I have a new op-ed in the Albuquerque Journal about New Mexico’s recent teacher recruitment bills. The state struggles with teacher shortages, specifically teachers of color. Six in ten students of color will go through their entire schooling without having a teacher who looks like them. As you’ve read in Katrina Boone, Justin Trinidad, and Cara Jackson‘s work, that’s a BIG problem.
The state is investing $10 million in two new programs to address this shortage, but I argue that they’re divvying up their dollars the wrong way:
The bulk of this investment is going to the Teacher Preparation Affordability Act, which targets new prospective teachers. A much smaller amount of money is allocated to the Grow Your Own Teachers Act, which focuses on current education assistants. But this is the wrong way to divvy up the pot: The state should be banking more on current education assistants and less on prospective teachers.
Education assistants are the perfect population to recruit from to address teacher diversity and retention concerns. Nationally, paraeducators – like New Mexico’s education assistants – are more likely to be bilingual, born outside the U.S., and nonwhite than current teachers. And they’ve already demonstrated their interest in working in schools. This type of locally focused recruitment strategy isn’t new: Former Public Education Secretary Karen Trujillo, whose dismissal was announced last month, led one such program out of New Mexico State University. But the Grow Your Own Act is particularly promising; it could be the incentive that pushes education assistants into lead teacher positions. According to a recent survey of current New Mexico education assistants, the primary barriers to completing licensure positions are time and money. But if each education assistant enrolled in the program uses the full scholarship amount available to them, that’s only enough to prepare 17 new teachers. By way of comparison, last year, New Mexico had 740 teacher vacancies. The state needs to do much more to recruit teachers of color, and this plan isn’t it.
Read the full piece in the Albuquerque Journal.
