DENVER, NC – North Carolina has a severe teacher shortage – the state started the school year more than 5,000 teachers short.1
But some places have learned you can grow your own.
In a webinar hosted by Higher Ed Works on May 16, Rachel Frye, the Southwest NC Teacher of the Year at East Lincoln High School, raved about the Teacher Cadet Program:
“The program is amazing, because I’m able to help high schoolers see what teaching actually looks like. So instead of looking at it from the children’s perspective, from the student perspective, they’re all of a sudden able to see teaching through a different lens,” Frye says.
Sponsored by the NC Foundation for Public School Children, the Teacher Cadet Program is geared toward high school juniors and seniors and consists of two classes that are often offered as honors courses.
Students visit preschools, elementary and middle schools – even special education classes. In the second course, they actually act as teachers in an elementary or middle school classroom.
“They’re on the ground level. They’re able to work with individual students. They’re able to work with small groups. They’re able to lead fully in the class,” Frye says.
“When they’re able to see what it really looks like, and they’re able to see the challenges of it and they choose to go into education regardless of those things, those are going to be the teachers who stay. And my hope for the profession rests inside of my Teacher Cadets.”
In fact, she says, a Teacher Cadet is teaching her own sixth-grader at a local middle school.
Frye has been working with cadets for nine years; she says she has 32 former cadets who are now teachers.
“It’s a program that works. Those children will come back. They will love their community. They’re already invested. The Teacher Cadet Program is one that I would recommend all of our districts looking into,” she says.
THE STATE ELIMINATED funding for the Teacher Cadet Program in 2011.
All its funds now come through the Foundation for Public School Children, which received a grant from the National Education Association (NEA) last year to focus on male and minority students in North Carolina’s most economically distressed counties.
Dr. Gwynne Shoaf, state coordinator for the program at the foundation, said 50 schools across the state offered the Teacher Cadet Program in 2022-23. The program has partnerships with the state’s universities, and especially with Appalachian State University.
The organizers know not every cadet will become a teacher, but that’s not the only aim. Some students might become guidance counselors or social workers – or simply well-informed voters.
“Our goal is not just to grow teachers,” Shoaf said. “Our secondary goal … is to develop an awareness in our students so they can become future advocates for public school education.”
More than 200 students came to the program’s annual conference in Raleigh in March, she said.
And 150 of them pledged to become teachers.
“There’s momentum behind this,” Shoaf said. “There’s momentum behind the grow-your-own movement.”
1 https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article271890032.html.
Victor S. Vance says
This is a very commendable program. But the problem of recruitment, selection and retention is complex. Many social, economic and political forces have made teacher shortages endemic prior to the 1970’s.
Once opportunities in the economy were made equal by law, the Teaching Occupation, which had benefitted from job discrimination against females, teaching lost its captive labor force.
Medical schools, law schools, Pharmacy schools and other professional schools were now accessible to women. As to be expected, women who were restricted to teaching, nursing and social work now had many more professional opportunities. These females, especially those who were able to score high on professional school admission tests, left teaching in large numbers.
The empirical evidence for the loss of a once captive labor force has been pretty convincing for the last fifty years.
Adding to the inability to both recruit and retain teachers in public education, is the low tax-low expenditure approach of state legislative assemblies. Over these some fifty years or longer. teachers have been asked to do more and more without relief from what they are already expected to do as teachers.
As a result, the teaching occupation will continue to recruit fewer from college education programs. retain fewer teachers that actually went into teaching, and suffer greater attrition among those who are able to seek and receive better job offers with higher salaries and better organizational working conditions.