Finding tomorrow’ teachers: Investigating school district plans for pre-collegiate GYO programs

Teacher shortages increase yearly while interest in the teaching profession seems to be at an all-time low. Policymakers are again seeing value in high school “grow your own” (GYO) teacher programs as a source of future teacher talent. Against the backdrop of career development models for teaching, we developed an instrument based on specific practices in the GYO literature and applied the instrument to review school district applications selected for statewide grant funding to evaluate the extent which proposed programs intended to enact such strategies. Applications reflected many of the recruitment, preparation and retention strategies found in the literature, but we also found three trends across the pool of applications that suggested GYO programs may miss their intended mark of increasing the number and diversity of teachers. First, application plans made limited use of current career models to guide recruiting efforts. Second, the application plans seemed unlikely to create diversity in the teacher talent pool. Third, plans for offering dual credit courses in high school gave little attention to aligning post-secondary academic pathways to undergraduate teacher certification. These results suggest that traditionally conceived pre-collegiate GYO programs need to be reimagined if they are going to be successful at mitigating teacher shortages.