In states and districts throughout the country, “Grow Your Own” (GYO) teacher programs have become a popular strategy for strengthening and diversifying the teacher pipeline. By developing teacher candidates from local communities, the logic goes, GYO programs will expose more potential educators to the career, diversify the K–12 workforce, and boost retention. Indeed, initial evidence suggested that these programs can enhance teacher recruitment and retention. But their rapid rollout outpaced research on their effects on student achievement. Now, a new study by four researchers from the University of Maryland builds on the existing literature by digging into different forms of teacher “localness” and by connecting localness to student outcomes.
Using data from the Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center, the authors link teacher and student data from 2012–13 to 2023–24. They also analyze select data going back to 2007–08 for then-students who went on to become teachers. They examine teachers’ localness based on three dimensions:
- Growing up locally, based on whether they graduated from a Maryland public high school, and whether their first teaching job is in the same district as the high school they attended. (Keep in mind that districts in Maryland are countywide.)
- Being trained locally, based on whether they completed a Maryland-approved preparation program, the high school pathway Teacher Academy of Maryland, and/or various other training and licensure categories.
- Working locally before teaching, based on whether they previously worked as aides in Maryland public schools.
Controlling for factors such as student demographics and prior test scores, teacher demographics and experience, and school characteristics, the researchers explore the impact of localness on teacher retention, and on third- through eighth-grade students’ math and English language arts (ELA) test scores. They focus on early-career teachers. In total, their data include about 12,366 unique teachers linked to about 1,581,000 student-year observations.
In line with previous research on GYO programs, the study finds positive and statistically significant relationships between teacher localness and retention. This pattern generally holds across all three categories of localness, with local upbringing and local training having the strongest relationships to retention. For example, teachers working in the same district where they attended high school are 10 percentage points more likely to stay in the same job for at least five years, compared to teachers who did not attend a Maryland public high school.
The effects of localness on student test scores, however, are much more modest. For most of the measures of localness, the association was statistically insignificant by two years into a teacher’s career. One exception was the link between local training and math scores, where the researchers found small but statistically significant increases for specific local programs. Traditional licensure through a Maryland program tied to a math improvement of 0.06 standard deviations, Teacher Academy of Maryland participation during high school to 0.09, and Maryland teacher residency participation to 0.12.
Even so, localness did not outweigh other features of teachers’ backgrounds. Those with out-of-state certifications saw a statistically significant math boost of 0.12 standard deviations within two years and by three years had the largest remaining advantage of any certification group, at 0.10 standard deviations—perhaps a reflection of a higher hiring bar for out-of-state candidates. Conditionally certified teachers over the age of 28 outperformed younger conditionally certified teachers by 0.05 to 0.10 standard deviations, even though younger conditionally certified teachers were likelier to be local. The researchers took this finding to indicate the benefits of prior work experience for teacher effectiveness.
Whatever the mechanisms, the findings around localness and student achievement are generally underwhelming. Yes, there’s a strong link between localness and teacher retention—but as the authors argue, student achievement should remain the north star. After all, keeping an ineffective faculty around for years doesn’t benefit students.
But the most common tradeoff probably isn’t between hiring a local teacher versus a slightly more effective out-of-state teacher. Given that Maryland’s recent GYO efforts seem to have contributed to the dramatic decline in teacher vacancies, the tradeoff may more often be between hiring a somewhat effective teacher and no teacher at all—and in that case, the local teacher certainly takes the cake. The authors also highlight their descriptive finding that recently conditionally certified teachers are more likely to be Black, and their effects on test scores are comparable to those of peers who enter through other routes—so certain local hiring practices may boost diversity while maintaining consistent effects on student achievement.
So, while GYO advocates undoubtedly hoped for stronger connections between localness and student achievement, these programs are certainly not without value. Still, before hitting the gas on GYO program expansion, leaders ought to consider what problem they’re really solving for—whether it’s primarily about recruitment, retention, diversity, or achievement—and consider whether the program is likely to move the needle toward that target.
SOURCE: Nicolas Dominguez-Mel, Wesley T. Morris, Sarah Montana, and David Blazar, “Teacher Localness, Early-Career Effectiveness, and Retention,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (October 2026).
