The Over-50s Turning to Teaching

Part 3 of the "Equity or Bust: Are Ontario's Public Schools a Model for Pennsylvania" Series: Ontario is widely lauded for its education system, celebrated for both high performance and relatively smaller achievement gaps between wealthy and poor students. One of the key factors to their success is rigorous preparation of and support for their teachers. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, struggles to find and retain educators.

The Brazosport school district has a unique teacher apprenticeship program which covers the cost of aspiring teachers’ coursework and pays them to teach under a mentor educator for a full year. Twenty-five new teachers graduated from the program this year and will be required to work in the district for at least three years, and research shows that about 86 percent of educators who complete similar programs are still teaching in the same district after three years.

Co-op programs such as those at the University of Waterloo allow students to get paid for hands-on experience in their chosen field while also completing academic coursework. Last year, the university facilitated roughly 25,000 work terms across six academic faculties.

In a country where less than 6% of public funding is allocated to education, under-resourced schools are able to hire quality teachers through Teach For Nigeria, a nonprofit that trains and deploys teaching fellows to communities in need. Fellows have been placed in 396 schools since 2018 and go on to complete personal projects that support the school system, such as a solar-powered computer hub developed by one alumnus.

Colorado's Seal of Climate Literacy pairs climate-focused coursework with community capstone projects to develop awareness and credentials around climate change knowledge; so far, the seal has reached over 1,200 students across 26 districts while inspiring similar policies in Maine, California, Hawaii, and Minnesota.

A group of women are restoring abandoned chinampas (ancient Aztec floating farms) in and around Mexico City, combining indigenous farming techniques with university research partnerships to clean polluted waterways, protect endangered axolotls, revive sustainable year-round agriculture, and train a new generation of farmers in traditional methods.

The Child Care 8000 initiative set out to increase the number of available child care slots in Mesa County, Colorado by encouraging coordination, streamlining the licensing process, and expanding training opportunities. Though the campaign did not reach its goal, it did help add roughly 800 child care slots and improve the quality of existing programs.

Alternative licensure programs such as the Mississippi Teacher Corps allow people with a bachelor’s degree to earn a teaching license in the classroom through a combination of hands-on experience, coursework, and mentorship. Since its founding in 1989, the corps has placed more than 600 teachers in districts designated as “critical-shortage areas.”

“Grow your own” programs, like Reach University’s, are working to address teacher shortages, particularly in rural areas, by recruiting school employees who don’t have college or education degrees and giving them a chance to earn an undergraduate degree in education at just $75 a month. Participants take courses online and take 15 hours out of their work week to spend time observing and training in classrooms. So far 84% of all parishes across the state have signed up to take Reach trainees, which could put a significant dent in the statewide teacher vacancy issue.

Belmont Charter School offers a year-round program that includes camp-style activities, work-study programs, job training, and classroom learning in small groups during the summer. Teachers still receive several weeks off before summer programming starts, and students say the summer options help them build real-world skills and explore topics that aren’t always covered during the regular school year.