It costs a lot to become a teacher.
The educational burden on would-be teachers has grown in the past decade. More teachers seek advanced degrees even as college costs rise and wages stagnate.
“A lot of people don’t understand what the true cost is to become a teacher, which is quite high compared to the salary that you’re going to make your first year,” said Kathleen Campbell, the chief executive officer of the the National Center for Teacher Residencies, a Chicago-based nonprofit that provides research and technical support to teacher residency programs nationwide. “And during student teaching, teachers are required to work 40 hours a week for 12 to 15 weeks—not only working for free, but they actually pay to work for free because you pay college tuition.”
That’s why, in the wake of widespread teacher shortages, declines in enrollment in traditional teacher-preparation programs, and historic increases in emergency-certified teachers, states and districts have expanded a wide array of apprenticeships, residencies, and local grow-your-own training programs to ease future educators’ paths to the classroom.
“The whole point of grow-your-own [teacher preparation] is that you’re going to remove barriers for people who haven’t been able to access teacher ed.,” said Amaya Garcia, director of pre-K–12 research and practice at the think tank New America. They do that “by providing wraparound supports and funding, academic advising and all these little pieces to help keep them in the program, graduate from the program, and get placed in a school.”
The distinctions in these community-centered programs are not always that clear, and even the programs themselves use different names. Here are some of the major distinctions to understand, including what they require and provide teacher candidates, and how big a financial lift they are for districts who want to participate.
1. All the programs target local candidates
At their base, grow-your-own teacher programs recruit and train community members—from high school students to parents to paraprofessionals—to become teachers. Often, this involves partnerships between one or more school districts and an institute of higher education, a community group, or other organizer. Often, the programs are intended to deepen or diversify the labor pool of local teachers or interest future teachers in particular high-need schools or content areas. But they cover a wide array of models.
“Any type of teacher pathway or pipeline program that recruits from the local community in hopes of bringing people back to teach in the local community, it is a grow-your-own program,” said Danielle Edwards, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, who studies teacher-preparation.
The programs may or may not require particular coursework or training, provide varying levels of financial assistance to candidates. While 14 states provide competitive grants for grow-your-own programs, they differ in their requirements and supports for candidates. For example, Michigan’s Future Proud Educator grants require programs to create a “no cost pathway” to teaching, providing for “tuition, fees, testing, materials, books, transportation, the cost of substitutes necessary to ensure the candidate’s participation in coursework, and any other costs directly related” to earning a teaching certificate or specialty endorsements.
Perhaps most surprisingly, these local programs typically don’t require candidates to work a minimum number of hours or years in a classroom.
Edwards and Matthew Kraft, an associate professor at Brown University, analyzed 20 statewide grow-your-own grants and 74 independent local partnerships, more than 60 percent of which focused on high school students as future teachers. They found considerable overlap among different kinds of residencies and grow-your-own programs, but found most do not require candidates to commit to teach a minimum number of years, or even to teach in a particular community.
“People think that just by providing these supports and because the people they’re recruiting are from the local community, they’re just going to automatically return and fill hard-to-staff positions,” Edwards said. “I would argue that’s probably not the case.”
2. Few programs track teacher diversity
Few of the programs track whether candidates who complete GYO, apprenticeship, or residency programs increased diversity in teacher labor pools or filled shortages in particular communities, Edwards and Kraft’s research found.
Although alternative programs have tended to bring in more teachers of color than the traditional college- or university-based programs that prepare the bulk of teachers, their relatively small number mean that longstanding disparities between teacher and student demographics continue to exist.
3. Some models have trainees as the ‘teacher of record'; others don’t
Teacher residencies and apprenticeships allow teacher candidates take education coursework and emphasize hands-on, classroom-based training under a mentor teacher for an extended period (typically much longer than the six weeks or semester in traditional programs).
Residencies first appeared in the early 2000s, while apprenticeships are a fairly new phenomenon that emerged in 2022. These programs have a few key differences, however:
- Registered apprenticeships are formally defined by the U.S. Labor Department. Apprentices must complete 6,000 hours of classroom work-study at the undergraduate level and 2,000 hours at graduate level. (This may include tutoring or other specialized teaching practice.) Although advocates say apprentices should not be considered the teacher of record until they have completed their training and mentorship, some states allow them to serve in that role. Those that are must be paid a wage that starts at least at minimum wage and increases with their training and skills at least once during the course of the apprenticeship. Apprentices work towards their teacher licensure but may or may not earn a degree.
- Residencies do not have a federal definition, but most programs do follow a national model, in which candidate teachers work toward an education degree as well as licensure. Residents take coursework while also holding a yearlong classroom internship under a mentor teacher, but are not the teacher of record.
“Residencies have a ‘gradual release,’” said Campbell, who works with 80 teacher residency programs in 30 states and the District of Columbia. “Residents are taught particular skills in their coursework and then go into the classroom to practice those skills under the mentor teacher, who knows what the student is being taught.”
While residencies are modeled on those used to train doctors, Campbell noted that few residency programs ask teacher-residents to go through medical-style rotations to learn different educational specialties. Some programs, including those in Oregon and Tennessee, allow teachers to focus on special education, English learners, or other students with special needs.
4. The programs have different—and sometimes unstable—sources of funding
Local teacher training exploded during the pandemic, from 19 states with programs in 2020 to 35 states in 2024, thanks in part to federal ESSER money. But with that federal relief aid expiring this year, experts predict the overall number of these local teacher-prep programs will shrink.
Apprenticeships are more likely to weather budget cuts, Garcia said, because registered programs can qualify for U.S. Department of Labor funding for teacher-candidates’ college tuition, pay, and even child care support. Residency programs typically do not, and must finding other sources of funding—matching dollars from participating school districts, universities, or nonprofits, for instance, or grants. (The Pathways Alliance, for example, helps districts calculate the costs and benefits of participating in teacher residencies to offset costs of paraprofessionals, substitutes, and other items.)
School districts and higher education members of the the Oregon Teacher Apprenticeship Consortium split costs for their teacher-candidates.
“Sustainability is the biggest issue that grow-your-own programs face,” said Garcia, who tracks state policy on teacher preparation. “Unless you find a way to build in these costs [of student tuition and pay] by working with the district, working as consortia, etc., it’s really hard to know from year to year if you will be able to maintain and support the candidates.”
