Juliana Urtubey, the 2021 National Teacher of the Year, worked three jobs while student teaching to pay for her education degree. Now she and other top teachers hope a new degree program they’ve helped develop will keep aspiring educators from having to do the same—and ultimately being priced out of the classroom.
The Educators Institute, launched this week, will provide free online courses leading to a bachelor’s degree over four years, along with at least a year of mentoring with a local instructional coach. The program was created by the National Center for Grow Your Own, a nonprofit group that works with districts to develop apprenticeships which a would-be educator is paid to work as a paraprofessional under a mentor teacher.
Institute classes will be held online, but the group will work with each participant’s district to identify and train their mentor.
Its first two degree programs, set to start in spring 2027, are intended to bolster the number of would-be teachers prepared for special education and multilingual classrooms. The Educators Institute is registered as postsecondary institution in Utah, and is working to earn the state approval and regional accreditation needed to use the 120-credit program for teacher licensure.
So far, the program does not qualify to offer federal student aid, but at least initially, the program will give full scholarships for the first cohort of 20-30 aspiring teachers. If accredited, the program could save teachers $20,000 to $90,000 in average tuition costs.
Grow-your-own teacher programs encompass a variety of models, but the common feature is recruiting locally. They train community members, such as high school students or paraprofessionals, and have gained traction in recent years as a way to bolster the educator pipeline in rural, urban, and hard-to-staff communities. But the lack of high-quality, low-cost education degree programs has been one of the biggest hurdles to effective grow-your-own programs.
“We’re just not seeing them at scale,” said David Donaldson, founder of the NCGYO, “and instead we’re seeing a lot of low-cost, low-quality, rubber-stamp diploma mills.”
Those have left many new and aspiring teachers underprepared and struggling to complete training and certification while also teaching, and can undermine the aims of the programs, he and others contend.
“In today’s day and age, teachers start, and if they don’t feel successful right off the bat, they’re not staying past year one,” Urtubey said.
The new courses are being designed by top educators
Urtubey and three other prior National Teachers of the Year—Missy Testerman, Kurt Russell, and Rebecka Peterson—teamed up with the Institute to help design and teach courses in the program.
While some districts partner with local teacher colleges to align degrees and certification programs, smaller and rural districts often do not have access to high-quality degree programs, and many states have rolled back academic and pay incentives to bring teachers into high-need areas.
Programs that move teachers into classrooms quickly can boost the number of staff, but “prospective teachers still need to know all of this foundational knowledge. They need to be trained in the science of reading,” said Testerman, who received the 2024 national teaching award for her work as an English-as-a-second-language teacher. “They need to be trained in addressing needs of diverse learners and students with special needs. Training has to prepare them for what they’re actually going to face in their classrooms.”
Urtubey, a longtime bilingual and special education elementary teacher in Nevada, said the group will structure the curriculum around topics that align with daily concerns of new teachers, from student behavior management to science of reading supports.
Setting up a new teacher education program can be challenging in the highly regulated postsecondary world, but over the past 15 years, new alternative programs, like the Relay Graduate School of Education, have been approved to offer degrees as well as teaching credentials.
Sarah D. Sparks covers the teaching profession and pedagogy for Education Week.