In the face of persistent educator shortages, more and more school districts in the Pittsburgh region are looking inward to “grow their own” supply of teachers.
Education advocates estimate Pennsylvania needs approximately 15,000 more certified teachers to fill ongoing vacancies and replace underprepared teachers temporarily certified through an emergency permit.
Earlier this year, Pittsburgh Public Schools announced a new “emerging educators” program — designed to help address the district’s teacher shortage — that allows students to earn college credit and industry certifications.
In Monroeville, students at Gateway High School can earn free college credits through the district’s Teacher Academy program. Senior Ashlee Young has completed two courses so far, including a practicum in one of the district’s seventh grade English classes.
“The moment that I was just like, ‘Okay, this is it,’ was when we were in the practicum and I was in my placement,” Young said. “I was with my seventh graders and they would ask me, ‘Are you coming back tomorrow? Are you going to be here? What are we learning tomorrow?’”
“‘That was the moment I was like, ‘I love you guys.’”
Young plans to join the program’s third and newest course in the sequence this upcoming spring — an internship that gives high schoolers independent experience leading a classroom.
Roughly 50 high school students have gone through Gateway’s Teacher Academy program since it began in 2023. Classes discuss what kind of teachers they want to be, create lesson plans and, eventually, teach younger students.
“The idea is these students are going to be ahead of their peers,” said Gateway social studies teacher Mark Spinola, who has led the program since its inception. “If they go into a teacher education program in college, they're going to be well ahead of the others.”
“They won't have the same fears going into creating lessons and teaching in front of their peers,” Spinola continued, “and teaching in front of kids who are younger than them. Kids can be really intimidating.”
“Seeing people who look like you”
Students at Gateway’s Teacher Academy have access to mentorship through Indiana University of Pennsylvania, as well as free college credits through Carlow University in Pittsburgh.
Spinola hopes that can help remove barriers for his students, as well as foster a generation of teachers that better represent the district’s diverse student body.
While a third of Gateway High School students are Black, 95% of the school’s teachers are white. That matters to Adrienne Woods, another senior in the Teacher Academy program.
“Because seeing people who look like you, doing things that you want to do, it actually is so important,” Woods said. “So you can feel that you can do something like that, and it's not only white men who can do this job.”
Woods said that archetype matches most of the teachers she’s had at Gateway, though she did have one Black teacher who looked like her.
“And she was so influential to me,” Woods said. “She was like almost a second mother.”
Taniya Denson, another senior in the Teacher Academy program, said she only sees a handful of other Black students in her Advanced Placement and honors classes. That’s part of what’s driving her passion for education: Denson wants to be a teacher who recognizes Black students’ talents and helps them pursue more opportunities.
“Stuff like that is so important to me, like being able to push Black people to be in higher level classes,” Denson said.
“You need someone to say that you can do it because you don't really have that [here],” Young added. “And to have someone that looks like you to push you to go there or see someone who is already in that position really just impacts the students' lives, and our lives in general too.”
Research has shown that Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. Yet many Pennsylvania students are likely to go through school without meeting even one Black teacher as the state continues to contend with a substantial shortage of teachers of color.
In Allegheny County, students of color make up roughly 40% of the K-12 population, while close to half of all school districts fail to employ even one Black teacher. Ed Fuller, a professor of education policy at Penn State, said the state hasn’t done enough to specifically address the lack of diversity in Pennsylvania’s limited teacher pipeline.
Fuller said broad-brush efforts like the state’s student teacher stipend program — which got a $20-million boost in the latest state budget — will help increase teacher diversity to a degree, “but not to the degree that we need an increase.”
In its initial trial earlier this year, the program was able to fund roughly 20% of the 3,500 applications it received. Fuller said reducing the cost of higher education in Pennsylvania — home to some of the country’s priciest public universities — would better break down barriers for aspiring teachers.
The high cost of college in Pennsylvania particularly creates a barrier for students of color who have less access to family wealth than white students, Fuller said. He pointed to states like Minnesota and Illinois, which passed targeted scholarship programs for aspiring teachers of color.
“We need more people and more programs and more support for people to do that type of work across the state,” Fuller said. “It's difficult to do from a state level outside of the state providing scholarships for specific subgroups of teachers…But it’s doubtful [Pennsylvania] would do that, so it's really got to be at the grassroots level.”
Despite some recovery, vacancies persist
More than a dozen schools statewide have launched Educators Rising programs that introduce high schoolers to careers in education, whether through course offerings or after-school clubs.
The Pennsylvania State Education Association, which coordinates the state’s Educators Rising chapters, hopes to expand the program to more schools this year with the help of a $750,000 grant from the National Education Association (NEA).
NEA president Becky Pringle visited Gateway High School in September to speak with students in the Teacher Academy.
“My role is to support [students] but to also grow this kind of a program so that every school has a program like this,” Pringle said.
Spinola, a former teachers union president, said it’s important that districts prioritize these programs in the same way that they’ve bolstered offerings related to science, technology, engineering and math (commonly known as STEM).
“We’ve focused a lot on STEM in the last decade or two, and I think we sort of missed out on these people facing professions that are so much in demand,” Spinola said.
Fuller and the education advocacy group Teach Plus PA published a report this spring that found 8,500 educators were needed to fill state-reported vacancies and replace emergency-permitted teachers with certified ones.
That estimate, however, doesn’t include the number of teachers leaving each year that will need to be replaced. About 8,300 Pennsylvania teachers left the classroom during the 2023-2024 school year. Meanwhile, the number of new educators working on emergency permits continues to outpace the number of certified educators entering the profession.
Fuller said Pennsylvania has experienced a 67% decline in the number of students enrolled in college-level teacher preparation programs — one of the greatest declines nationwide.
“We've recovered somewhat, but we haven't recovered near enough to have a supply that's sufficient for all the openings that are in Pennsylvania,” Fuller said.
Nor does it stem the tide of demoralized teachers leaving the profession for careers subject to less partisan backlash. Students in the Teacher Academy program have been exposed to that reality by many of the adults in their lives — including their own teachers.
“We've had teachers of our own tell us that we should think of going down a different path to our face,” Young said.
It’s something Spinola said he tries to address head-on as his classes learn about the common conditions teachers face, such as burnout and stagnant wages.
The average Pennsylvania teacher makes less now than they did 30 years ago when adjusted for inflation, according to state union leaders. While teachers nationally have seen small improvements in their weekly wages, they remain behind relative to college graduates in other professions.
“They're going to hear perspectives from other people that they ought to consider,” he said. “And then we all honestly talk about whether those are a reflection of reality or a circumstance of people's lives.”
Spinola said he wants his students to confront these issues so they can make informed decisions before pursuing a career in education. Yet students like Young remain hopeful that a new generation of teachers can influence change within public education.
“It's a new set of teachers, a new face, new people,” Young said. “So if we can create our own outlook — and if we come back to this district — we can change that up.”
