Durham Public Schools Big Idea: Homegrown Teachers

Grow Your Own: For Durham, By Durham

Durham’s Homegrown teaching fellows program

This is a joint proposal between Durham Public Schools, Student U and the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Our vision is to create a Durham Teaching Fellows program that recruits and prepares current Durham Public School students of color to become teachers who will work for Durham Public Schools upon completion of their college programs. We ground this proposal in our collective understanding of the need, the opportunity and research on national models that have started to show promise in diversifying the teaching workforce. We enumerate our dreams below.

The Need and Challenge:

Our district currently serves 42% Black students, 33% Latinx students and 19% white students. Our teacher workforce is 40% Black, 3% Latinx and 55% White.
The Durham Public School Strategic Plan #3 focuses on attracting and retaining outstanding educators and staff. Specifically, our goal is to increase the Latino teacher cohort from 3 percent to 10% by 2023.
Research supports that people of color are less likely to become teachers because of the low wages in the profession and the high cost of higher education.

The opportunity:

The following mechanisms have been used across the country to increase recruitment, preparation and retainment of teachers of color:

Underwriting the cost of teacher preparation in exchange for a commitment to teaching in high-need schools or subject areas, typically for at least 4 years.
Partnering with local teacher preparation programs, including those at minority-serving institutions, to coordinate student teaching placements and vet candidates for hire before they graduate.
Funding teacher residencies—partnerships between districts and universities that subsidize and improve teachers’ training to teach in high-need schools and in high-demand subject areas.
Offering comprehensive induction to support teachers of color in their first years of teaching.
Implementing Grow Your Own programs at the district level in partnership with universities and other partners to hyperfocus on creating pathways for people of color to become educators.

The Proposal

Our vision is for Durham to create a local teaching fellows programs. This program will identify students during their junior or senior year of high school and will provide students with the following opportunities:

A structured service-learning class during high school designed by DPS and Student U that will focus on: understanding the educational landscape of Durham, the teaching profession, culturally relevant pedagogy, the intersection of teaching and racial and social justice, and will provide students with weekly time volunteering in schools in Durham Public Schools and Student U’s after-school programs.
Tuition supplement to ensure that students graduate debt-free.
Yearly teaching residency in Student U’s 5-week summer academy to supplement the number of teaching hours completed prior to the first year of teaching.
Guaranteed employment in DPS upon successful completion of school and passing required teacher licensure assessments.
Cohort-based experiential learning opportunities throughout college to supplement academic learning and provide increased exposure to varied models of education throughout the US and abroad.
Sustained professional development and comprehensive year of support in a cohort model until the end of the first year of teaching supported by Student U and DPS.

Combined, we believe that such a comprehensive model will position us to reach our goals of a teaching workforce that is more reflective of the demographic makeup of our District. This is an important goal and particularly encouraging because research shows that teachers of color improve students of color outcomes by way of increased attendance, high school completion and college attendance rates. These goals support DPS’ long term goals for each and every student in our community.

Resource Needs

This program will require a significant investment over time to pilot the program and plan for scale. We anticipate the following needs:

Partnerships with Schools of Education to support this program. Of specific interest are NCCU, UNC, NCSU, Duke, UNCG, ECU, UNC Pembroke, and Elizabeth City State University. These are prioritized by the number of teachers who work for DPS who currently come from those institutions. A long-term goal would include partnerships with all 17 UNC school system universities.
Financial resources to ensure students can graduate debt free. This can be accomplished through the partner organizations providing scholarships through their own mechanisms, foundations and corporations sponsoring the program and eventually by state funding mechanisms.
Financial resources to provide stipends for the residency components of the model and professional development.
A staff person to coordinate this program over time that is a shared employee between DPS, Student U and connects all the university partners. We do not anticipate this cost until year 3-4 when we have multiple cohorts of students participating in the program.

Budget