Report Touts Community Colleges As Source of Teachers

By Julie Blair

Washington

The nation's 1,100 community colleges have the potential to provide more than 25 percent of the teachers needed to staff classrooms over the next decade, but to date remain an overlooked resource, a report released last week contends.

Such institutions are already a significant pipeline, helping to train more than one in five educators, according to the study by Recruiting New Teachers, a nonprofit organization based in Belmont, Mass. Moreover, it says, community colleges produce highly qualified, desperately needed minority candidates who volunteer to work in the country's most challenging schools.

"Strengthening and expanding teacher education programs on community college campuses not only offer the best hope we have to overcome the teacher shortage in this country, it is a powerful solution to improving teacher quality at the same time," Mildred Hudson, the organization's chief executive officer,...