-hour teaching lab where they student-teach in a Worthington school.³⁵ Concurrent enrollment agreements with MNWest give students three college credits that can apply to an associate degree at MNWest, which easily rolls into credit toward a teaching degree at SMSU. Students may also take a concurrent enrollment “Technology in Education” course, receiving two MNWest credits upon successful completion.³⁶ Students are recruited locally, with the course’s high school teacher leading recruitment efforts.

More broadly, SMSU has offered concurrent enrollment courses in Introduction to Education and Introduction to Child Growth and Development since 2018. Focusing on GYO in Minnesota rural schools, SMSU awarded 1506 credits to 502 students across 26 public schools through fall 2020.³⁷ High school educators teach the course, while a SMSU professor supports the program and serves as the faculty of record. Thirteen former concurrent enrollment students are now enrolled in education programs at SMSU, and while SMSU does not track students at other universities, it is estimated that the large majority of students who have enrolled in college since are pursuing careers in education.³⁸

In addition to SWTPP, which primarily focuses on elementary education licenses, SMSU has two other programs for paraprofessionals pursuing teaching licensure, one for special education and another for ESL. The special education program was SMSU’s first foray into paraprofessional pathways, initially funded by a $385,000 state grant eight years ago, which paid faculty until program tuition could cover costs approximately two years later. Every candidate in the special education program has passed the requisite MTLEs, and all but three have met state edTPA³⁹ requirements, a success rate that SMSU attributes to the quality and experience of its paraprofessionals. Starting in fall 2021, paraprofessionals may also pursue an ESL license (for which SWTPP got a similar state waiver).