View Research by Author - Ana Maria Villegas

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The projected need for 2 million new teachers within the next eight years has spawned a number of efforts to increase the teaching pool. With K-12 enrollments expected to mushroom well into the new century, and the current crop of teachers either retiring or leaving the teaching profession for other jobs, states and local school districts are scrambling to ensure a steady supply of high-quality teachers. For many of these school districts - especially those in urban areas, where it hurts the most - the teacher shortage has already arrived. And these shortages are intensified in selected fields, such as bilingual education and special education, and in subjects such as mathematics and science.

This report presents the cumulative findings from the six-year evaluation of the Pathways to Teaching Careers Program supported by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund. The report is organized into five sections. The introduction situates the Pathways program within the current policy context and provides an overview of the Pathways initiative. Section 2 describes the evaluation methods. Section 3 describes program outcomes. Section 4 highlights Pathways strategies that proved successful in recruiting new candidates into teacher education, preparing them for teaching, and supporting them through program completion and the attainment of teacher certification. The final section gives the conclusions of the evaluation as well as the implications for policy that can be drawn from the study.

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