Strong & Diverse Educator Pipeline
Outstanding Educators for Every Student
Excellent educators engage students, support their social and emotional development, and drive their learning and achievement. Ensuring that every student has access to effective educators requires comprehensive policy strategies to develop and maintain a strong and diverse teacher workforce. These policy strategies must address all stages of the educator pipeline:
Recruitment. Invest in recruiting aspiring teachers early, especially candidates of color willing to serve high-need subject areas and regions.
Preparation. Create competency-based stackable credentials that allow for multiple entry points into the profession and high-quality programs that meet the diverse needs and experiences of candidates across the entire state.
Mentoring & Induction. Ensure all educators are equipped to support diverse, equity-focused, and inclusive classrooms and can integrate SEL and trauma-informed supports into their practice.
Retention, leadership, and growth. Support diverse teacher leadership development pathways that start with a cooperating teacher role and principal residency and end in superintendence to increase diversity of PK-12 leaders.
All children are entitled to a high-quality education regardless of their race, zip code, or family income. It is critically important that we provide teachers and principals the support they need to help students reach their full potential.
Effective educators are the most important in-school factor impacting student success
Research shows that teachers impact academic achievement two to three times more than any other school factor. To ensure that school environments are ambitious, collaborative, engaging, and supportive of all students, schools also need highly-effective school leadership, support staff, and other educators.
Educator diversity is also vital to effectively serving our students of color. Teachers of color improve the success of the entire school, but particularly that of students of color. Research shows that having a teacher of color has particularly large benefits for students of color in terms of attendance, discipline, academic achievement, graduation, aspirations, and ultimate level of educational attainment.
Unfortunately, Illinois is struggling to maintain a robust, excellent, and diverse educator workforce. Since 2011, the number of unfilled educator positions in our state has consistently and drastically increased, and these unfilled positions disproportionately impact students already facing systemic disadvantages. Over two-thirds of unfilled positions in Illinois are concentrated in just four subject areas, two of which are special education and bilingual education. Black students in Illinois are three times as likely to attend a district with unfilled positions as White students. Schools with lower educator retention rates disproportionately impact students of color and students from low-income households. Ensuring every student in Illinois has access to equal educational opportunity requires that we address these inequities – all Illinois students deserve access to highly-effective and diverse educators.
Our Approach to a Strong & Diverse Educator Pipeline
We believe that every student deserves highly effective, culturally responsive educators who are prepared to support their academic, social, and emotional needs. All aspiring and current educators should have access to career exploration, preparation, induction, professional learning, and continued leadership opportunities. Illinois must cultivate a sustainable, high-quality, and inclusive educational environment that recruits, develops, supports, and retains educators that better reflect the diversity of our state.
At Advance Illinois, we:
Lead convenings of the Educator Pipeline Group, a set of stakeholders that work collaboratively to develop and advocate for a cohesive set of policy strategies to strengthen and diversify Illinois’ educator pipeline.
Advocate for state investment in affordability of teacher preparation programs including the Minority Teachers of Illinois (MTI) scholarship; proven pathways into the profession; and other programs that support highly-effective teachers who stay in the profession. Having teachers of color is imperative to further supporting the diverse identities and experiences of students. But in Illinois, teachers do not reflect the young people they teach, with students of color representing over half of all Illinois students in SY21-22 while only 18 percent of their teachers were of color that school year. The MTI scholarship program is a vital resource to support candidates of color in obtaining teacher certification and entering the teaching profession. Interested in learning more about these advocacy efforts? Reach out to Maty Ortega Cruz at: mortegacruz@advanceillinois.org.