This was a year of good news and bad news in California’s schools. Faster-than-expected infusions of new funding under the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) allowed many districts to replace teachers and programs lost during the Great Recession. However, as the school year opened last August, districts around California scrambled to hire qualified teachers and many came up short. About one-third of the credentials issued by the California Teacher Credentialing Commission this past year were for teachers on the equivalent of emergency permits, who lacked training for their assignments and were not in any structured preparation program.

As has been the trend in California whenever shortages re-emerge, these teachers are assigned largely to high-need schools serving students of color and new immigrants in schools of concentrated poverty. This has a devastating effect on those communities and their children’s access to learning. Even wealthier districts paying higher salaries cannot easily find math, science, special education and bilingual teachers, who are in especially scarce supply.

A new breed of teacher residency program offers a much better long-term solution to this problem – one that has already taken root in California and deserves expansion. Building on the medical residency model, teacher residencies offered in districts like San Francisco and Los Angeles and charter school organizations like Aspire provide an alternative pathway to teacher certification grounded in deep clinical training.

Read the full article by Linda Darling-Hammond about teacher shortages from EdSource