Getting high school students excited about teaching can significantly expand the pipeline of diverse educators—but mentorship and support determine whether those new teachers return to the districts that trained them.
That’s the crux of a decadelong causal evaluation of one of the nation’s largest grow-your-own teacher programs, the Teacher Academy of Maryland, which supports a formal career-technical education pathway for high school students.
Participating districts in the state initiative provide a four-course sequence on child development and pedagogy for high school students, as well as student-teaching practice. Students who complete the academy can earn college credit toward an education degree and scholarships at local colleges.
A decade later, those who had participated in the academies as students were 45% more likely to be teachers and earned 5% higher wages than students who had not participated.
“The TAM program does seem to be building interest in the profession and long-term career decisions,” said David Blazar, an associate professor of education policy at the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author of the study.
The results highlight the potential of grow-your-own programs, which have exploded in all 50 states in the last decade, although not all of them target high schoolers.
But district leaders hoping that high school career education tracks similar to Maryland’s can help diversify and counter the graying of their local teacher workforce need a commitment to providing mentorship for students and the patience to wait years for a deepening teacher pool.
Nearly all school districts in the state now offer teacher pathways, but they adopted the program over time beginning in 2004. For the study, Blazar and his colleagues used the state’s staggered rollout to understand their effects. The researchers compared data—including on coursetaking, graduation rates, and career choice—for more than 225,000 students who started high school between the 2008–09 and 2012–13 school years. They collected the data from schools both before and after they adopted the academies, and to a comparison group of students in schools that had not yet implemented the academies.
The researchers then compared long-term choice to teach, work location, and for those who actually became teachers, the quarterly pay of academy students, to that of the comparison group who did not.
Maryland’s teacher academies cost about $32 per student per year to run—less expensive than many other high school career pathways, Blazar said, because they only need classrooms and equipment that schools already have on hand. Schools that launched such academies tended to carve out a portion of existing teachers’ course loads to teach and mentor the students, he found, rather than adding new staff.
Among teaching academy students, 5% of white girls and 1.6% of Black girls eventually took up a teaching career. That’s a large racial gap, but a narrower one than among students who did not participate in the academies: 3.6% of white girls and 0.9% of Black girls became teachers without exposure to the academies.
Relatively few boys participated in the Maryland academies compared to girls, but among those who did, both Black and white young men were more likely to become teachers, compared to peers who did not participate in the teaching pathway.
White and Black teachers took different paths into the classroom, Blazar found. The majority of white women in the teacher academies used dual credits to segue directly from high school into an undergraduate teaching program, after which most returned to work in their hometowns.
Need for more support
By contrast, among the Maryland academy participants, about half of Black women opted for alternative-certification programs rather than a traditional university-based program. Ultimately, Black academy participants who went into teaching tended to choose districts with a higher starting salary and a higher share of other Black educators than their home districts.
Black teachers who completed the academies, for example, earned on average $640 more per quarter, or 18% of their quarterly wage, than Black teachers who had not participated.
“We can’t assume that a grow-your-own program that increases an individual’s likelihood of entering teaching is necessarily going to diversify teacher retention,” Blazar said. “That requires a lot more targeted design intention that we can’t take for granted.”
More mentoring and early classroom experiences, as well as better college financial planning for students and families, could improve completion and encourage more teachers of color to return to their home districts, he advised.
While students of both races were equally likely to pass the Praxis and ParaPro licensing tests at the conclusion of the academy sequence, Black students were three times as likely to drop out after one or two academy classes. Blazar suggested that more mentoring and earlier student-teaching opportunities might retain more students across races.
“I’ve heard from youth who have gone through all the courses that the teaching practice was really exciting and they wanted that experience earlier on,” Blazar said. “The fact that there are dabblers in the program who don’t make it to that last practice-based component suggests opportunities for redesign.”
Even among those academy participants who did not become teachers, the study found many had higher high school graduation rates than their peers.
The latest study did not look at teacher effectiveness, but Blazar said a forthcoming study from the same evaluation suggests teachers who earned completion certificates from the Maryland academies had higher student test-score gains in their first two years in the classroom than other novice teachers.
