California’s State Educator Workforce Collaborative

Teacher shortages are forcing many California districts to meet staffing needs with substitute teachers and teachers with insufficient preservice preparation. While the state has made unprecedented investments in strengthening the teacher pipeline, strategically leveraging this funding requires engaging leaders from across sectors in local, regional, and statewide planning that is grounded in data and shared goals.

Purpose

Facilitated by WestEd, the California State Educator Workforce Collaborative brings together key staff from major state agencies and institutions implementing the state’s educator workforce initiatives, including the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, State Board of Education, Student Aid Commission, Department of Education, and state and private higher education institutions.

The Collaborative facilitates dialogue across agencies to improve implementation of one-time investments in the educator workforce and establish sustainable cross-agency collaboration to address policy challenges.

The systems change work of the Collaborative is structured to address root causes of teacher shortages and improve coherence and information-sharing systems for institutions serving the educator workforce.

Audiences Served

California’s State Educator Workforce Collaborative provides a replicable model for statewide collaboration between state agencies and institutions of higher education with the shared goal of strengthening the educator workforce.

Project Activities

The first phase of the Collaborative’s work produced resources for prospective teachers and preparation program providers to improve access to and affordability of preparation pathways, with a focus on increasing the number of educators of color, educators of multilingual learners, and early childhood educators.

Tools for Teacher Candidates

Teaching candidates can use the following resources to compare preparation pathway options and explore financial supports.

Tools for Teacher Preparation Programs

Teacher preparation program leaders can use the following resources to help make their offerings more attractive and valuable to teacher candidates.

WestEd has also supported the Collaborative with disseminating the tools so that more educators-in-training and program leaders have resources that can help increase access to and affordability of teacher preparation pathways.

In the second phase of the work, the Collaborative will focus on establishing a long-term, sustainable infrastructure for statewide educator workforce planning.

Project Director

Funder

This project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Emerging Bilingual Collaborative, Sobrato Philanthropies, and the U.S. Department of Education-funded Region 15 Comprehensive Center.

Project Duration

August 2022 – Ongoing

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Resources

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