A new teacher preparation program in Camden is off to a fast start in preparing para-professionals for careers as fully-certified teachers. The Camden Education Fund has partnered with Camden U, a non-profit hybrid college, to create “The Teacher Pathway Apprenticeship,” which offers coursework and test preparation to classroom aides, regardless of whether they’ve attended college, have associate’s degrees, or have bachelor’s degrees. All Camden U students must spend 12 weeks as a student teacher and pass the Praxis, a subject skills test.. The path to certification is customized for each student and there is either no or very little cost for aspiring teachers.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Camden Education Fund has pledged $150,000 to support paraprofessionals’ advancement to licensed teachers. “There are so many diamonds in the rough here in Camden, across the state and across the country,” said Giana Campbell, the fund’s executive director. “The stakes are too high for a handful of missed questions on an exam or thousands of dollars in certification courses to deprive our students of a great teacher in the making.”.

Currently 30 paraprofessionals are enrolled in Camden U and six of them have already earned a New Jersey certificate of eligibility, the first step in the process for teacher certification. A new cohort will enroll in August.

Serendipitously, a new report from CALDER called “The Relationship Between Pandemic-Era Teacher Licensure Waivers and Teacher Demographics, Retention, and Effectiveness in New Jersey,” finds good outcomes for these alternative route teacher certification programs. The analysis, performed by Ben Backes and Dan Goldhaber, looks at a program created by the New Jersey Department of Education in response to COVID teacher shortages that offered a “Temporary Certificate of Eligibility” to non-certified adults and even waived the PRAXIS tests.

The report finds that the temporary certifications attracted a more diverse group of prospective teachers than traditional certification programs, an extremely important factor for students: “the demographic makeup of teachers entering on Temporary CEs was much closer to that of the state’s student body.” When Temporary CEs’ impacts on students were compared with a control group of novice teachers, Temporary CEs “were at least as effective – and in some models, more so – as other novice teachers in the state as measured by student test score gains.”

Camden Mayor Vic Carstarphen said, “this is making dreams become a reality.”