Strengthening the Illinois Educator Pipeline Should Involve Investing in the Student Teaching Experience

Student teaching is a vital part of an educator’s preparation. The experience gives them a chance to practice and hone their craft with the support of an experienced (cooperating) teacher.   

There’s room to improve this experience in Illinois. Student teachers and cooperating teachers face challenges as a result of being unpaid for their services. Given the backdrop of persistent teacher shortages in various subject areas and geographies, and the disparate impact this has on students across lines of race and income, it is timely and right to address this issue.    

Challenge: Student teaching poses a financial barrier for too many prospective teachers, especially prospective teachers of color. 

For many teaching candidates, student teaching means financial hardship during the 10-16 week period spent in school practicing their craft. It can mean cutting back on the part-time or full-time work necessary to pay for their living costs. A recent report from Teach Plus highlights how even adults already working as paraprofessionals or teaching assistants often need to take a leave of absence during their student teaching experience, requiring them to go without critical pay and benefits.    

The economic implications of being a student teacher have an impact on who makes it into the teaching profession. We know from research that affordability is a barrier into teaching generally, but especially for students of color, who are already sorely underrepresented in the educator workforce and who make a positive difference in classrooms. The more debt students take on, the less likely they are to go into lower wage professions like teaching, with higher education debt disproportionately impacting Black Teacher candidates.    

Challenge: Few cooperating teachers receive any compensation or support for their role, despite their importance to the quality of the student teaching experience. 

Since school districts generally do not compensate cooperating teachers for the additional responsibilities involved, experienced teachers are not exactly clamoring to take it on.    

This is unfortunate since cooperating teachers play a critical role in developing the next generation of educators. Being a cooperating teacher takes extra time, effort, patience, and mentoring skills. We know from research that teaching candidates placed with highly-effective cooperating teachers end up teaching like a third-year teacher in just their first year in the classroom.  That’s significant! 

Yet, 72% of educator preparation program staff report that it has become even more difficult to find cooperating teachers since COVID. The National Council on Teacher Quality’s 2020 review of about 1,200 prep programs found that only 10% of prep programs take an active role in screening for any cooperating teacher skills or qualifications. From our own survey of teacher preparation program staff, we estimate that less than 20% of cooperating teachers receive training for the role.   

Investments in enhancing and making the student teaching experience more affordable can help expand our pipeline and direct more candidates to the districts and schools that need them.  

According to our recent report, The State of the Educator Pipeline, 2023, Illinois is dealing with an educator shortage in particular subject areas and geographies. The report’s findings underscore the need for strategic investments in the teacher pipeline that will help students from early childhood education (ECE) to 12th grade, along with students with special needs, students of color, and English Learners in particular, by addressing these challenges head on: 

• 3,532 unfilled teaching positions in Illinois in 2023, with 1/3 of them in Special Education 

• An additional 3,359 teachers are teaching on provisional licenses or short-term approvals, including 16% of bilingual teachers.   

• In 2023, about 61,000 students in Illinois did not have a fully certified teacher leading their classrooms. This disproportionately affected schools with more students from low-income households, Black and Latinx students. In fact, 35% of the state’s Black students are learning in high-vacancy schools (schools where 5% or more of their teaching positions are unfilled), compared to 15% of all students.  

Student teaching is a vital part of building pipelines in hard-to-staff schools and districts.  We know from Illinois research that the median distance from where someone went to high school and ends up teaching is 13 miles. We also know that  teaching candidates often wind up at the school where they completed their student teaching. Research from Washington state showed that 23% of teachers teach in the same district where they grew up but 37% of teachers teach in the same district where they did student teaching. If we could be more deliberate about where teaching candidates do their student teaching, we could specifically address the need for teachers in schools with the greatest need.   

Districts that deliberately invest in their student teacher pipeline are seeing those investments pay off.  An example is Rockford Public Schools District 205. Student teachers in Rockford Public Schools can earn from $6,250 to $20,000 depending on whether they are student teaching 16 or 32 weeks respectively.  Importantly, student teachers are placed with the most effective teachers in the district.  And these cooperating teachers can earn $10,000 annually and complete these duties as part of broader suite of Multi-Classroom Teacher Leader roles. Those selected to be cooperating teachers must be passionate about growing teachers, have demonstrated strong instructional skills, and  have a history of taking on informal and formal leadership roles within their school.  And the program is working. 76% of the program completers have reached or are on track tenure and the district has expanded its investments so that there are now 18 pre-service teachers in the full-year student teaching program.    

There is more Illinois can do to expand paid student teacher opportunities and strengthen compensation and supports for our cooperating teachers. This legislative session, Representative Faver-Dias introduced HB5414, which would: 

• Pay all student teachers in the state $10,000 and pay cooperating teachers $2,000. If full funding is not possible, priority would be given to student teachers with the highest demonstrated financial need, pursuing licensure in high need subject areas like early childhood, SPED, and bilingual and completing their student teaching in high need schools.  

• Ensure that participating cooperating teachers complete training that aligns with the state’s training for mentor teachers. 

• Prohibit teacher preparation programs from maintaining a policy that student teachers can't be paid.  

• Require an evaluation to better understand how to improve the program.   

If we pay student teachers and their cooperating teachers, ensure that our cooperating teachers are consistently trained, and encourage student teacher placement in high need subject areas and schools, the state will be strengthening a critical part of its teacher pipeline, responding to shortage areas, supporting its continued growth, and increasing its diversity. Taken together, this investment will move us closer to ensuring all PK-12 students have the teachers they need to fully realize their potential.     

Jim O’Connor is a Project Director for Advance Illinois.