The Educational and Labor Market Impacts of Maryland's Grow-Your-Own Teacher Recruitment Program

Grow-your-own (GYO) programs seek to address teacher shortages by recruiting locally. Interest in these programs--which recruit high school students, college students, or career changers--has ballooned over the past decade. GYO programs offer an attractive model because teacher shortages are typically a local problem and recruiting locally is more likely to yield teachers that are demographically representative of the student body. These factors can support student success, as local teacher shortages can create coordination problems in schools and increase the workload of current teachers, as well as the fact that students benefit from having a teacher who looks like them and understands their background.