 Good afternoon. I'm Jessica Cartichon, and I'd like to welcome you to this one-hour webinar co-hosted by the National Urban League and the Learning Policy Institute. I want to let audience members know that this webinar is open to the public and is being recorded. The recording will be emailed to you in a few days and available at the link just shared in the chat. We also like to remind viewers that this is the second in a series, and the previous webinar, Making S's Equity Promise Real, can be viewed at this link. Please sign up for our mailing list to receive a notification or check our website's upcoming events page for future webinars. Today's agenda will begin with a presentation by Danny Espinosa. We'll then hear from Raigel Masaro and then Roy Jones, followed by a moderated discussion. And finally, we'll have some time to respond to questions we've received from the audience. We encourage you to submit your questions through the presentation in the chat box at the lower right of your screen. Please make sure all participants are selected from the drop-down menu to ensure that we see your questions. I will now turn the webinar over to Danny Espinosa, a research and policy assistant with the Learning Policy Institute, and the lead author of Taking the Long View, State Efforts to Solve Teacher Shortages by Strengthening the Profession. Danny? Thank you, Jessica. My name is Danny Espinosa, and at the Learning Policy Institute, we're focused on bringing high-quality research to communities and policymakers in order to improve education policy and practice, and ultimately improve learning opportunities for children. A major focus of LPI's work over the past few years has been studying teacher shortages. Today, I'll talk about strategies for solving teacher shortages in underserved communities. In particular, we'll discuss why teacher shortages matter, what causes teacher shortages, and what states, districts, and schools can do to address their teacher shortages. As many of you may be experiencing in your communities, and as we've seen in headlines across the country, many states, districts, and schools are facing teacher shortages. Our research shows that schools across the country were short at least 100,000 qualified teachers last year. Almost every state is experiencing shortages in certain subjects. Shortages are particularly severe, and special education with 48 states in D.C. have reported shortages, followed by math and science. And depending on state demographics, more than 30 states also reported shortages in bilingual and English learner education. Here are a number of reasons why the shortage of fully qualified teachers matters. In addition to challenges with sustaining and building on school improvement efforts, opportunities for students can be limited as a result of teacher shortages. When districts have a hard time filling vacancies, they may cancel courses, increase class sizes, staff classes with long-term substitutes, or hire underprepared teachers, all of which impact student learning. In addition, it becomes challenging to develop student-teacher relationships or to provide multiple pathways to prepare students for college and career. One of the consequences of shortages is an increase in the percentage of uncertified teachers, which has a disproportionate impact on schools serving predominantly students of color. The most recent data by the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights data collection shows that between 2014 and 2016, the proportion of uncertified teachers grew by nearly 50 percent. Furthermore, schools with high minority student enrollment are nearly four times as likely to employ uncertified teachers compared with low minority schools. That is a cause for concern because not only are teachers without full preparation generally worse for student outcome, they also only act as a band-aid solution. Research indicates these teachers leave at two to three times the rates of fully prepared teachers, creating the leaky bucket phenomenon that further contributes to shortages. It is important to note that shortages are often a teacher turnover issue, rather than a pipeline into the profession issue. Teacher turnover is especially high in schools predominantly serving students of color. The top two bars of this graph show that turnover rates for teachers overall are 70 percent higher in schools with more students of color than in schools with few students of color. And the turnover rates in those schools are even higher from math, science, special education, and teachers who enter the field through an alternative certification pathway. It's important for states, districts, and schools to know why teachers are leaving. Based on our analysis of the Department of Education's nationally representative schools and staffing survey, most teachers surveyed stated that dissatisfaction of some sort was a very or extremely important reason for why they left teaching, that includes dissatisfaction with testing and accountability measures, or dissatisfaction with the administration and with poor working conditions. And in addition to having a stable teacher workforce, many schools and districts recognize the benefits of having a diverse workforce. Research findings show that all students benefit from a racially diverse teacher workforce. Teachers of color can boost academic performance, attendance rates, and school climate. They may also improve satisfaction and decrease turnover for other teachers of color. However, we found that in addition to some of the issues for why teachers leave that I discussed on the last slide, there are some conditions that are unique to teachers of color. For example, teachers of color tend to work in under-resourced schools, which are also schools that serve the most students of color. Teachers of color are also twice as likely to enter teaching through an alternative certification pathway, which is associated with having high turnover rates. However, it's important to note that when we compare turnover rates for teachers of color and white teachers in the same kinds of schools, their turnover rates are essentially the same. In other words, teachers of color aren't more inclined to turnover. They're just more likely to teach in high turnover schools, where turnover rates are high for all teachers. Improving the conditions in those schools is important for supporting their retention, but can also, of course, improve the learning conditions for students. How stick can states and districts productively address their teacher shortages? The recent reports by LPI highlight six strategies states and districts can use to address their shortages, shown here, but without undermining teacher quality or lowering certification requirements. In the interest of time, I'll only be covering the first couple of strategies. However, they are all included in the report, which I encourage you to check out on our website. So first, teacher residencies. Teacher residencies are a model of teacher preparation that recruits candidates to work with paid apprentices to skilled expert teachers for a full year while completing highly integrated coursework. Residents typically receive financial support in exchange for the promise to teach between three to five years. The model also involves a tight partnership between the university and district, so that training is grounded in the district context and meets the hiring needs of the district. Research on teacher residencies shows that graduates of these programs tend to have higher retention rates than their peers, are effective teachers, and increase the diversity of the local teacher workforce. Another effective strategy are Grow Your Own programs, which focus on recruiting members of the community who reflect the local diversity and are more likely to continue teaching in the community they already call home. They include a variety of approaches, such as 2 plus 2 programs, that allow candidates to begin teacher preparation at a community college with clear course articulation agreements to then complete teacher preparation and credential requirements at a full year institution. Grow Your Own programs have shown positive results in recruiting and retaining diverse teachers in the hardest to staff schools. A review of a national program found participants remained in teaching, longer than the typical beginning teacher, and taught in high-need, urban, and rural schools at a very high rate. Our report highlights how a number of states are providing increased opportunities for residencies and Grow Your Own programs. A similar map along the state examples are included for each of the six strategies in the report. For example, in the past couple of years, California has invested $45 million to provide a classified staff teacher training program, a type of Grow Your Own program that is currently serving over 2,000 candidates and is offering up to $20,000 per candidate to help pay for the cost of teacher preparation. Another strategy to address teacher shortages is loan forgiveness and service scholarships at the federal and state level. These are particularly important for recruiting and retaining teachers of color who often burden with significant student loan debt in addition to often receiving low salaries. Regarding low salaries, US teachers make about 20% less than other college graduates, and that amount grows to 30% by mid-career. In fact, in more than 30 states, a mid-career teacher heading a family of four is eligible for government assistance. Our report highlights how a number of states provide increased salaries, loan forgiveness, or service scholarships of significant amounts to teacher candidates. For example, Nevada recently launched the Teach Nevada Scholarship, which offers a $24,000 scholarship for individuals to help fund their teacher preparation in exchange for teaching in high-need subjects or schools for five years. I wanted to conclude with one final thought, which is that while addressing teacher shortages requires significant investments, the cost of not making this investment is even greater. In addition to the cost in terms of student achievement and school accountability, which are significant in and of themselves, turnover carries real financial costs between $4,000 per teacher in a rural district and more than $20,000 in an urban district. So high turnover in an urban district can cost districts millions of dollars in recruiting, onboarding, HR, and other training costs. To assess the cost and savings in your district, LPI provides this calculator on our website. I'll close by encouraging you to visit our website where we have a series of research reports, briefs, and interactive tools that go in-depth on some of the points I've made here and how states and districts can move these efforts forward. Thank you. I'll pass it back to you, Jessica. Great. Thank you, Danny. And just a reminder to our audience members that links to all these reports are being posted in the chat box, and we'll follow up with them as well. And as Danny mentioned, he mentioned two of the six strategies. The report showing up on your screen now provides more detail on all of the different strategies as well as state examples and efforts in this area. I also would like to remind you to include in the chat box any questions that you have for panelists and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible after the presentation. We will now hear from Raigel, a senior staff attorney with the Public Advocates Education Equity Team, where she focuses on teacher quality and school finance. Raigel is a former teacher and a lifelong activist. Raigel, I will turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Jessica. Again, my name is Raigel Massaro. I'm a senior staff attorney with Public Advocates. Public Advocates is a civil rights law firm and polished these shop in Northern California. We do education, equity, housing, transit, and climate justice work using a community partnership model to inform our policy advocacy and impact litigation. We also rely on experts like Danny to inform our advocacy. I am a former middle school teacher in Arizona. I was an intern with Teach for America. I'm familiar with the underprepared and alternative certification experience. I'm going to talk briefly about teacher shortages in California and how public advocates has approached advocacy to combat shortages at the state and local level. So the picture, this is pulled from an LPI report. The picture in California is as dire as the rest of the nation, where the blue line represents our estimated teacher hires and the reddish-orange-ish line there represents the new credentials that are being issued by the state. And so there's a big gap there. And how are we filling that gap? We're filling that gap with substandard permits and credentials. They are on the rise in California at a pretty rapid rate. And for us, this is a civil rights issue because these underprepared teachers tend to be or more likely to be teaching high-need students of color, low-income students. Public Advocates' vision for our teacher quality work is that all students are taught by fully credentialed teachers. Even when we're not facing a shortage, this vision is hard to realize. And so until we do, we want our credentialed and experienced teachers to be equitably distributed so the hardship doesn't fall unduly on high-need students. So in times of shortage, we advocate and litigate at the state and local level for data to understand the areas and impacts of shortage. If we don't have this, it's hard to advocate for sound policy. We advocate for keeping the teachers we have and state and local policies to support keeping teachers that are in classrooms currently. We resist efforts to water down standards and support a robust and diverse teacher pipeline. I'm going to take each of these points in turn. So in terms of leveraging data, I'm mentioning two pieces here that are applicable nationwide. We continually lift up data on teacher pipeline through the Title II annual reports on teacher prep programs to show, for example, that while California teacher diversity has been increasing, it's not near reflecting our students diversity. Or we might point out that we are preparing a disproportionate number of teachers via alternative certification, which could be evidence that our state needs to further support candidates to pursue traditional credentials, for instance, through loan forgiveness, as Danny mentioned. Tied to the Every Student Succeeds Act, we're pushing for school-level data to be part of local conversations about the disproportionate number of ineffective and inexperienced teachers teaching at our state's low income and high poverty schools. In California, we're supporting efforts to improve teacher data. We have a long way to go to have great data on our teachers. I'm flagging this slide for a couple reasons. Well, first of all, this is a graph showing how many credentialed teachers are teaching in a subject or student they're not prepared to teach. In California, we call these misassignments. So two points. One is you can see that this shortage hits high-need students, such as special education students there in red, the hardest. We know Black students and English learners are disproportionately represented in special education, which is further illustration of how this shortage is a civil rights issue. Secondly, this data is only collected every four years. You see here 2011 to 2015. For our state to have a complete picture of misassignments in every school, we only get the data every four years. So we're working on obtaining yearly teacher data on misassignments, vacancies, underprepared teachers at the state, district, and school site level. I'm going to talk next about two local examples of the work we're doing with community partners. In Richmond, or West Contra Costa Unified, which covers Richmond, California, last year, analyzing their financial planning, we noticed the district plan to double its investment in teacher professional development using funds generated by high-need students. Now, that can be a great thing, right? We know that when teachers feel well-supported and well-equipped to meet their students' needs, they're more likely to stay. However, we knew the district's numbers, they're highlighted in green, that retention numbers were actually dwindling over the past few years, according to the district's own data. And this increase, this doubling of investment was coming without any explanation of how we were going to be ensuring that these dollars benefit high-need students. So we wanted to make sure the district was going to spend this money wisely in a way that ensured teachers felt supported and supported robust instruction. And so through advocacy with the district and the county office, we were able to ensure the district articulated a plan to make these dollars meet the needs of high-need students at their school site level for school site professional development. Also, just wanted to point out, we see the percentage of underprepared teachers increasing every year in this district. And in Oakland, another example of where we're partnering with community-based organizations, I'm gonna talk about the retention issues there. Oakland suffers from very high-teacher turnover, 18.5% attrition. In partnership with Youth-Led, Californians for Justice and Family-Led, Oakland community organizations, we've prioritized teacher retention and diverse teachers in partnership with the district. CFJ's focus comes from their young people's understanding that relationship-centered schools aren't possible without a stable and culturally responsive teaching force. And through this partnership with the district, we're using these stay factors and leave factors that we've gleaned from surveys to create a plan, a five-year plan for recruitment and retention in the district. I just wanna flag that there have been some links added here to the chat box. If you wanna learn more about Oakland's very robust data dashboards around educators, Californians for Justice and Oakland community organizations. So jumping up again to the state level, as I mentioned earlier, part of our advocacy in times of shortage is resisting efforts to water down standards. These shortages bring the right conditions for the arguments around watering down standards. And these changes should be made with extreme caution because lowering standards can impact the long-term quality of the teaching force and particularly for high-need students. So we've resisted multiple bill legislative and regulatory proposals to water down standards until they're proven absolutely necessary. And even then we advocate for as robust preparation and support as possible. In this instance, our teacher shortage has brought a substitute shortage, which has led to rolling some, particularly in special education classrooms. So we were able to ensure the problem was documented before policy change, and we won 40 hours of local preparation before these permit holders with no teaching experience or education could be a teacher of record, as well as weekly mentoring. And finally, we wanna address the pipeline, right? So this is aligned with another of the suggestions that Danny brought forth. For years, we've been advocating for the state to take bold action regarding teacher shortages and address this crisis, a crisis that's affecting everyone locally is not something that locals can solve. And so this year we got a total, won a total package of $130 million to address teacher shortages. 75 million for teacher residencies in special education, science and math. 50 million for districts to be creative about how they attract and retain special education teachers, and five million for professional development, for perspective and credentialed bilingual teachers. And we're in the process now in partnership with LPI to make sure that these funds are implemented and do the job that we expect them to do in terms of addressing our pipeline. We're kind of out of time, we do touch on litigation when it's needed, and particularly ensuring that the under-prepared teachers are as prepared as we can get them to be, and happy to talk more with folks offline about that. Thank you very much, and I'll pass it back to Jessica. Great, thank you, Rigel, and we are definitely thinking of you out in California. We know it's been a difficult week. We are gonna head over to Rigel, sorry, over to Roy in South Carolina, but first I wanna just remind participants again to please submit questions in the chat box. We have a number of questions already that we've received and we'll make sure to get to as many of them as possible after we hear from Dr. Roy Jones, who is a professor and the executive director for the College of Education's Call Me, Mr. Program at Clemson University. Roy will talk more about the program, but the mission of the Call Me, Mr. Program initiative is to increase the pool of available teachers from a broader, more diverse background, particularly among the lowest performing elementary schools, and we are going to learn more about that program and its impact. Roy, I will turn it over to you. Thank you, Jessica, and thank you again for allowing me to be part of this important conversation along with Rigel and Daniel. Yes, I appreciate the opportunity and to get right into the conversation. I will give you a, you certainly expressed well the mission of the Call Me, Mr. Program. I wanna point out at the outset that the program began at Clemson University in partnership with three private historically black colleges in South Carolina. The development began actually 20 years ago to address teacher shortage, but specific to teacher shortage to African American men teaching at the elementary school level in South Carolina. This first visual is an actual photo shot of one of our ceremonies celebrating the graduation and completion of our ministers during one of those, that time. Mr. stands for Mentors Instructing Students Toward Effective Role Models, and this is the statement that you referred to at the introduction. It has been our mission for since 2000 when we first launched. So we were in development in the late 90s recognizing that fewer than 1% of our state teacher force were African American men teaching at the elementary early childhood level at that time, through the 1%. And we developed this mission, which has been the same since we launched in 2018 years ago. This was the statistics back in 2000. There were over 600 elementary schools served by over 20,000 teachers. And there were a few, there were 200 African American men teaching in those schools. In effect, that's 1% or 1% of the teacher force were black men. Yet black children were being suspended, expelled and referred for discipline and high rates within our school system. And I don't want to lead you to think that the 200 were spread in 200 schools. They were highly concentrated. So we estimated that there were at least 75% of our schools in South Carolina that didn't have a single black male teacher teaching at the elementary school level. Since 2004, when we first started graduating, we had ministers that entered our in in 2000, from 2004 up until literally last spring. We have graduated 221 fully certified, as Raju pointed out, fully credentialed black males that have gone through teacher education programs, traditional teacher education prep programs and completed with a fully certified degree and sort of a certificate to teach at the elementary level. We currently have about 229. Well, currently it's actually 175, ministers that are currently enrolled in our program at all levels from bachelor's, mainly bachelor's and a few master's candidates. And our partnership has grown from Clemson and the three HBCUs to now 24 collaborating institutions in South Carolina alone. This is a listing of all of our partner colleges to really stress the phenomenal growth is that although we started with the HBCUs, the private HBCUs in partnership and collaboration with Clemson, the success of those institutions and then later on adding South Carolina State was the fourth HBCU. We currently have all of the HBCUs, which are four that are fully credited in South Carolina as partners with Calmy, Mr. and Clemson. But the success caught on and it has always been our position that if the model is followed that the same success experience that the HBCUs could be experienced at the PWIs and HWC, historically WCUs, white institutions in universities in South Carolina. And here you have a listing of those. I won't name them all, but you can recognize some from the College of Charleston to just state-supported institutions to the Newberry Colleges, which is a private white liberal arts institution, faith-based institutions like Southern and Wesleyan. So we cover the waterfront in terms of the profile of collaborating colleges and all have been successful in recruiting and retaining cohorts of African American males. In addition, you see as well the network of two-year colleges because we recognize early that in a state that has, and I'll cover this momentarily later, that ranks 50th in education. We've gone back and forth between 48 and 50. I'm not sure what the difference really is, but in a state that has basically performed at the bottom in education on most measures that there's no surprise that many of our students come out of their K-12 experience, not fully prepared to enter into a college, traditional college setting and do well. And regardless of whether you're a teacher or not, but when you add in the stress of being, a challenge of being a teacher education major, pursuing teaching with all of the requisite tests required that many of our students are simply not prepared to take on a competitive college and university at the outset as a freshman. So we employed, if you will, and included as part of the collaboration our two-year technical colleges in South Carolina are known as technical colleges, community colleges, junior colleges known elsewhere, but in our state is technical colleges that have filled the bill for many of our students that need to start and develop their basic skills even on the college level before transitioning into a teacher education major. So that's been very successful with us as well for that, in terms of that collaboration. Our success success is also caught on nationally where we began to get inquiries starting in 2005, 2007 from other states that said, hey, we're experiencing teacher shortages along the same line, same experiences that our black students are having, what did you do and how can you expand to, can you, are you prepared to expand into our state? And we didn't know how to do that initially and didn't think about it because we thought we were the only ones in the country with this problem and we were trying to solve our problems within our state. Well, fast forward now 18 years, we have now grown into nine states, including institutions in all those states, making up to about 31, 33 institutions totally and it's called me Mr. Network. And as again, you see it varies from Southern colleges from Southern states to Midwestern states as well as the Virginians as well, using the same exact model that we use in South Carolina. Our conceptual framework in brief is what you see here is that we are, and in stress it is, our students are major in traditional teacher education prep programs, but we know that that is not enough. We knew early on that that's not enough. We had to create and did create a co-curricular framework around these students to engage in their development. And so this model, conceptual model, involves the co-curricular experience of a mister throughout their retriculation that leads to not only the recruitment, but their development and retention. So in here, and I can't go into much detail, but it involves community engagement, it involves summer experiences, summer internship, it involves summer leadership institutes, and importantly, residential component that requires them to be involved in a living learning community. And we were among the first living learning LLCs in Clemson University as an example as well as the LLCs and the other colleges. But at the core of all this is the co-curricular experience that students have. And these are just a shot of some of those experiences and that our students are exposed to throughout their matriculation. This is critical in terms of the system that we've developed that has been remarkably successful, that we've introduced basically a triad partnership that encompasses and has been mentioned as one of the strategies, and we represent a GYO, a Grow Your Own model from the very start. Our whole position, our whole philosophy is that the teachers that were going to be successful in Call Me Mister and that we were targeting were in fact in South Carolina, in the communities that we expect them to come from and expect them to go back and teach in once they finish. So we again look to not other states and even internationally where many districts have had to go outside the country to find talent or outside the state particularly, we felt the talent existed right in our own communities and by cultivating, identifying and cultivating that talent through our experience that we could develop a lifelong career teacher. But it also involves this triad experience where you are modeled that involves the school district which are the producers of the students that are the eventual benefactors of the process as well as our two and four year colleges that are engaged in the system as well. And we've been involved with that now for solid 12 years involving the three triads. Grow Your Own experience is just another table to show the flow of growing your own and also to engage Sierra Center for Recruitment and Retention in South Carolina where they have protein and teacher cadet because we believe the mindset that the development, the gym, the germ in the seed is planted early and students are to become teachers and we try to drill down to try as far deep as we can go began to identify students early on that could be potentially a teacher through our system. Not very much like the philosophy of athletics where they literally assign stars to students, the potential student athletes early on in terms of how they might fare later on and collegiate athletics. Well the same as a teacher. How do you identify a master teacher? They don't start off as a master teacher. They have to start off with the dispositions, attitude, preparation and skills to develop into what becomes a master teacher. We believe in the same process involves students wanting to become a pre-service teacher. The need, a diverse teacher workforce benefits all students but especially low income students. Contacts in 2018, the South Carolina Education System ranked 48th of 50 with high inequality and growing teacher shortages in our whole state. So it's a state challenge for us. Challenge in South Carolina, the demographic shows that the representation of a diverse educators through recruitment and retention. Our white students represent 51%, 1.1% of the student population but also represent 78% and 0.6% of the teachers. Black student population in South Carolina ranks is 34% with teachers just 15.3%. Latinx students represent 9% with just 1.6% of the teacher workforce. Due to the success of Call Me Mister over the last 18 years, the State of South Carolina through the Commission on Higher Education issued a RFP for a Center of Excellence, which has been a program they've had over 20 years. It's highly competitive. Every state college and university in South Carolina can compete and submit proposals for a Center of Excellence. Well, we submitted one last fall and we were able to prevail and issued a and granted a Center of Excellence for South Carolina at Clemson University. Center of Excellence is known as the Center of Excellence in the recruitment and retention of diverse educators. The goal you see here is to research, design and implement the best strategies for recruiting and retaining high quality diverse educators. We produced a book entitled Call Me Mister, the Re-emergence of African American Male Teachers in South Carolina, recognizing the evolution of the education of black kids in our state. You're looking at a basically a two room schoolhouse dated back in the early 1900s that is still standing today. Being in front of them, we have three remarkable young men who started off as freshmen and have become teachers and all of them from South Carolina and they've done a remarkably well coming out of this state and under the conditions even to this day. Basically, that's the end of the presentation just to again stress that we are partnered and our ministers come through teacher education programs. I wanted to end with this stat though that among the ministers that have graduated, 95% of our ministers are still in the classroom that have graduated since 2004. The other 5% are either principals or assistant principals or still working in education in some capacity. And also 90% of our ministers are still in South Carolina as well. A mister must teach in giving back in service for every year that they receive support from Call Me Mister. There hadn't been a single mister that has failed to honor that commitment and we're very proud of that. So that's our strategy. That's our dedication to South Carolina and also beyond South Carolina as we have expanded into other parts of the country. Great, well thank you so much Roy just for sharing all that and for your important work and the great impact that it's having as Danny mentioned early on a lot of the teacher shortage issues about retention. So hearing the retention rates for program graduates is really impressive. Also would like to just let audience members know that we have included a link to a report that LPI produced that speaks to the benefits of a diverse educator workforce and the research base behind it that Roy had mentioned. And with that I'd like to take about 15 minutes and try and get through as many audience questions as we can. We did receive a number of questions around rural education and Danny if you wanna start us off what strategies are being used to address teacher shortages in rural areas and then Roy I know you spoke a bit about the work that you're doing in a diversity of states but including other states of you might want to speak to that after. So Danny will you start us off please. Happy to you, thanks Jessica. So there's a range of different strategies that school districts in rural areas have been using to address their shortages. I'll highlight a few. So two plus two programs that I mentioned in my report is one model that can be used. And the reason is why I mean not surprising that for many rural districts a university or a credentialing institution isn't nearby. So the graduates, the supply of graduates is hard to access and tap into. So two plus two programs where you have a credentialing institution partner with a community college is a successful model. So we saw actually recently speaking with faculty at Elizabeth City State University. It's a college in North Carolina and they partner with community colleges in Halifax County over a hundred plus miles away to prepare and credential teachers for that community and help them address their shortages. It involves everything from beaming into classrooms or bleeding in for sessions, but also driving those miles, making that commute to be on the ground for classes, for mentoring, coaching, observations, all of that. Some other examples in Colorado, they have a Colorado Center for Rural Education. And one of the ways that they're helping to increase the number of teachers that are considering rural education position or teaching in rural communities is even offering just a stipend for individuals to student teach in rural schools. Roy mentioned earlier about SARA in South Carolina, the Center for Educator Recruitment and Retention. They also offer salary stipends for teachers that teach in high turnover districts, which in South Carolina is frequently rural school districts, and they also offer loan forgiveness. So there's a few models there. Teacher residencies I think are another that we've seen in California. There's the Kern Rural Teacher Residency. There's the Chico Teacher Residency. And in Colorado again, there's a Bocher Teacher Residency. That's focused in, or has a branch that's focused on rural school district. Great, thank you. And Roy, are there any aspects of the Common Mr. Program that are specifically unique to supporting schools in rural communities? Absolutely. Danny just mentioned one. We have a strong partnership with SARA and where they have added incentives for teachers teaching in rural districts in partnership with the state. So there's a recognition on a large scale within our state that rural retaining teachers in rural areas is very important. Beyond that, because our whole state is rural for the most part, with the exception of a few townships, our largest city is obviously Columbia, Greenville, Charleston. But frankly, we're deficient in these rural areas. So what we've done, especially with the Center initiative, is that we go in and we talk and kind of do an assessment and try to get a needs assessment of what's going on in these communities. That's not always obvious. But specifically, how does it impact the loss of talent within those communities that would otherwise be beneficial to them as teachers? And that often happens. So part of the stress is to, what we've stressed is to identify early on teachers that come out of those same communities that we can work with and along the pipeline with some degree of expectation that they will return to those districts to teach. So we're beginning to add and find, for incentivizing that, we can certainly do that, who would call me Mr. But beyond that, we think we can develop the kind of resources involving stakeholders that can help provide those same kind of incentives, contribute incentives to entice and keep the talent that comes out of these communities to return to these communities. Now, our tech system is important because there's a tech of colleges system with the main campus or an outreach campus that really is within reasonable proximity of most of our students in the state. And again, to a four year college is different, but at least, if we can get that pipeline started at the tech system level, then we can facilitate into a teacher ed program at a four year college level. So we're working on several levels, but really the main one is to again identify talent early, make teaching an attractive vocation to go into with benefits that are reinforced every year that they're in school and during summers. We think that's the strategy and if we've got a formal relationship between the school district, the colleges, the community, faith-based community, community organizations, businesses, civic organizations, then we've begun to really have impact on that and show that education is everybody's business. Great, now that's really helpful. And I also starting early on, at the federal level they just passed fairly recently the Career and Technical Education Act and a number of schools are considering developing a teaching pathway as one of their pathway programs. North Carolina, there's a rural district that includes education as one of their pathways in high school. So when I get to a question around as the implementation that came through and then a preview, we're gonna talk a little bit about how to fund some of these efforts because a number of participants asked about that. But Rigel, as a number of states are planning to implement their ESSA plans and focus on school improvement and closing gaps for historically underserved students, including as you mentioned English learners and students with disabilities and students of color. What is the impact of teacher shortages of high turnover rates, particularly on local and school efforts to implement ESSA and improve school performance and close gaps? Thanks, Jessica. Yeah, so teacher shortages are a real barrier if they present significant challenges to school improvement efforts. Underprepared teachers, particularly those serving high students are likely to be consumed by day-to-day teaching survival, like I was as a brand new and underprepared teacher, and have limited capacity to reflect, plan, collaborate, refine their practice, look at data. They're also less likely to be kind of long term at their school site with their students in their district and they might know that or they might not, but when they're less likely to be long-term invested, again, that's a real challenge to turn around efforts at the school site and at the district. So, you really need folks who are around, who know the students, the programs, the conditions of the community. And when you have teacher shortage and you've got folks kind of coming in a lot of teacher churn and underprepared folks, that poses a real barrier. It really can frankly halt improvement efforts at a school site where there's an overwhelming reliance on underprepared teachers. Right, and we're also hearing, in addition to that, that a number of secondary schools are trying to increase opportunities for advanced placement, dual enrollment, early college, CT pathways, but if they don't have the educator workforce to do that, it can be particularly challenging. It is worth mentioning that districts and schools can use funding under ESSA to implement staff surveys, so at least to get some sense from teachers around school climate and how they're experiencing their working conditions, which I would imagine would be very useful information for school improvement efforts. We also received a number of questions around what federal programs could support state and local efforts in this work. Danny, would you like to share a little bit about what resources might be available from federal funding? Sure, happy to. So there's a range of different possibilities of federal funding sources that can be used to address teacher shortages. I mentioned a little bit about ESSA and Title II funding for licensure requirements, residencies, mentoring, or even school leadership under Title II, 3% set aside. All of those are flexible sources to use for states and in schools and districts to be used for address their teacher shortages. There's also under the Individual Disabilities Education Act, IDEA, Part B, there's funding there to support special education teacher shortages, which are a major issue and often overlooked. Within the Higher Education Act, many people might be familiar with teacher quality partnership grants, but those can be used to fund residencies. And then of course, Jessica, like you mentioned, to the Perkins CTE Education Act is another source for both funds to support CTE teacher recruitment and support. Great, and we're hopeful at LPI that in this new Congress, they take up reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. There's a number of opportunities to better support these programs. So teach grants, which support teachers who work in high needs fields and schools, increasing the teach grant award amounts would go a long way in offsetting some of the low salaries that teachers might make so that they're not, as you mentioned earlier, burdened with high student debt loads. There are a number of programs under the Higher Education Act that support historically black colleges and universities and other MSIs. And it's a really small pot of funding, hopefully there'll be an increase in funding, but they support teacher and leader programs at HBCUs and MSIs. And again, we're hoping that in this new Congress, they'll take this opportunity to strengthen these programs and increase federal investments. We have time for about one more question. And one of the other ones that came up from a number of participants was the extent to which cultural proficiency or culturally responsive practice is being incorporated into teacher preparation and in the work being done with teachers already in the school. So maybe Roy, if you wanna start us off and then Ryde will talk a little bit about the work that you're doing in that area, that would be great. Sure, I'll try to do it quickly with the nine time, but yeah, much of it clearly has to do with exposure. Part of development, and we do this in again, the co-curriculum outside of the formal curriculum where we help students, teacher, candidates understand the need to connect with their students once they get into the field, but we do it as pre-service teachers. So we expose them to communities, to families, to parents, to understand the context that students come from. And in many of that context, some of that context is their own. But at the same time, not all kin folks are skin folks, not all skin folks are kin folks, that culture is multiple. Just because you share the same skin hue doesn't mean that you come from the same subcultures. So part of it is understanding that what is and how do you connect with students to get students to actually respond, to commit to their own learning? And a lot of that, we do that through an exposure upon exposure upon exposure throughout their matriculation as pre-service teachers. We don't wait until the end of the program, the teacher ed program to do it within student teaching, for example, or even their pre-clinicals. So a lot of it is just understanding their own story. Every mister has to be able to articulate their own story throughout their matriculation so that they can appreciate and respect the lives and stories of others. And in a nutshell, that's what it is, but it's really a much more developed development process that we get into in terms of disposition and attitude and to help our students stick and stay. We're not trying to just put them out for a year and quit or to fulfill an obligation and quit. We really are looking for really strong educators. Yeah, so this is Rachel. I agree so much with what Roy has shared and just want to lift up, but having culturally responsive education is critical for addressing student achievement gaps. In districts where we work with organizations like Californians for Justice who has a campaign around relationship-centered schools, in some of these districts, it's one in five high school students feels like there's an adult at school that cares about them. And care comes from knowing and knowing comes from taking the time to build a relationship and understand who students are. And so this is data we think is critical to collect and lift up and integrate into teacher preparation and professional development and because it's again, it's just critical that closing those gaps and making students want to come to school so welcome at school. And for teachers as well, there's been some really interesting research that teacher retention is more positive when teachers feel connected and you saw in the data around Oakland that they feel more, they're more likely to stay when they feel connected to students and families in the communities that they're teaching in. Great, now thank you. And we received another question around how we can raise the prestige of the profession. And I think obviously raising teacher salaries is an important piece of that as well as making sure that we're making the right investments in their preparation and their support once they're in the classroom. So unfortunately, we've run out of time but I would like to thank you, Danny, Raigel and Roy not only for a great discussion and presentation but more importantly for the wonderful work that you are all doing each and every day. I'd like to thank our partners and National Urban League in putting this series together who are also doing really important work each and every day. I'd like to remind the audience that we are recording this webinar and we'll email you in a few days when it's available. And another quick reminder that the previous webinar is posted right now and if you'd like information on upcoming webinars, we invite you to sign up for our mailing list to receive a notification. Also, the following online resources including slides from today's webinar are posted on the webinars page. And finally, we'd like to let you know that a survey will appear in your web browser when this webinar ends. It'll take just a few moments and to complete and if you have time, we'd really love to get your feedback on possible future webinars that we can do in this series and also ways that we can improve the webinars that we deliver. So thank you all for your time on this busy Tuesday and have a great rest of the week. Thank you. Thank you.