Across the U.S., the teaching profession is facing exacerbated demand and dwindling supply. The number of vacant positions is creeping upward, but fewer and fewer candidates are completing teacher prep programs. States and districts are funding alternative and new pathways to enter the teaching profession in the hopes that these non-traditional routes into teaching will tap new talent pools, increase the supply of new teachers, and alleviate shortages. In some ways, they are succeeding—enrollment in non-traditional pathways has increased steadily—but higher enrollment rates have not translated to higher completion rates. In short, alternative pathways are having mixed results.
In this post, we summarize trends in teaching that have created such extreme shortages in the profession. We then describe three alternative approaches states, districts, and programs have taken to bring new talent into the profession to address these shortages, and discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of each.
An urgent need for new teachers
Recent trends in teaching have created urgent shortages and a deep need to diversify the teaching profession. Low salaries and decreasing job satisfaction, together with the added stress of the COVID019 pandemic, have contributed to high turnover. Recently, the U.S. Department of Education left education programs off its list of “professional degrees,” which included medicine, law, and dentistry. Not only does this list further reinforce public perception that teaching is no longer a prestigious profession—measures of public opinion show that the public’s estimation of the prestige of the teaching profession is at its lowest point in a half century—it also limits the amount of federal loans students pursuing graduate degrees in education, including teaching, can access. And as teaching has appeared less viable as a profession, fewer young people see teaching as a potential career. Teacher pipelines are drying up. By multiple measures, the supply of new teachers has been in steep decline since the Great Recession.
These dual trends of dwindling supply and high turnover have left tens of thousands of teaching positions unfilled and hundreds of thousands covered by teachers who lack proper certification. While teacher shortage data is not collected systematically in most states—the subject of another Craft Insights Team post—scholars use a number of closely related metrics to estimate that high-poverty schools suffer the most from these shortages. What’s more, the teacher workforce is far less diverse than the student population. As the proportion of public school students of color approaches 50%, the proportion of teachers of color is barely over 20%. This disparity is particularly worrying given a bevy of research showing that teachers of color provide outsize benefits, particularly for struggling students and students of color.
Addressing such extreme shortages requires new and innovative solutions to bolster the supply of new teachers. Traditionally, aspiring teachers would take courses at colleges or universities and spend time training in K-12 classrooms to earn credit toward a Bachelor’s degree in teaching and teacher certification. This traditional path into teaching is time- and resource-intensive—university tuition is steep, and a degree takes four years—and fewer learners are opting in. In an effort to fill shortages and to diversify the teacher workforce, new pathways into teaching have emerged beyond the traditional route.
States and districts are investing heavily in these new pathways. With limited and fragmented data on teacher supply, it has become increasingly important to understand how these pathways work, and how programs that look similar on paper can differ significantly in structure and outcomes.
Creating more pathways into teaching
While traditional pathways remain the primary supplier of new teachers, these new pathways have made important strides toward rebuilding the new teacher pipeline and increasing diversity. All of them come with substantially lower cost burdens than traditional teacher preparation programs and many have more flexible structures to accommodate different schedules and timelines for nontraditional learners.
It is unsurprising, then, that more and more aspiring teachers are using these pathways. According to Title II data, the most definitive source for data on new teacher supply in the U.S., in 2010-11, about 12% of candidates enrolled in alternative, as opposed to traditional, teacher preparation programs. By 2020-21, alternative programs comprised 28% of all teacher prep candidates. These programs also bucked the trend of declining enrollment in teacher preparation programs. While enrollment in teacher preparation programs overall declined between 2010-11 and 2021-22—by a whopping 299,310 candidates—Title II data shows that enrollment in alternative programs increased by over 60,000 candidates. The overall decrease was driven by declining enrollment in traditional teacher preparation programs.
However, increases in enrollment were not followed by commensurately more new teachers. Even as enrollment in alternate route programs jumped between 2010-11 and 2022-23, completions remained flat. This indicates that these programs could increase supports, like sustained mentorship from an experienced and effective teacher and coursework aligned to real classroom experiences, to help candidates complete them successfully.
Title II data categorizes many different types of programs as “alternative.” Aggregating all of these programs into a single category obfuscates that these programs, while they share the distinction of being different from the traditional pathway into teaching, can be very different in terms of their program structures and the quality of their supports. Models that fall under the “alternative” umbrella are designed to attract specific pools of potential teachers, but the programs themselves overlap in both design and implementation. Most share elements of exposure to classroom environments, mentorship, and related coursework, but the quality of their structure, supports, and alignment to real classroom practice ultimately determines the success and impact of different programs. Given the comparatively low completion rates of alternative programs overall, it’s important to dig into the elements and structures of these programs to determine what is and isn’t working. By understanding the positive and supportive components of different programs, as well as their shortcomings, we can begin identifying which programs and program elements merit investment from states and districts. Below, we describe three models of alternative teacher preparation: alternate certification programs, grow-your-own programs, and apprenticeship programs.
Pathways for Career Changers
A pathway into teaching that is specifically designed for professionals looking for a career pivot into teaching, or for graduates who didn’t major in teaching, is alternate route certification. These programs provide enrollees with brief exposure to a classroom setting, usually in the form of a few weeks of student teaching, and then place them as lead teachers in schools under a provisional license while they complete a series of courses at a local college or university or through an online provider in their subject-focused and in pedagogy-focused courses.
A famous and pervasive provider of alternate route certification is Teach for America, which pioneered a model of recruiting non-education majors from prestigious colleges and universities to become teachers in high-needs schools for two years. The number of Teach for America members grew from 2007 through 2013, reaching a peak of nearly 6,000, and then began a steady decline. While Teach for America sustained its share of criticism, research indicates that its recruits proved to be as effective as other teachers as measured by their students’ reading and math scores.
While Teach for America enrollment declined after 2013, enrollment in other alternate route certification programs—particularly for-profit programs—spiked after 2014. The growth of online and for-profit alternate route programs raises some cause for concern: while online programs can vary in their program components and quality, evidence suggests that many teachers who complete online preparation programs are both less effective, again as measured by student test scores, and more likely to leave teaching. Alternate route certification remains an important tool for recruiting new teachers, but providers and districts must remain vigilant about ensuring these programs provide enough structure and support so that their enrollees become high-quality teachers. Mentorship, in particular, is a weakness of many alternate route certification programs, where a single mentor teacher may be assigned three to five mentee teachers, which can spread them too thin to offer a meaningful level of support. But weak mentorship is not unique to alternate route certification: across pathways, mentorship often emerges as a critical but underdeveloped component. Mentors may be assigned too many candidates or lack structured guidance, limiting their ability to provide consistent, high-quality support.
Attracting local talent
“Grow-your-own” programs take advantage of local talent pools—whether that be district employees like instructional aides, tutors, substitute teachers, or bus drivers; interested community members; or even high school students—to recruit and train new teachers.
This approach has important advantages: aspiring teachers in grow-your-own programs are connected to, and often resemble, the local community, and many already know the children who will be their future students. These attributes become critical strengths once grow-your-own learners become new teachers: as teachers, they tend to form strong relationships with students, and their connection to the community, students, and school can make recruited teachers more likely to stay in the local district once trained. Using local labor to solve local shortages makes a lot of sense, and grow-your-own programs have been shown to be effective at attracting more aspiring teachers into the profession.
Grow-your-own programs take a variety of forms, but the programs that are most effective at easing shortages align their training to local needs in terms of academic subjects and diversity. Nationally, states report the deepest shortages are in science, math, special education, English/language arts, and foreign languages. Effective programs also provide multiple supports, including funding to lower costs to participants and test prep services to prepare for licensure exams. Intensive training similar to teacher residency programs, which require a year-long mentorship from a veteran teacher, could make grow-your-own participants both better teachers and more likely to stay in teaching. Finally, many grow-your-own programs are targeted at high school students, but scholars suggest that the lag and the hurdles between a high school program grow-your-own program and actually becoming a teacher can mean fewer participants ultimately become teachers.
Teacher apprenticeships
An emerging and promising alternate pathway into teaching is apprenticeship. In teacher apprenticeship models, aspiring teachers earn pay during their training—just as apprentices in other career paths do. This alleviates some of the financial stress of earning a teaching degree or certification and is therefore a promising way to help more learners successfully complete their teacher preparation programs. This is critical, as the high cost of becoming a teacher is frequently cited as a barrier to entry. Teacher apprenticeship programs also incorporate supports—like flexible scheduling and guidance from high-quality mentors—that have been shown to improve new teachers’ performance and persistence.
Teaching apprenticeships are a type of grow-your-own program in that they enroll employees of a district, most commonly paraprofessionals, but also central office employees, custodial staff, bus drivers, or others. Effective apprenticeship programs will align apprentices’ progress through their programs to their experiences in the classroom. For example, rather than completing an essay to show their learning, an apprentice may demonstrate growth and competency through an assignment they designed or their students’ improvement using work products from the classroom.
Teaching apprenticeships have only been around since 2022, but, since then, programs have been launched in forty-seven states. Participants are enthusiastic: not only do they confirm that apprenticeship programs make becoming a teacher financially feasible, they also describe feeling well-prepared to teach. One teaching apprentice in Tennessee said, “It has definitely made me [a more effective teacher] compared to the traditional route student…Compared to a traditional student that goes through the teaching program… I definitely see that I have more experiences, and it has made me a better teacher than what I would have imagined I would be.” Moreover, these programs are showing promise for diversifying the teaching profession: Michigan’s teacher apprenticeship program, Talent Together (a Craft partner), consistently enrolls more diverse learners than the state’s educator workforce.
However, with teacher apprenticeships being so new, there are still challenges to implementation and questions about design. In particular, apprenticeships programs take several years to complete (the length varies by state), but apprentices are usually mentored only in their final year. Experts consider this a weakness in the apprenticeship model, but have developed resources to help districts structure meaningful mentorship into their teacher apprenticeships.
From pathways to solutions
Opening up new pathways into teaching is a critical part of alleviating our nation’s teacher shortage. These pathways tap into new and more diverse talent pools and bring much-needed diversity, community connection, and expertise gained from other careers into our classrooms. They also reduce key barriers to entry, in particular financial barriers, by lowering costs and, in some cases, allowing candidates to earn as they learn.
Despite new pathways opening into the teaching profession, none of these are yet operating on a scale that will truly tackle the dire shortages we face. Where pathways have scaled, increased enrollment hasn’t necessarily translated into a proportional number of new teachers, indicating that candidates need stronger supports. In many cases, apprentices are integrated into existing school environments without additional structures for support, which can limit the effectiveness of both mentorship and on-the-job learning. High-quality and sustained mentorship, in particular, is a weak point of many programs. The need for stronger programmatic structures that incorporate clear guidance for ongoing mentorship emerges across teacher prep models. Investment and resources
To fill the tens of thousands of teacher vacancies across the U.S., we will need to identify, invest in, and expand promising programs that support aspiring teachers to complete them successfully, pass their certification exams, and feel confident and prepared as they start to lead their own classrooms. Better data that tracks candidates who enter and completes teacher prep programs, and who remains in teaching afterwards, will be essential for policymakers looking to identify what works and invest in scaling it effectively. The more granular these data, the more it will help programs identify where candidates fall off, improve mentorship structures, and strengthen alignment between coursework and real classroom practice.
