Planting the Pipeline: The Effects of Grow Your Own Initiatives on the Teacher Workforce in Tennessee

• In Event: District Policy Toward Educational Equity

Abstract

States and school districts across the country have embraced “Grow Your Own” (GYO) initiatives as a key strategy to cultivate and nurture local teaching talent. These initiatives, spanning a myriad of localized recruitment efforts, embody a collective effort to bolster the dwindling supply of new teachers and recruit teachers of color (Edwards & Kraft, 2024). GYO initiatives aim to expand the teacher pool by tapping into new sources of local talent, such as high school students, teaching assistants, and substitute teachers. By focusing on individuals already embedded within school communities, these programs aim to not only alleviate staffing shortages but also foster diversity and inclusivity within the teaching profession.

 

Despite the promise of “Grow Your Own” initiatives, there remains a significant gap in our understanding of their effectiveness and impact. Many of these programs are newly adopted by school districts, and evaluations are only beginning to emerge (see Blazer et al., 2024 and Edwards & Kraft, 2024). This paper aims to fill this gap by examining the effects of high school training courses in Tennessee, the most prevalent type of GYO program. These courses seek to increase the teacher supply by increasing interest and early exposure to the duties of the profession through coursework and hands-on teaching experiences. 

 

Using longitudinal K-12 public school student coursework data linked with educator preparation and staff data from Tennessee, we examine the effectiveness of GYO high school teacher training courses by tracking high school student participation through their eventual entry (or non-entry) into the teaching profession. We ask: 

1.     To what extent are students taking the “teaching as a profession” courses graduating from Tennessee educator preparation programs, getting licensed, and becoming Tennessee teachers? 

2.     To what extent does the implementation of Grow Your Own programs within a district align with indicators of need, such as teacher vacancy rates, teacher turnover, and student performance?

 

Between 2015 and 2023, the number of schools offering GYO coursework grew from 70 to 141 schools. Similarly, the number of high school students enrolled in these courses grew from roughly 2,000 students to over 5,000. We leverage the staggered rollout of high school courses to employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate their effects on the likelihood that students become teachers in Tennessee, as well as the intermediate outcome of enrolling educator preparation programs. 

 

In addition to examining the effect of GYO programs on future employment as a teacher, we also seek to understand the extent to which GYO programs successfully target schools that struggle to recruit and retain teachers. We conduct descriptive analyses to compare the characteristics of schools with and without GYO programs, focusing on indicators of high-needs schools such as teacher vacancy rates, teacher turnover, student economic disadvantage, and student achievement. We use regression modeling to estimate the likelihood of GYO program implementation as a function of staffing and student need to examine whether GYO efforts were equitably targeted to support schools facing significant staffing shortages and academic needs. 

Author

• Ashley Brooke Ellison, Vanderbilt University
  Presenting Author