Pathways to Economic Advancement for Diverse Educators in Diverse Classrooms

Income inequality

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

We know the power of representative teachers in the classroom on student dropout rates, graduation rates, promotion, and achievement. However, too frequently teaching teams do not reflect student demographics because the pathway to the teaching profession can come with significant barriers in time, cost, and accessibility. In recent years, teacher shortages have caused substantial costs to both the school system and students themselves. And yet, there is a wealth of community capital in the classified staff employed at schools – the teaching assistants, behavior interventionists, and folks who work daily with students on campuses – who are equipped to serve our students in the classroom and improve their economic standing if they only had access to teacher preparation programs. Avance is our answer to this issue. Through our innovative teacher preparation program, we are advancing the long-term economic standing of marginalized staff members.

The Avance Teacher Residency is a grow-your-own teacher residency designed to expand, diversify, and strengthen a pipeline of teacher development in Los Angeles. Our goal is to promote the economic advancement of classified staff at our networks by providing them with a supportive pathway to a credential. We focus on developing staff members who know our communities well and can ensure all of our students – but especially our dual language and special education students - learn in classrooms led by well-qualified, diverse teachers who share strong beliefs in the ability of all students to achieve at high levels. As another extension of our larger mission, we are also reaching alumni from our network through this project to help them grow professionally and personally as they return as leaders within the classrooms where they grew up. Through this project, up to 24 residents are paired with an expert mentor teacher at their school site, where they receive coaching, workshops, and cohort-driven activities. At the same time, they enroll in the teacher preparation program at LMU and participate in a rigorous program to prepare them to be leaders in the classroom. LMU provides Commission-approved teacher preparation programs in special education and bilingual education, as well as in our other Avance focus credential areas, giving our future residents multiple, in-demand pathways to choose from.

This program offers our staff the same opportunities that we promise to our students: the chance to invest in themselves through the power of a quality education and create intergenerational change for themselves, their families, and their communities.
We believe that Avance will transform Los Angeles by offering economic advancement for staff who spend years dedicated to serving our students and yet are too often struggling to make ends meet. As our network is an active participant in various working groups and collaboratives across LA County, we see this partnership as an avenue to build a scalable, replicable pipeline of teacher development that could be shared with other similar education partners. This program interrupts the teacher shortage while also simultaneously providing a strengths based, culturally relevant program that allows for more Angelenos to have access to the teaching profession while minimizing traditional barriers to obtaining and clearing a credential.

Camino Nuevo Charter Academy leads the Avance Los Angeles Teacher Residency and we partner with three other networks and LMU. Our project was formed to increase teacher diversity and launched with our first cohort of 18 residents and mentor pairs in the summer of 2023. This project proposes two new pathways to build on the existing infrastructure of Avance and improve upon the success we’ve seen by focusing on bilingual and special educators. We will also deepen the professional development and financial support we can offer to this new cohort of residents.
We have seen success through our first cohort and are eager to deepen our impact. 100% of our residents felt supported to succeed, prepared to lead the classroom, and that Avance made an impact both in their lives and for the students they will serve. Likewise, 100% of School Leaders who had a resident on campus said they felt the residents were more prepared for teaching than those from other teacher prep programs.