How early care apprenticeships can help address California’s dire teacher shortage

California is in the midst of a decade-long and ever-present teacher shortage crisis.

Since 2016, the state has invested $1.2 billion to address the issue, and while this infusion of resources seemed to help make a difference initially, there has been a 33% decline in teachers — over 5,300 total — since the 2020-21 school year. The continued expansion of transitional kindergarten is also adding a tidal wave of more than 11,000 credentialed teachers needed to staff those classrooms.

Translation: The teacher shortage crisis is about to hit a breaking point.

Fortunately, an answer to this need for a teacher pipeline is hidden in plain sight: All we have to do is look at, and learn from, the so-called early care and education system. A proven option to address the teacher shortage, and a new option from the existing pathways to teaching that exist in California, is apprenticeship.

In 1937, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Apprenticeship Act to set standards for a federally recognized apprenticeship program. In the more than eight decades that followed, apprenticeship programs trained generations of workers in myriad professions and trades. Recently, it has rightly begun to be used for teaching careers.

For California, the Labor and Workforce Development Agency last year launched an initiative to develop a roadmap for implementing and scaling Registered Apprenticeship Programs in teaching across the state. As good and promising as this effort is to alleviate our teacher shortage, it’s unfortunately ignoring California’s early-care education system (i.e., birth to age 5). So far, the conversations about developing an apprenticeship pathway into teaching have focused only on the TK-12 system, ignoring the early years that are essential to a long, successful education in just about every way imaginable.

Apprenticeships in the early care and education workforce have been increasingly widespread over the past 10 years, with programs for early educators and caregivers in 42 states. Many successful models include wraparound supports to ensure their cohorts are not only able to participate, but complete their training and earn a living while they learn.

Additionally, a tremendous strength of the early care and education sector is the workforce is far more diverse than TK-12. An estimated 66% of early educators in center-based care identify as people of color compared to 34% in TK-12. Implementing an inclusive apprenticeship model could bolster the TK-12 education system’s goal of recruiting a more diverse and representative teacher workforce.

The TK-12 system should also learn from these effective models to see where traditional views on workforce development have left out potential populations and answer questions about why existing efforts have fallen short.

Finally, encouraging collaboration between the TK-12 education and early care and education systems would yield significant equity implications and important benefits for teachers and schools, as well as the children, families and communities they serve. Building bridges between early education and TK-12 education through apprenticeships would create a pipeline for young people and adults interested in teaching, allowing them to move seamlessly from early educator apprenticeships to TK-12 apprenticeships.

This is the moment for California to think differently about solving the teacher workforce shortage, from early care to high school. The apprenticeship model offers a promising new pathway into teaching, one that is affordable, effective and will help to diversify the profession. What are we waiting for?

Financial support for this story was provided by the Smidt Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation.