In the effort to expand and diversify the teacher pipeline, states and districts have invested millions in actively recruiting and training teachers from local communities. Such “Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs exist in an estimated nine hundred school districts and in forty-nine states (Wyoming is the exception). Despite this growth, little research to date has examined the impact of GYO programs. Now, however, a new study by researchers from the University of Maryland and American University investigates how a Maryland GYO program affects the state’s teacher workforce, as well as educational and economic outcomes for students enrolled in schools with the program.
Like most but not all GYO programs, the Teacher Academy of Maryland (TAM) aims to draw high school students into teacher preparation pathways. (Other GYO programs target college students, education paraprofessionals, or other community members.) A Career and Technical Education (CTE) option, TAM offers a four-course sequence aligned with the requirements of the Maryland Associate of Arts in Teaching degree. After high school, TAM completers may take a special assessment to become immediately eligible for an educational support job, or they may transfer their credits toward a two- or four-year degree. The most recent statewide data indicate that nearly two thousand students participate in TAM at forty-three schools throughout seventeen of Maryland’s twenty-five school districts.
Using data from the state Department of Education and the Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center, the study examines professional, educational, and economic outcomes for 226,000 students who began ninth grade between 2008-09 and 2012-13. Using a research design called difference-in-differences, the researchers compare outcomes for students at high schools that implemented TAM during this period—not necessarily students who participated in TAM—to outcomes for students at schools without TAM. They control for gender, race/ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch, English language learner status, disability status, eighth-grade test scores, high school enrollment, and other system changes enacted during this period. The methodology allows us to infer causation, and the researchers conduct numerous robustness and sensitivity checks to confirm the validity of their findings.
The results were good news for TAM. First and foremost, attending a high school with TAM made students more likely to become public school teachers in Maryland by the age of twenty-five. Overall, this likelihood increased by 0.6 percentage points (pp), or 47 percent. The effect was largest for White and Black girls. The percentage point increase was higher for White girls (1.4 pp) compared to Black girls (0.7 pp), but because White girls already become teachers at much higher rates than any other subgroup, the percentage increase in teaching was much larger for Black girls (80 percent) than White girls (39 percent).
Notably, the mechanism by which White and Black girls later entered the profession differed. White girls exposed to TAM tended to complete the program and then obtain a traditional teaching license through a college degree. Black girls, on the other hand, were more likely to start the four-course sequence without completing it, then obtain a non-teaching college degree, and eventually earn an alternative teaching license. These differences deserve further investigation, as they suggest that TAM improved White girls’ access to traditional pathways, but for Black girls, it provided compelling information without necessarily improving that access.
Another notable set of findings reveals that the educational benefits of TAM extend beyond widening the teacher pipeline. Attending a school with TAM increased the overall high school graduation rate by 0.8 pp, or 1 percent. Among student subgroups, graduation rates improved most for Black girls (2.2 pp, or 3 percent), but they also grew for Black boys (1.3 pp, or 2 percent) and White girls (1 pp, or 1 percent). Exposure to TAM also increased overall enrollment in a four-year college by 1.7 pp (6 percent). This effect was largest for girls, with a 2.6 pp (8 percent) increase, and for Black boys, who experienced a 2.3 pp (11 percent) increase. Black boys and Asian girls exposed to TAM also completed BAs at higher rates than peers at schools without TAM (1.7 pp or 15 percent, and 5.8 pp or 10 percent, respectively).
The study also found long-term economic benefits to attending a school offering TAM. Overall, wages at age twenty-five were 5 percent higher, with the largest benefits for Black girls and Asian girls (each 18 percent higher). As the study’s authors point out, the increase in wages may undermine the popular narrative that a teaching career necessarily translates into lower pay. The mechanisms here are complicated—Asian girls’ economic gains, for example, seem to come from higher educational attainment, rather than a teaching career—but the researchers hypothesize that a school setting with TAM may encourage students to think more strategically about their career plans.
In sum, TAM benefits different students in different ways, but that makes it a win on several fronts: recruiting more teachers, improving academic outcomes for teacher-candidates, and improving earnings. The program has room for improvement—for example, by addressing the finding that TAM likely improves access to teacher pathways more for White girls than for Black girls—and GYO initiatives remain understudied, especially given the rate of their expansion and the variation among programs. Nonetheless, these findings provide encouraging evidence that GYO programs have the potential to make a difference for students present and future.
SOURCE: David Blazar, Wenjing Gao, Seth Gershenson, Ramon Goings, and Francisco Lagos, “Do Grow-Your-Own Programs Work? Evidence from the Teacher Academy of Maryland,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2024).
