Policy Recommendations to Strengthen Pathways into Teaching

The P–20 partnerships that we studied recognize the difficulty that Latinx students—particularly first-generation, low-income students—experience in navigating and succeeding in higher education and see the value in helping them stay on a path to attain their degree and enter the teaching profession. However, ensuring a strong system of recruitment and preparation for Latinx teachers requires policy support at the federal, state, and local levels. We recommend five areas in which to bolster this support:

1) Invest and incentivize P–20 partnerships through new and current funding streams

Because of the importance of partnerships between educator preparation programs and other entities in developing a pathway for prospective Latinx teachers, we encourage the federal government to continue to fund residency programs through its Teacher Quality Partnership grants program.¹

The federal government should also continue to invest in Hispanic-Serving Institutions and other minority-serving institutions that graduate a large number of Latinx students and teachers, and continue to use grants that encourage and support collaboration between two- and four-year colleges to promote completion and successful transfer. Federal grants such as the Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program in the Higher Education Act can be used to fund programs like the Latino-Teacher Academy Learning Community in San Antonio that support pathways into teaching for Latinx students.

Any P–20 partnership grant should also encourage the use of strategies that attract and retain Latinx candidates such as early recruitment initiatives, intensive mentoring, and cohort models that facilitate relationship building among peers, support with academic preparation, and navigation of university structures and bureaucracy.

2) Expand high-quality, community-based teacher pathways

States should invest in high-quality Grow Your Own (GYO) programs at the state and local level that support individuals in attaining a degree and teacher certification and that are grounded in research to support Latinx students. In a time of increasing teacher shortages, GYO partnerships give policymakers an opportunity to invest in recruiting and preparing a diverse set of educators from local communities who are likely to stay and teach in those communities, while also providing students the chance to pursue a teaching degree without going somewhere else.² The federal government can also help encourage these types of partnerships by expanding the Teacher Quality Partnership grant to include GYO Programs.³

In March 2019, New America released a set of essential policies and practices to help guide states and school districts in their efforts to develop high-quality GYO programs,⁴ a core component of which is that bachelor degree programs are geographically accessible to teacher candidates.⁵ In rural areas, though, this will be difficult to accomplish except with the use of online and hybrid course offerings, which are less well-suited to the collaborative, human-centered profession of teaching. One way that states and institutions can provide four-year degree granting opportunities to students in their local communities, while stepping up efforts to diversify the teaching workforce, is through approving applied baccalaureate (AB) programs in education.⁶ The AB allows community and technical colleges to offer four-year degree programs that support working and non-traditional students.⁷ Community colleges are essential to Latinx student attainment, as these institutions typically come with lower price tags, proximity to home, and flexible or open admissions policies.⁸ For states, this type of policy change can mean meeting workforce demands and increasing baccalaureate degree attainment while being more responsive to working adults.⁹ Almost half of states have community colleges that confer baccalaureate degrees,¹⁰ which can build on a two-year associate degree, an especially useful feature for professionals currently working in schools but not fully certified to teach, such as paraprofessionals.¹¹

3) Provide financial support to students

States are implementing financial support programs—such as loan forgiveness and relocation incentives—to recruit teachers for high-need subject areas and to diversify their workforce. Expanding access to these types of support for prospective Latinx teachers could help recruit and retain individuals, particularly from low-income families, if the financial benefit substantially offsets the cost of preparation.¹² For example, states could follow the model of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows grant, a competitive program that provides forgivable loans to students with up to $4,125 per semester for up to four years in exchange for teaching special education or a STEM field in the state’s public schools.¹³ Loans are forgiven for every year the recipient serves as a teacher (i.e., one year of a loan is forgiven for one year of teaching).¹⁴ A study of the program found that more than 90 percent of fellows returned for a third year of teaching, and 75 percent returned for a fifth year.¹⁵ If states do adopt these types of money-in-return-for-service “grants”, policymakers should be clear with students that the program is in fact a loan, and not a grant, as this type of labeling can be confusing and misleading to students. However, because of loan aversion among the Latinx population, initial uptake of these kinds of programs may be limited without loan education and counseling.

4) Collect and align data that will facilitate program improvement

Pathway programs connecting high school students to postsecondary programs can only know if they are succeeding if they can follow whether the students they began recruiting in middle or high school are getting to and through the pathway into teaching. Because PreK–12 data systems and post-secondary data systems are not always connected, it is very difficult to assess effectiveness and make improvements in early recruitment pathways.¹⁶ To overcome this barrier, states should align data systems that follow students over time. An advantage of state-funded high school pathway programs is that data collection and evaluation can be mandated as part of the program agreement.

Scant data on educator preparation program retention rates, completion rates, and eventual entry into the teaching profession keeps the public from understanding which programs and strategies are most or least effective for teachers of color. While the federal government collects some data on educator preparation programs through Title II of the Higher Education Act, the data collected are largely focused on the “inputs” to teacher preparation rather than the outputs. That is, the data provide little to no insight into which aspects of educator preparation are related to effective programs or effective teaching. For example, the number of past year program enrollees and completers are reported in Title II report cards, but there is no way to calculate the completion rate of any given cohort of enrollees. Without this information, states—and the public—have no information about which groups of students successfully complete teacher preparation programs.¹⁷

Furthermore, we lack data that would indicate whether some programs are more successfully producing teachers from certain demographic groups than others. For this reason, all metrics, to the extent possible, should be disaggregated by race/ethnicity, sex, and family income status when reported to the public. Collecting better data on educator preparation programs and connecting that data with PreK–12 data for students participating in pathway programs would help states learn which program characteristics are most correlated with success, and aid districts in determining which programs may be able to best help them meet their teacher workforce diversity goals.

5) Assess testing barriers that impact Latinx teacher candidates

States should assess whether the basic skills requirement is impacting potential Latinx candidates, or whether they are being lost at other points along the pathway. States can use a free tool developed by AIR’s Center on Great Teachers and Leaders to help identify and visualize exactly where diversity gaps are occurring along teacher pathways.¹⁸ The tool can then help state, district, educator preparation, and school-level leaders make informed decisions about how to best address the specific barrier(s) that they see.¹⁹

In states where basic skills tests are disproportionately keeping Latinx candidates from entering teaching, states and educator preparation programs should consider using the basic skills test to identify candidates who have gaps in their academic skills and provide support to address areas of weakness. In addition, or alternatively, they should incorporate some flexibility on cut-off scores, when considered in conjunction with other evidence that shows a candidate’s potential to be an effective teacher. States should also help subsidize test preparation and support.