The Success Network: Supporting Partnerships and Coalitions that Strengthen Student Opportunities and Outcomes

A few short weeks ago, the Illinois Education and Career Success Network wrapped up its 11th annual conference. This year’s convening, Awareness to Action: Promoting Equity in Education and Careers, was targeted to secondary and postsecondary education partners, workforce development entities, community-based organizations, advocacy organizations, state agency partners, and national partners who are interested in equitably increasing the number of individuals with a college degree or postsecondary credential in Illinois. Across various sessions, attendees delved into topics such as access to quality education, workforce development, and eliminating systemic barriers that hinder opportunities.  

 “It was wonderful to see over 360 participants from across the State come together to learn, collaborate, and share best practices,” said Cheryl Flores, Director of Community Engagement at Advance Illinois. "It was inspiring to be with so many leaders with such a strong commitment to ensuring students are supported as they progress to and through postsecondary education and into the workforce.”  

 In 2009, the Illinois P-20 Council,  a statewide council that makes recommendations to the Governor, Illinois General Assembly, and state agencies for developing a sustainable statewide system of high-quality education and support from birth through adulthood, set a goal for Illinois to increase the number of individuals with high-quality college degrees and postsecondary credentials to 60% by 2025. While the P-20 Council and state agencies monitor progress against this goal and advocate for state policies that support it, it was clear that local effort and leadership was essential if Illinois was going to move the needle on getting students to and through postsecondary and into the workforce.  

 So in 2013, Advance Illinois, Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University (EdSystems), and the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) collaborated to launch the 60 by 25 Network in 2013. The goal? To advance equitable postsecondary attainment in the state by working in partnership with state and local leaders to develop actionable strategies grounded in relevant data, research and best practice.  

 Eleven years later—and having renamed itself the Illinois Education and Career Success Network to make clear that it is committed to change beyond 2025– the Success Network supports communities around the state, working with stakeholders to gather and use data to set goals and monitor impact and collaborate with partners to develop sensible strategies to increase meaningful and equitable postsecondary attainment. The annual Success Network conference allows these networks and communities to come together to share best practices and lessons learned. And the interactive Leadership Community Dashboard helps communities visualize regional educational trend data, and group and compare their information with state averages.  

This year’s conference also spotlighted some timely and high-profile issues. Advance Illinois delivered presentations on "Why Illinois Needs an Equitable, Adequate, and Stable Higher Education Funding Approach" and "The State of Our Educator Pipeline: Strengths, Opportunities, and the Early Impact of COVID-19”. In the higher education funding session, Advance Illinois Senior Policy Associate Eyob Villa-Moges and Senior Policy Advisor Kelsey Bakken discussed challenges in Illinois’ current approach to funding its public universities, and walked the audience through recommendations being considered by the Commission on Equitable Public University Funding to make college more affordable, effective, and more equitable. [NOTE: The Commision has since released its recommendations and propose to increase overall funding to ensure each university has the resources they need to support their unique student body and mission, and to allocate new funds to universities furthest from full funding.  

“Illinois has disinvested in its public higher education system for two decades, and even in years when it attempted to increase funding, it did so using an historically inequitable system that has been driven more by political negotiation than student need. Sadly, the status quo does not serve either students or the state well," Villa-Moges said. “The Commission’s recommendations give us a blueprint to do better, enabling institutions to meet the challenges of educating their student body, both today, and tomorrow." 

And there may not be a hotter topic in the state than ongoing shortages in teachers, paraprofessionals and school counselors and social workers, and the reality that our educators do not come close to matching the diversity of our student population. Jim O’Connor, Project Director at Advance Illinois, shed some light on where we are making progress and where we still have challenges during a presentation “The State of Our Educator Pipeline 2023: Strengths, Opportunities, and the Early Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic”.  Jim noted that the supply of new teachers and principals has increased in recent years (and at a faster rate than the country as a whole), as has the diversity of candidates going into the profession, and districts have added over 5,000 new positions. However, many more educators are using emergency licensure (short-term approvals and provisional licenses), and the supply of paraprofessionals has declined.  As importantly, educator shortages are not the same regionally or by position. Vacancies are concentrated mainly in remote rural and urban districts, and vacancy rates are especially high in Special Education and Bilingual Education. Finally, and sadly, vacancies disproportionately impact Black and Latinx students, students from low-income households, English learners, and students with IEPs. As part of this session, Briana Morales, 2023 Illinois Teacher of the Year and Josh Stafford, Superintendent, Vienna High School, presented teacher retention strategies that are working for their school communities.  

 “If we want all students to have the option to earn a postsecondary degree or credential, we have to care about everything from preschool and home visiting to the strength and diversity of our educators to the affordability of our community colleges and universities and their ability to support every student to and through school,” said Robin Steans, President of Advance Illinois.  “And that takes teamwork. So we look forward to the work ahead and the many and powerful partnerships and coalitions and networks that are working everyday to make sure students have strong opportunities and outcomes.”

Strengthening the Illinois Educator Pipeline Should Involve Investing in the Student Teaching Experience

Student teaching is a vital part of an educator’s preparation. The experience gives them a chance to practice and hone their craft with the support of an experienced (cooperating) teacher.   

There’s room to improve this experience in Illinois. Student teachers and cooperating teachers face challenges as a result of being unpaid for their services. Given the backdrop of persistent teacher shortages in various subject areas and geographies, and the disparate impact this has on students across lines of race and income, it is timely and right to address this issue.    

Challenge: Student teaching poses a financial barrier for too many prospective teachers, especially prospective teachers of color. 

For many teaching candidates, student teaching means financial hardship during the 10-16 week period spent in school practicing their craft. It can mean cutting back on the part-time or full-time work necessary to pay for their living costs. A recent report from Teach Plus highlights how even adults already working as paraprofessionals or teaching assistants often need to take a leave of absence during their student teaching experience, requiring them to go without critical pay and benefits.    

The economic implications of being a student teacher have an impact on who makes it into the teaching profession. We know from research that affordability is a barrier into teaching generally, but especially for students of color, who are already sorely underrepresented in the educator workforce and who make a positive difference in classrooms. The more debt students take on, the less likely they are to go into lower wage professions like teaching, with higher education debt disproportionately impacting Black Teacher candidates.    

Challenge: Few cooperating teachers receive any compensation or support for their role, despite their importance to the quality of the student teaching experience. 

Since school districts generally do not compensate cooperating teachers for the additional responsibilities involved, experienced teachers are not exactly clamoring to take it on.    

This is unfortunate since cooperating teachers play a critical role in developing the next generation of educators. Being a cooperating teacher takes extra time, effort, patience, and mentoring skills. We know from research that teaching candidates placed with highly-effective cooperating teachers end up teaching like a third-year teacher in just their first year in the classroom.  That’s significant! 

Yet, 72% of educator preparation program staff report that it has become even more difficult to find cooperating teachers since COVID. The National Council on Teacher Quality’s 2020 review of about 1,200 prep programs found that only 10% of prep programs take an active role in screening for any cooperating teacher skills or qualifications. From our own survey of teacher preparation program staff, we estimate that less than 20% of cooperating teachers receive training for the role.   

Investments in enhancing and making the student teaching experience more affordable can help expand our pipeline and direct more candidates to the districts and schools that need them.  

According to our recent report, The State of the Educator Pipeline, 2023, Illinois is dealing with an educator shortage in particular subject areas and geographies. The report’s findings underscore the need for strategic investments in the teacher pipeline that will help students from early childhood education (ECE) to 12th grade, along with students with special needs, students of color, and English Learners in particular, by addressing these challenges head on: 

• 3,532 unfilled teaching positions in Illinois in 2023, with 1/3 of them in Special Education 

• An additional 3,359 teachers are teaching on provisional licenses or short-term approvals, including 16% of bilingual teachers.   

• In 2023, about 61,000 students in Illinois did not have a fully certified teacher leading their classrooms. This disproportionately affected schools with more students from low-income households, Black and Latinx students. In fact, 35% of the state’s Black students are learning in high-vacancy schools (schools where 5% or more of their teaching positions are unfilled), compared to 15% of all students.  

Student teaching is a vital part of building pipelines in hard-to-staff schools and districts.  We know from Illinois research that the median distance from where someone went to high school and ends up teaching is 13 miles. We also know that  teaching candidates often wind up at the school where they completed their student teaching. Research from Washington state showed that 23% of teachers teach in the same district where they grew up but 37% of teachers teach in the same district where they did student teaching. If we could be more deliberate about where teaching candidates do their student teaching, we could specifically address the need for teachers in schools with the greatest need.   

Districts that deliberately invest in their student teacher pipeline are seeing those investments pay off.  An example is Rockford Public Schools District 205. Student teachers in Rockford Public Schools can earn from $6,250 to $20,000 depending on whether they are student teaching 16 or 32 weeks respectively.  Importantly, student teachers are placed with the most effective teachers in the district.  And these cooperating teachers can earn $10,000 annually and complete these duties as part of broader suite of Multi-Classroom Teacher Leader roles. Those selected to be cooperating teachers must be passionate about growing teachers, have demonstrated strong instructional skills, and  have a history of taking on informal and formal leadership roles within their school.  And the program is working. 76% of the program completers have reached or are on track tenure and the district has expanded its investments so that there are now 18 pre-service teachers in the full-year student teaching program.    

There is more Illinois can do to expand paid student teacher opportunities and strengthen compensation and supports for our cooperating teachers. This legislative session, Representative Faver-Dias introduced HB5414, which would: 

• Pay all student teachers in the state $10,000 and pay cooperating teachers $2,000. If full funding is not possible, priority would be given to student teachers with the highest demonstrated financial need, pursuing licensure in high need subject areas like early childhood, SPED, and bilingual and completing their student teaching in high need schools.  

• Ensure that participating cooperating teachers complete training that aligns with the state’s training for mentor teachers. 

• Prohibit teacher preparation programs from maintaining a policy that student teachers can't be paid.  

• Require an evaluation to better understand how to improve the program.   

If we pay student teachers and their cooperating teachers, ensure that our cooperating teachers are consistently trained, and encourage student teacher placement in high need subject areas and schools, the state will be strengthening a critical part of its teacher pipeline, responding to shortage areas, supporting its continued growth, and increasing its diversity. Taken together, this investment will move us closer to ensuring all PK-12 students have the teachers they need to fully realize their potential.     

Jim O’Connor is a Project Director for Advance Illinois.