Finding Tomorrow’s Teachers Among Today’s Students

“When I ask 1st and 2nd graders, 90 percent say they want to be a teacher,” explains Dr. Corrine Murphy, Dean of Western Kentucky University’s College of Education and Behavioral Sciences.

“But then I go into a middle school and nobody raises their hand. What happens between those two times in a student’s experience that we lose the excitement to become an educator?”

That’s a question that is keeping a lot of education leaders, teachers college faculties, and policy makers up at night. And for good reason. The shortages that have been accelerated by the COVID-era strain our public education system.

A primary contributor is the rapid decline in the number of aspiring educators earning degrees from traditional teacher preparation programs at colleges and universities. Between 2008 and 2019 the number of annual graduates of these programs dropped by more than one third, with significant declines in specific areas including special education, science, math, and foreign language, according to data from the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education.

But those numbers only tell part of the story. There are actually more teachers overall than ever before, but the persistent mismatch between that supply of educators and the demand for them with respect to geography and specialty is growing. High-poverty, majority-minority, and rural districts face the greatest challenges. Stagnant pay, challenging work conditions. and a declining sense of esteem in the profession all contribute to these dynamics.

Which is why Murphy and her team at WKU set out to flip the script on teacher recruitment and preparation. Rather than focusing on getting more students at the gateway from high school to college, they are reaching down into high schools, as early as 9th grade, to recruit talented students who are interested in the teaching profession. Leveraging U.S. Department of Labor funding, the local school district and WKU are able to pay these students while they serve as teacher apprentices in high school and earn credit toward their teaching degree.

The result is a program that gets more young people who are interested in teaching connected with a meaningful career pathway that pays today and helps them save over the long term by reducing the length of time to earn and therefore the cost of their college degree. The program is built on a six-year model, four years in high school and two years in college.

“We’re trying to provide opportunities at the high school level to explore and embrace the education profession,” Murphy said during a recent conversation. “We aim to get high-performing students, allow them to demonstrate their competencies in high school and earn an associate’s degree.”

Nelson County School District in central Kentucky is the first district to launch the apprenticeship initiative with 7 freshman and sophomores at Nelson High School. The students will fill roles in elementary, middle and high school as apprentices before matriculating to WKU.

During that time they’ll work directly with professional educators and be guided through a carefully mapped sequence of on-the job learning experiences. The apprenticeship competencies and activities students undertake are mapped to the teacher education course competencies in WKU’s curriculum, which are closely aligned with state licensure requirements. As students demonstrate apprenticeship competencies, they earn credit toward a degree and move closer to licensure.

This job-based learning is supplemented with teacher education courses via WKU’s highly flexible digital-based delivery model, since the high school is about 90 miles from WKU’s campus in Bowling Green. When fully deployed, Murphy says she expects 30 to 40 apprentices participating in the program. Grayson County Schools will be the second district to join, according to Murphy. Given Grayson County’s relative proximity to WKU, those students will take classes on campus as they work in their home school district.

“At the end of the day you’re living, learning, and working within the same district that you grew up in and that you’ll eventually teach in,” Murphy noted. “It’s an especially powerful tool for rural districts to develop their next generation of teachers and leaders.”

It’s also a potentially powerful tool for rural districts facing staffing challenges overall to supplement their workforce with apprentices. Apprentices are able to fill roles that can be difficult to hire and allow leaders to redeploy professional staff to more effective uses. What’s more, because the program is using Department of Labor resources, it’s giving them more staffing capacity without drawing down on local resources.

Murphy says that the response has been significant. WKU recently hosted district officials from across the state as well as leaders from other colleges and universities to discuss the program and how apprenticeships can bolster teacher education program enrollment and address shortages. Given the level of interest, she believes as many as 30 to 40 districts will be participating in the next 5 years. As Murphy pointed out, that’s momentum that teacher prep programs and the field could really use.

“We need to understand that we have lost the recruiting battle of getting students from K-12 into teaching,” Murphy noted. “We have spent the last three decades recruiting into STEM fields, into medicine and healthcare. We’ve opened our districts saying ‘Come talk to all our talented kids about your profession.’ The one profession we don’t talk about is teaching. The number of apprenticeships a year may be small, but the visibility of the program in a district can amplify and enhance the profession’s standing.”

“This is about reengaging education as a first-choice profession, a first-choice major,” Murphy concluded. “If we change that, we’ll change our ability to recruit all of the high-quality, highly trained professionals we really need in our schools.”

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