Introduction

Sergio De La Rosa spent his career serving youth, helping undocumented young people as a community organizer and working as a youth corrections officer before eventually becoming the director of his local Boys & Girls Club. He loved being with young people and had a knack for supporting multilingual students in particular. Through the Boys & Girls Club, he got to know Daniel Cooper, a local elementary school principal. Impressed by De La Rosa, Cooper often told him that he wanted to hire him to teach at his school. 

But De La Rosa knew a teaching career was out of reach. He didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, plus he was a father to young children. Abandoning his paycheck to go back to school was a nonstarter for his family. Even if he had been able to leave his job, there wasn’t money for tuition, nor would the long commute from his home in rural northeastern Colorado to in-person classes be feasible, given his family commitments. 

But one day, Cooper came to De La Rosa with exciting news. Colorado had just created a program designed to train new teachers. De La Rosa could earn a bachelor’s degree in education through remote coursework at Colorado Mountain College while getting paid to work and train at a school in his own town, Fort Morgan. The college would help him find grants and scholarships to cover his tuition, and a veteran teacher would mentor him. Was De La Rosa interested in applying? 

He was. Here was an avenue to pursue a career in teaching that didn’t require impossible financial or logistical commitments. “This is the door opening,” he recalled.¹

Colorado’s new program was a degree apprenticeship, an emerging training and education model that integrates Registered Apprenticeship with an associate, bachelor’s, or master’s degree. Registered Apprenticeship is a federally defined model that requires apprentices to receive progressive wage increases, structured on-the-job training, instruction from a skilled mentor, related classroom-based education, and an industry-recognized credential. In degree apprenticeship, the classroom-based element culminates in a degree.²

In the field of education, degree apprenticeships have potential to address long-standing challenges in teacher recruitment and preparation. Traditional teacher preparation programs are often long, expensive, and inaccessible to many would-be teachers. They require a major financial investment from trainees: four years of college tuition, plus unpaid student teaching. They’re usually designed for traditional college students, not working adults. As De La Rosa’s experience illustrates, even when people have the passion and talent to become great educators, the path can be prohibitive due to financial, logistical, academic, and other barriers.³

Teacher degree apprenticeships address some of these structural barriers, particularly the financial ones.⁴ This model makes teacher preparation more affordable by providing both tuition support and wages for teacher trainees, but it also creates a clear pathway to a career since these programs are designed to lead to a permanent role in the district. By reducing barriers to entry, degree apprenticeship can increase the appeal of becoming a teacher and, with time, address teacher shortages and increase teacher diversity.⁵

These models also have the potential to improve teacher retention by recruiting people who are already familiar with working with students and are invested in and reflect the local community, like De La Rosa, and by providing on-the-job training that better equips apprentices to lead instruction and manage classroom behavior.⁶ “The most sustainable solution to teacher shortages is not external recruitment, but intentional local development,” said Dennis George of Western Kentucky University, which sponsors teacher degree apprenticeships in several districts. “For smaller and rural districts especially, investing in people who already know and care about the community creates a reliable pathway to a strong, stable teacher workforce.”

Degree apprenticeship promises to be a low-cost and accessible pathway into teaching that can address some of the most pressing challenges the field faces. To deliver on this vision, program leaders and policymakers need to design and implement programs that work for apprentices, for the districts that hire them, and for the colleges and universities that educate them. Our conversations with program leaders and technical assistance providers revealed the following three design or implementation considerations that matter for program quality:⁷

• Sponsorship types: Ensure that lead partners or sponsors are well positioned to realize program goals and build collaborative, constructive relationships.
• Affordability strategies: Prioritize affordability for apprentices—as not to replicate the financial barriers of traditional preparation programs—as well as for districts and institutions of higher education to ensure long-term program sustainability.
• Accessibility strategies: Center accessibility and flexibility in program design so that apprentices progress efficiently and complete successfully. 

There is no single approach to implementing these considerations, and programs have deployed different strategies based on their contexts and resources. This has often made it hard to understand the tradeoffs or quality implications of one strategy versus another, leaving leaders unsure about which choices are best for their program or state. 

Here, we offer, after a brief overview of the K–12 teacher degree apprenticeship landscape, some basic frameworks for understanding how different sponsorship types and affordability and accessibility strategies factor into teacher degree apprenticeship quality. This report explains how programs are implementing these three considerations and the challenges they have faced in doing so, highlighting common approaches and themes.