“Grow-your-own” (GYO) programs seek to address teacher shortages by recruiting locally. Interest in these programs—which recruit high school students, college students, or career changers—has ballooned over the past decade. The programs offer an attractive model because teacher shortages are typically a local problem and recruiting locally is more likely to yield teachers who are demographically representative of the student body. These factors can support student success, as local teacher shortages often create coordination challenges in schools and increase the workload of current teachers, as well as the fact that students benefit from having a teacher who looks like them and understands their background.
This report from the Urban Institute examines a GYO program in Maryland called the Teacher Academy of Maryland. The effort itself exposes high school students to teaching as a career through a four-course career and technical education sequence and allows them to dually enroll in courses with credits counting toward high school graduation and a two- or four-year teaching degree. Among other things, the analysis of TAM aims to provide insight into several student outcomes, including high school and college graduation, becoming a public school teacher in Maryland, and earnings.