Skip to main content

America’s Future Teachers Could Be Hiding in Plain Sight

Innovative programs guide middle and high schoolers on a path through college and into teaching careers.

By Brian Weber  |  January 9, 2025

The United States suffers from a teacher shortage, and the solution might come from innovative programs designed to get middle and high school students thinking about a career in the classroom.

These grow-your-own efforts include nonprofit PDK International’s teacher recruitment program Educators Rising, which is active in 46 states. It exposes students to the profession with a structured curriculum, after-school activities, competitions to display their skills, and national conferences to network for the future and become part of a professional community.

As an extracurricular group known as a career and technical student organization, PDK supports career and technical education programs that exist in some form in every state.

“We’ve asked parents how likely (they) are to recommend teaching to their children. We are now at the lowest point ever—only 40%.”

—James Lane, CEO, PDK International

“It really is building out the whole wraparound system for a student that’s thinking about getting into the teacher pipeline,” PDK International CEO James Lane told a session on finding future teachers at NCSL’s Base Camp 2024.

And teachers are badly needed. As of last year, more than 400,000 teaching positions were unfilled or filled by teachers not fully certified for their assignment, according to the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization. In addition, 66% of districts nationwide lack qualified teaching candidates and are losing more; 51,000 teachers quit in 2023.

And young people are not being encouraged to fill those jobs, Lane says.

“We’ve asked parents how likely (they) are to recommend teaching to their children. We are now at the lowest point ever—only 40%,” Lane says, citing PDK’s annual poll of Americans’ attitudes toward public schools.

Salary is one reason, but others include issues around job stress, lack of respect, classroom management and working conditions in schools.

Lane says that sustainable solutions to those sobering statistics include, besides Educators Rising, teacher apprenticeship models unassociated with his program that allow students working in local school districts to get hands-on teaching experience.

“They learn while they earn their bachelor’s degree to become a teacher,” Lane says.

Creating opportunities to experience the profession is especially beneficial in high school because 60% of teaching students end up teaching within 20 miles of that school, Lane says. Many other teaching students end up within 20 miles of where they went to college.

“And we have seen that lead to amazing results, where kids have confidence the day they go into college that they’re going to have a job,” Lane says.

Ninety-eight percent of participants told Educators Rising that the program helped them better understand the teaching profession, and 99% said that high school programs increased their understanding of student development.

Ninety-two percent of students in the program say it helped them become more accomplished teachers. And it has the potential to increase diversity, with 52% of participants being students of color, Lane says.

Brian Weber is a Denver-based freelance writer.

Loading
  • Contact NCSL

  • For more information on this topic, use this form to reach NCSL staff.