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Danielle Sanderson Edwards

Danielle Sanderson Edwards, Matthew A. Kraft.

“Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs have recently emerged as a promising approach to expand teacher supply, address localized teacher shortages, and diversify the profession. However, little is known about the scale and design of GYO programs, which recruit and support individuals from the local community to become teachers. We conduct a quantitative content analysis to describe 94 GYO initiatives. We find that GYO is used broadly as an umbrella term to describe teacher pipeline programs with very different purposes, participants, and program features. Our results suggest that misalignment between some GYOs’ purposes and program features may inhibit their effectiveness. Finally, we propose a new typology to facilitate more precise discussions of GYO programs.

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Danielle Sanderson Edwards, Matthew A. Kraft, Alvin Christian, Christopher A. Candelaria.
We develop a unifying conceptual framework for understanding and predicting teacher shortages at the state, region, district, and school levels. We then generate and test hypotheses about geographic and subject variation in teacher shortages using data on unfilled teaching positions in Tennessee during the fall of 2019. We find that teacher staffing challenges are highly localized, causing shortages and surpluses to coexist. Aggregate descriptions of staffing challenges mask considerable variation between schools and subjects within districts. Schools with fewer local early-career teachers, smaller district salary increases, worse working conditions, and higher historical attrition rates have higher vacancy rates. Our findings illustrate why viewpoints about, and solutions to, shortages depend critically on whether one takes an aggregate or local perspective.

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