Localized Teacher Recruitment Through “Grow-Your-Own”: Impacts of the High School Teacher Academy of Maryland Program

Recruiting teachers via “grow-your-own” (GYO) programs is a popular, yet rarely evaluated, strategy for addressing local workforce shortages and ensuring that incoming teachers resemble, understand, and have strong connections to their communities. We provide novel evidence on the impacts of one such GYO program by exploiting the staggered rollout of the Teacher Academy of Maryland (TAM) Career and Technical Education (CTE) program across public high schools. Exposed students were more likely to become teachers a decade later by 0.6 percentage points (pp), or 45%. Effects were concentrated among White girls (1.4pp/39%) and Black girls (0.7pp/82%), though boys benefitted too (0.2pp/59%). Although White girls induced by the program to become teachers often did so in the same district they attended as students (0.9pp/43%)—a key goal of GYO and localized teacher recruitment programs—this was less common for Black girls. Rather, Black girls induced by the program to become teachers did so in districts with more Black teachers than their home district (0.4pp/143%) and in districts with higher starting salaries (0.5pp/239%). Access to the program also increased wages (5% on average/18% for Black girls), challenging the narrative that such programs cause students to forego more lucrative professions.