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“The Arizona Department of Education (ADE) released a report on July 28 on Arizona’s teacher workforce in 2020 based on data local education committees submitted to their teacher input application. The Arizona Teachers Academy (ATA) program is one way universities are trying to encourage education students to become teachers in the state.
The report stated that there were 58,293 active teachers in the state during the 2019/20 school year, and an additional 34,661 people who had teaching certificates but were not currently teaching in Arizona public schools. Of this last group, 10,705 had never taught in the state.
Part of the reason for this, according to the report, is that ‘Arizona-based online teacher preparation programs ...[often] educate teachers that live out-of-state and can receive certification in Arizona. These individuals often immediately apply for a reciprocal certificate in their home state, without ever teaching here.’ It also mentioned out-of-state college students returning to another state after graduating.
The report also noted a high attrition rate for teachers early in their careers.
‘Efforts to recruit new teachers,’ the report said, ‘are hampered by Arizona's ability to retain teachers in the early years of their careers. Teachers may leave the profession for many reasons -- being a teacher in Arizona means challenging and demanding work. Some only ever plan to teach for a short time, or some may have met a grant or loan forgiveness commitment.’
The report then clarified that it was not seeking to answer the question of why Arizona teachers leave the profession.
ATA is a program that helps cover tuition for students who agree to teach in Arizona schools after graduating. It is offered by Arizona’s three public universities as well as at Scottsdale, Rio Salado and Pima community colleges.
ATA is continuing to grow its curriculum, both across the state and at Northern Arizona University.
‘Starting in fall 2021,’ Newberg wrote, ‘ATA at NAU has added more degree programs as well as content related coursework to meet the needs of in-service teachers who are enhancing their qualifications in order to teach dual enrollment courses,’ which are high school classes that also count as college credit.
Newberg also said that ATA now covered ADE teacher certification fees for its graduates.
More than 950 NAU students were enrolled in ATA in the 2020/21 school year, according to the Arizona Board of Regents' (ABOR) communications director, Julie Newberg. She said a little less than half (48%) were studying at locations other than the NAU Flagstaff Mountain Campus.
The program started with ‘nearly 60’ participants in the fall of 2017, Newberg said. The first ATA students at NAU graduated in the 2018/19 school year, 26 in all. Last year, Newberg said, there were 269. Overall, 2,933 students received ATA scholarships in the 2021 spring semester.
One of these students, Victor Gastelum, is in his fourth year at NAU. Originally from California, he visited the Flagstaff campus on a road trip with his grandmother and ‘knew that NAU is where I wanted to go.’
Shortly after arriving on NAU’s campus, he moved to studying part time, working full time as a bus driver at the university to reduce his tuition. He joined ATA after it was established at NAU and was able to return to being a full-time student, part-time employee.
‘It was definitely a big relief when that amount of financial assistance came into play for a career path that [I] wanted to do anyway,’ Gastelum said. ‘It just really incentivizes staying in Arizona and being a teacher here.’
ADE’s press release on their 2020 report said the pandemic had a limited impact on the size and average age of the teaching workforce in Arizona. Instead, there were fewer specialized teachers and more students enrolled in charter or online instructional schools.
‘While the overall size of the workforce did not change significantly, there was a significant decline in the specialized teachers needed to help bridge any learning gaps,’ according to the press release.
Being a teacher has ‘always been’ one of Gastelum’s goals, and a chemistry teacher in his sophomore year of high school inspired him to pursue that science. After graduation, he said, he’s open to going anywhere, but hopes to stay in Arizona, specifically teaching chemistry and math in Flagstaff.
‘I’m pretty eager to get into the classroom and my passion is definitely with science,’ he said, ‘so as long as I can teach in a science classroom, I am happy wherever.’”
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