A publication of the Association of California School Administrators

Meeting local staffing needs with negotiated agreements

Labor unions and management can collaborate on ways to support new teachers in residency

By Conni Campbell and Amy Bennett | January | February 2025

Many school leaders started another school year understaffed and with under-prepared teachers in their classrooms. Districts and labor unions are well aware of the educator shortage affecting schools nationwide at all levels, including paraeducators, substitute teachers, credentialed teachers and school counselors. At the same time, fewer candidates are choosing to earn teaching credentials and other educator certifications. School districts, teacher preparation programs, labor unions and state agencies are hard at work to attract more educators to the profession and staff their schools with qualified educators who will stay in the profession, are diverse and reflect the demographics of the school community. This has proven to be a formidable task, and to accomplish these priorities, it is necessary for labor unions and school districts to think creatively together about how to find solutions to this critical issue that leaves students underserved.

Incentivizing educators to the workforce has been a priority of U.S. education policy and for the field for more than two decades. Some reports and education authors opine that differentiated compensation could be a valuable tool for hiring and retaining teachers in hard-to-staff subject areas or schools, an opinion met with significant debate, especially from labor groups. Less controversial may be incentives for teachers in training.

The U.S. Department of Education sees teachers as the backbone of our democracy and adds that “… a great teacher in every classroom is one of the most important resources we can provide students. This is not possible without a shared commitment to recruiting, developing and retaining highly qualified teachers.” The good news is, states across the nation have designed effective pathways for educator training and removed barriers meant to entice more candidates to earn those credentials, especially for hard-to-fill positions like math, science, special education and bilingual education. Now is the time for labor groups and their institutions to work creatively and collaboratively on accessing these effective pathways and overcoming their staffing challenges. What if we could have two teachers in classrooms where the learning needs were the most significant? What if we could prepare teacher candidates in a way that ensures they are fully prepared on their first day on the job, represent the very community they are serving, and remain in the district for years to come?

Residency explained One workforce strategy to staffing is educator residency programs. Educator residency is an opportunity for an individual who is earning their credential to co-teach in a mentor teacher’s classroom for an entire school year, gradually taking over classroom responsibilities, until they have assumed the entirety of the teaching role which completes their credential program. Upon completion of the residency year, the credentialed educator gains full-time employment in the district. Besides the elongated experience that gives candidates the full scope of the responsibilities of the job, residency includes a stipend paid to each resident throughout their year in the classroom.

Each residency program determines an appropriate stipend for their context, but currently in California, and in other states across the U.S., a resident receives a stipend of anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000, primarily through grant funding provided by the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Coupled with other opportunities to earn an income at the school site, such as substitute teaching or as support personnel, the stipend makes earning the credential accessible to more candidates, and especially candidates from lower socio-economic backgrounds who might otherwise find it impossible to participate in certification. Most importantly, residents are prioritized for employment at their school of residence after completion of the program, resulting in new teachers already having a year of mentoring and classroom experience on day one of their new job. Because teacher certification and employment come together in this particular pathway, the decisions of how a resident will be employed on campus often calls for negotiated agreements with the labor unions.

An equitable system The inequities in the traditional certification system for educators have left many candidates out of the opportunity to join the workforce. In fact, research confirms that lack of affordable pathways is a significant barrier to diverse candidates (Steiner, Elizabeth et al., 2022). In response, a teacher residency pathway provides a living stipend during clinical practice as well as opportunities to earn additional income at the school site, compared to traditional student teaching that includes no earned wages, and in fact, requires candidates to pay the teacher preparation program for their clinical experience credits.

It is well known that a diverse school staff has been proven to have a positive impact on student achievement and well-being (Carver-Thomas, 2018). Nearly 60 percent of teaching residents identify as people of color, three times the national average for teachers. One of the characteristics of educator residency is strategic recruitment of teachers who identify with the school community and are best poised to meet their needs. Additionally, residents who spend an entire school year embedded in the mission and culture of the school community are specifically and intentionally prepared to be the next full time staff member for that employer. In short, residency programs aim to remove the barriers to becoming an educator for individuals for whom the barriers are the most prohibitive, and to assist schools and districts to recruit and retain the most effective workforce for the specific needs of their community.

Examples from the field Many districts and their labor unions representing both certificated and classified staff have been successful in providing a residency experience for teacher candidates that includes financial support. In these examples, the financial support includes employment on campus and a stipend to assist with the costs associated with certification, attracting a workforce of individuals who may otherwise be left behind. These opportunities would not have been possible without the collaborative negotiated agreements between districts and their labor groups who work together to determine wages, benefits, evaluation and hours of employment. How certificated and classified staff are assigned, among other things, can also be part of the scope of negotiations. When hiring a resident teacher as a paraprofessional, a tutor, an impact teacher or a substitute teacher, how their employment integrates with their role as a resident teacher and how both roles will be satisfied and maintained, must be clearly understood.

In Central California, Fresno Unified School District has adopted an innovative approach to addressing staffing shortages by recruiting their own classified employees to become resident teachers. This strategy leverages the fact that many of these employees are community members and often graduates of the district's schools, making them well-aligned with the school sites and well-suited to transition into credentialed teaching roles. By implementing a paraeducator residency model, the district creates a targeted pipeline to fill staffing gaps while fostering local talent. Employees who enter the teacher residency program continue in their existing roles and complete credential coursework in the evenings. Unlike traditional credential candidates, who must often leave their jobs to engage in full-time student teaching, the residency model allows paraeducators to maintain their employment and benefits while gradually assuming more teaching responsibilities within their own classrooms. Additionally, Fresno Unified does not limit this initiative to current classified employees. Incoming residents can also be employed as paraeducators while completing their schooling. This approach helps target not only teacher shortages but also paraeducator shortages, creating a more comprehensive solution.

This initiative, launched by Fresno Unified in 2019, addresses a critical issue in teacher preparation: the inequity faced by individuals who cannot afford to forego employment during their training. By negotiating a side letter agreement with their classified bargaining unit, Fresno Unified ensures that paraprofessionals aspiring to become teachers can retain their jobs and health benefits while earning their credential alongside experienced mentor teachers. They collectively defined the position, engaged in open dialogue, and forged a partnership around the common goal of advancing opportunities for union members while simultaneously improving support to students. This side letter agreement, initially focused on paraeducators in special education, has since expanded to include instructional assistants in transitional kindergarten, reflecting the model’s growing success and adaptability.

Another example of successful negotiated agreements on behalf of the educator workforce is from a K-12 school district and university partnership in Sonoma County. Different from Fresno Unified, their grow-your-own model for educator recruitment allows former paraprofessionals to retain their health benefits while serving their year as resident teachers, a benefit only available because of collaborative work between a school district and their labor unions. In this model, since the residents did not retain their employment as paraeducators, they are earning income as substitute teachers, fulfilling a substitute teacher staffing shortage at the same time they are earning their teaching credential. During the year-long program, residents are allowed to serve as a substitute teacher up to 2 1/2 days per week in the first semester of the program, becoming less frequent semester two as they take on more and more of their own classroom teaching responsibilities. The added benefit for the resident is a variety of experiences and collaboration with multiple professionals on campus in preparation to become a staff member the following year. Like these districts, the field has multiple examples of positive collaboration and fruitful agreements with their labor unions who have agreed that fortifying the workforce with well-prepared teachers is of critical importance for students.

A wholistic educator workforce strategy Educator residency is a wholistic educator workforce strategy that is mutually beneficial for school districts and labor partners. It fills multiple shortages within school systems as we prepare 21st century educators from our local communities. When this process is implemented systematically, many staffing issues are resolved and student needs are met, and with an overall savings to the school district by eliminating costly teacher turnover. In California, for example, a credential candidate must complete 600 hours of clinical practice under the tutelage of a qualified mentor. Those are hours where two educators, rather than one, are meeting the needs of the students in that classroom, resulting in academic, social-emotional and behavioral benefits for students. Across an entire school year, the resident teacher has many hours left to perfect their craft and to fulfill other necessary roles on campus. Providing residents with paid positions, such as substitute teaching or the paraprofessional role, not only helps shortages in those areas, but also makes educator certification more accessible to candidates who would have otherwise found the barriers to entering the profession too steep to overcome. What makes residency attractive to candidates is the ability to earn a living while earning their certification.

Labor unions and management have a unique opportunity to look closely at the advantages educator residency provides and the long-term benefits of this strategic staffing model.

Educator residency also meets each component of U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s vision for supporting and elevating the teaching profession, as explained on the U.S. Department of Education website, www.ed.gov/teaching. He focuses on three areas:

Recruiting diverse, high-qualified teachers into the profession and investing in teacher pipeline programs.
Supporting educators’ professional development to ensure our nation’s students are receiving high-quality education.
Investing in strategies to retain high-quality educators and keeping them in the profession long-term.

To meet these three priorities, the Department of Education commits to the following guiding strategies:

1. Investing in a strong and diverse teacher pipeline by increasing access to affordable, comprehensive, evidence-based preparation programs.

2. Supporting teachers in earning initial or additional certification in high-demand areas like special education and bilingual education.

3. Helping teachers pay off their student loans including through loan forgiveness and service scholarship programs.

4. Providing teachers and students with the resources they need to succeed including mentoring for early career teachers, high quality curricular materials and access to guidance counselors and other specialists for students.

5. Creating opportunities for teacher advancement and leadership, including participating in distributive leadership and serving as instructional coaches and mentors.

Another consideration is the long history of concern regarding teacher-to-student ratios. The significance of this topic is evidenced by the presence of teacher-to-student ratio language in nearly every collective bargaining agreement. Implementing educator residency has the additional positive impact of lowering the adult-to-student ratio in each of those classrooms, reforming the traditional one-to-many educational model by welcoming resident teachers as co-teachers. Co-teaching, defined in the pre-service context as “two teachers (a cooperating teacher and a teacher candidate) working together with groups of students; sharing the planning, organization, delivery, and assessment of instruction” (Heck, Bacharach, Mann & Ofstedal, 2005), offers significant advantages for students. The benefits of co-teaching include improved student achievement, increased individualized attention and enhanced classroom management. Research also reveals that students in classrooms with pre-service co-teachers achieved higher scores on standardized tests compared to those with single or traditional student teachers, and that students in co-taught environments reported more positive classroom experiences, noting timely support, increased opportunities for engagement, exposure to varied teaching styles and more creative lesson plans (Bacharach, Heck, and Dahlberg 2010). The opportunity for co-teaching through educator residency not only addresses the workforce shortage and the inequities in traditional teacher preparation, but also offers research-based benefits to students and educators.

Time for transformation Through educator residency, those engaged in collective bargaining have an opportunity to transform education with a focus on equitable practices and prioritize what is in the best interest of their students and educators. When schools reopened after the pandemic in 2021, Cardona messaged that this was our moment as educators and leaders to transform our education system so that it serves all students, particularly those historically and presently underserved. Labor unions and management have a unique opportunity to look closely at the advantages educator residency provides and the long-term benefits of this strategic staffing model.

Also in 2021, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing funded an initiative to support the implementation of educator residency across the state. The Statewide Residency Technical Assistance Center (SRTAC) is a collective effort providing complimentary and differentiated support to district and university partnerships to plan and implement teacher and school counselor residency. To date, the CTC has awarded a total of 245 residency grants for district and university partnerships to plan, implement and expand the residency option for their teacher and counselor candidates, and just last year, SRTAC supported 77 partnerships to start their residency programs. With and without grant funding, districts are working closely with their labor partners and with SRTAC to prepare teachers for hard-to-fill positions and decrease the number of under-prepared teachers employed on their campuses.

Preparing educators in partnership — through residency — prioritizes educators-in-training by providing the most supportive entry to the profession, prioritizes students with additional support and prioritizes families through fully credentialed educators who understand their school community on their first day of employment. Sounds like an arrangement we can all get behind.

References Bacharach, N.; Heck, Teresa W.; and Dahlberg, Kathryn, "Changing the Face of Student Teaching Through Co-Teaching" (2010). Teacher Development Faculty Publications. 1. https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/ed_facpubs/1

Heck, T., Bacharach, N., Mann, B., & Ofstedal, K. (2005, February). Co-teaching Workshops: A platform for enhancing collaboration in student teaching. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Teacher Educators, Chicago, Illinois.

Simons, C. (2022). Getting schools back to pre-COVID levels. The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/10/turn-covid-setbacks-into-opportunity-cardona-urges/

U.S. Department of Education website, https://www.ed.gov/teaching, accessed September 11,2024.

Zhao, Yong (2021). Learners Without Borders: New Learning Pathways for All Students. Corwin Books.

Conni Campbell, Ed.D., and Amy Bennett are lifelong educators and coordinators at Santa Clara County Office of Education working in the Educator Preparation Programs department and serve the Statewide Residency Technical Assistance Center (SRTAC), assisting districts and their university partners to implement educator residency as a sustainable model for equitable teacher preparation in California.