Data-Informed Grow Your Own Programs: Tailoring Responsive Paraeducator of Color and Indigenous Paraeducator Teacher Development Pathways

• In Event: Growing Your Own Teachers: Building Community-Focused Teacher Pipelines

Abstract

Paraeducators are a group of potential teachers who do not conform to the typical design of teacher education programs. For example, paraeducators are often not able to attend school full-time and may not have financial resources to pay for college due to familial and personal responsibilities (Amos, 2013, 2018). Still, they are knowledgeable of professional responsibilities in school communities and have positive impacts on student learning (Chopra et al., 2004; Hemelt, Ladd, & Clifton, 2021). Misalignment of paraeducators with teacher education programs has limited efforts to recruit paraeducator teacher pools; however, intentionally designed paraeducator educator pathways can create access to the profession (Author, 2021; Villegas & Clewell, 1998).
This research study examines the demographic contexts of Paraeducators of Color and Indigenous Paraeducators (PCIP) in three urban school districts. Given the importance of educator ethnoracial diversity, coupled with the need to reform educator preparation structures, it is important to understand the demographic context in which they are situated. As such, we address the following guiding questions: 1) What is the demographic profile of PCIP?; and 2) Which demographic and educational characteristics of PCIP are associated with movement into a teaching position? Our data file comes from the university education research consortium and includes all employee records from the three urban school districts between the 2007 and 2021 school years. Our analytic approach to answering RQ1 included descriptive and summary statistics with the goal of better understanding the demographic characteristics and educational background of PCIP. Our analytic approach for RQ2 involved estimating the probability as well as time-invariant characteristics at the school, district, and year level for each paraeducator-year observation in our analytic file.
Our findings show that as a group, nine out of every ten paraeducators in the districts studied is a PCIP. This group of educators represents an existing ethnoracially diverse pool of potential teachers with prior experience in the school communities where they could transition as lead classroom teachers. Thus, these findings imply that in other similarly diverse teacher labor market contexts, paraeducators could represent an untapped source of ethnoracially diverse teachers. This idea is further supported by the finding that many PCIP have an existing educational background that districts could help them leverage towards becoming a certified teacher—without having to start the degree/credential process from square one. Across all PCIP-year observations 17 percent had a bachelor’s degree, eight percent had an associate’s degree, and 17 percent had a teacher certification. PCIPs with these credentials are already employees of the districts and likely have established relationships with schools and school leaders. From a practical policy perspective, district leaders already hold the contact information and employment records of this set of educators, potentially smoothing their transition into a teaching position compared to a new hire. Finally, our finding that PCIP with a teacher certification has an increased likelihood of transitioning to a teaching role is intuitive, yet it provides evidence that increased credentialing support could strengthen the preparation to workforce pipeline for PCIP in other large metropolitan district contexts.

Authors

• Conra D. Gist, University of Houston
  Presenting Author

• Wesley L. Edwards, University of North Texas
  Presenting Author