Educator and Student Support

Grow Your Own Educator Programs Equity Assistance

Emphasizing Equity-based Approaches

Grow Your Own educator programs are a potential strategy for states and district to employ to help recruit and retain teachers of color.

Grow Your Own programs help address teacher shortages, retention issues and teacher diversity by engaging in a variety of strategies that aim to recruit teachers from local communities in hopes that the pool of candidates will increase in diversity and will be more likely to stay teaching in the community.

This IDRA Grow Your Own Educator Programs – Online Technical Assistance Toolkit discusses how equitable approaches and critical perspectives can combine the powerful roles of “homegrown” teachers, culturally-relevant curriculum, and social justice pedagogy in addressing achievement and opportunity gaps, especially for the nation’s woefully underserved, largely urban schools serving students of color.