“Grow-your-own” (GYO) programs seek to address teacher shortages by recruiting locally. Interest in these programs—which recruit high school students, college students, or career changers—has ballooned over the past decade. GYO programs offer an attractive model because teacher shortages are typically a local problem and recruiting locally is more likely to yield teachers that are demographically representative of the student body. These factors can support student success, as local teacher shortages can create coordination problems in schools and increase the workload of current teachers, as well as the fact that students benefit from having a teacher who looks like them and understands their background.

Despite the growing interest in GYO programs from policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels, however, credible evidence of their effects is sparse. The Teacher Academy of Maryland (TAM) is the state’s GYO program, which exposes high school students to teaching as a career through a four-course career and technical education sequence and allows them to dually enroll in courses with credits counting toward high school graduation and a two- or four-year teaching degree. An analysis of TAM can provide insight into several student outcomes, including high school and college graduation, becoming a public school teacher in Maryland, and earnings.

Key Takeaways

Using data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System on cohorts of entering ninth-graders between 2008 and 2013 and observing them for 10 years, findings show the following:

• Enrollment in TAM increased the likelihood that both Black and white girls went on to become teachers.
• White girls induced by TAM to become teachers do so almost exclusively on traditional teaching licenses, and the program increased white girls’ likelihood of earning a bachelor’s degree in teaching. TAM’s effects on Black girls are mostly through alternative pathways into the profession, such as conditional licenses, which require a bachelor’s degree—though not necessarily in teaching—and allow individuals to work as full-time teachers while pursuing requirements for full certification.
• TAM increased high school graduation rates, with the largest increase for Black girls and a significant effect on white girls.
• Enrollment in TAM increased wages, with the largest gains accruing to Black girls.

Implications

These results are encouraging, and although only a small set of students participate—primarily Black and white female students—they provide insight on how school-level adoption of the TAM program influences longer-run outcomes. The analysis shows that GYO programs could offer an avenue to expand the teacher labor force while increasing educational attainment and potential earnings.

GYO programs like TAM may also help diversify the profession, which is a central goal of many program designers and policymakers. Although take-up of TAM is highest among white female students, Black female students also significantly benefit, greatly reducing gaps among those who become teachers after enrolling in a GYO program. But despite the positive effects of TAM for some groups, few boys or Hispanic and Asian students enroll in the program. To continue increasing the representation of students of color, program expansion efforts could target schools and districts with large populations of students of color not already offering TAM. Additionally, modifying the TAM program and curriculum to focus on cultural relevance and increasing the diversity of TAM teachers are possible solutions.

Additional Resources

• Grow Your Own Teachers: A 50-State Scan of Policies and Programs
• A coming crisis in teaching? Teacher supply, demand, and shortages in the US
• Teacher Diversity and Student Success: Why Racial Representation Matters in the Classroom
• Examining grow your own programs across the teacher development continuum: Mining research on teachers of color and nontraditional educator pipelines
• Grow Your Own: An Umbrella Term for Very Different Localized Teacher Pipeline Programs
• Understanding teacher shortages: An analysis of teacher supply and demand in the United States
• The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century
• Changing the narrative on diversifying the teaching workforce: A look at historical and contemporary factors that inform recruitment and retention of teachers of color