The future of student teaching

A New Jersey school district seeks to entice new teachers to their district by supporting them in their student-teaching experience.

At a Glance

To address teacher shortages, New Jersey has sought new ways to recruit and retain teachers.
For some prospective teachers, student teaching presents a financial barrier to entering the profession.
The West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District began offering stipends for student teachers.
The program allows the district to identify and recruit promising new teachers before they enter the open job market. research and experience, the authors have found these five techniques to be effective:

Student teaching has been an integral part of the preservice educator experience since the early 20th century (Schneider, 2018). The goal of hands-on student teaching is clear: It allows future educators “to further develop their instructional and classroom management skills and become better prepared for the demands of teaching” (Bastian, Patterson, & Carpenter, 2021, p. 1584). Many preservice teachers consider this experience the most valuable aspect of their teacher preparation; however, completing the practicum comes with financial pressures (Grant-Smith, et al., 2018).

Unlike internships in many other fields, student teaching has historically been unpaid. Student teachers still attending college must pay tuition, rent, gas, or other transportation costs and hold down a job. Because of the strenuous schedule, most preservice teachers cannot retain a second job during their student teaching, limiting their access to necessary funds. As one University of Connecticut student explains, “this financial strain discourages many talented, passionate future educators, especially first-generation, low-income and minority students” (Connecticut Education Association, 2025).

New Jersey is facing a teacher shortage of unprecedented proportions, especially in specialized areas such as world language, mathematics, and special education

With teacher shortages nationwide, school leaders are searching for ways to encourage preservice educators to complete their preparation programs and get certified. David Aderhold, superintendent of the West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District (WW-P) created The New Teacher Program to provide stipends for select student teachers. Once program participants graduate from their preservice education programs, they are required to apply for any open position in the district for which they qualify.

Could this program, which accepted its first cohort in fall 2024 and is training its fourth as of spring 2026, be the future of student teaching in New Jersey and beyond?

New Jersey’s teacher shortage

New Jersey is facing a teacher shortage of unprecedented proportions, especially in specialized areas such as world language, mathematics, and special education. Researchers estimate that “for every teacher that left the profession in the 2022-23 school year, the state issued just 1.1 provisional teaching certificates, compared to 2.9 certifications in the 2013-14 school year” (Biryukov, 2024). Teacher shortages often disproportionately affect disadvantaged schools, where inequalities already strain the current staff (Goldhaber et al., 2020). If this pattern continues, there will be more openings in schools than ever before, with fewer qualified teachers to fill them (Nguyen, Lam, & Bruno, 2024).

Stakeholders have proposed various solutions to this growing problem. These include increasing teacher compensation, streamlining the teacher certification process, and shoring up the state teacher pension system (Weber, 2022). Some of these ideas have been implemented in New Jersey. In 2024, for example, New Jersey contributed nearly $7.2 billion into the pension fund, fully funding it for the fourth year in a row (New Jersey Aiming for Record $7.2 Billion Pension Fund Contribution, 2024).

Additionally, as of Jan. 1, 2025, prospective teachers will no longer need to pass the Praxis Core Test, a test of basic skills frequently criticized as being redundant and unnecessarily costly (Comstock, 2025). The New Jersey legislature also has passed bills creating a task force to investigate the teacher evaluation process and offering scholarships of up to $7,200 to eligible students for each semester of full-time clinical work (Gross, 2024).

However, despite these meaningful steps, New Jersey still has a long way to go to both retain the teachers they currently have in the profession and attract new educators who are willing to work in a system that has been devalued greatly in the last 20 years (Zahn & Wilde, 2022). Gone are the days of supervisors rifling through hundreds of applications for each open position. Superintendents and other hirers often must go directly to teacher preparation programs to entice preservice teachers to consider their district for future employment.

Seeking new educators from within

In November 2022, Gov. Phil Murphy created the Task Force on Public School Staff Shortages in New Jersey. The committee was composed of 25 members, representing school administrators, the New Jersey Education Association, the New Jersey Department of Education (NJDOE), and other important collaborators. In early 2023, after five meetings, the task force identified three categories of recommendations to battle the shortages: 1) supporting educators to improve retention, 2) improving recruitment and training, and 3) state-funded programs to address educator shortages (NJDOE, 2023). Each of these categories included specific actionable items, such as expanding mentorship and co-teaching models, streamlining the alternate route pathway to certification, and establishing middle and high school programs to encourage students to pursue a teaching career.

The idea of finding future educators from the local community is supported by research, especially around student teachers.

One suggestion consistently seen as a viable option for relieving teacher shortages is establishing Grow Your Own (GYO) programs. GYO programs identify candidates in the local community, with “the hope [that] a community member will be more personally invested in the school system, and more likely to stick around” (Turner & Cohen, 2023). Often, these candidates are pulled from existing pools of substitute teachers or paraprofessionals already working in the school system.

The idea of finding future educators from the local community is supported by research, especially around student teachers. As one study showed,

about 15% of teachers are hired into the same school in which they student taught, about 40% are hired into their student teaching district, and the location of teachers’ student teaching placements is more predictive of where they are hired than where they went to high school or college (Krieg et al., 2016, as cited in Goldhaber, et al., 2020, p. 1).

Putting more effort and money into GYO programs can encourage individuals who are familiar with the area to stay in the community. This idea has been part of the impetus for The New Teacher Program (TNTP).

Aderhold’s participation in the Task Force on Public School Staff Shortages in New Jersey helped spur the creation of The New Teacher Program (TNTP) in West Windsor-Plainsboro. Student teachers who are accepted into the program receive a stipend of up to $10,000 per semester, ongoing evening professional development sessions, and opportunities to participate in a job fair with résumé editing and interview practice.

Aderhold’s intention is to catch educators before they hit the open job market (personal communication, December 2024). As Aderhold explains, districts must proactively find and support educators. They cannot wait until graduation or beyond.

The program at WW-P handpicks and thoroughly vets promising candidates before they begin student teaching. The application involves not only standard questions and multiple essay responses, but also an asynchronous video interview. Candidates are given prompts and two attempts to record their responses. Questions include inquiries about teaching philosophies and district goals. Applicants were asked to reflect on the mission statement and goals of WW-P and identify which resonate with them the most and why. This process whittles down applicants to those who have strong communication skills and feel that their values and ideals align with those of the district.

Once candidates have been identified, the district seeks to remove barriers to entering the profession. New Jersey’s Task Force on Public School Staff Shortages noted that “unlike other professional and technical fields … candidates that are completing their student teaching requirements are currently unpaid for this experience” (NJDOE, 2023, p. 23). To address this, WW-P guarantees everyone who is accepted to the selective TNTP program a salary of $5,000, with additional funds, up to $10,000 total, for applicants with hardships or those gaining certifications in difficult-to-fill positions. (This had to be delivered in the form of salary so that it did not interfere with loans, scholarships, or other sources of income.)

To convince the district’s board of education to offer these funds, Aderhold showed that hiring a novice teacher straight out of an education program would cost thousands of dollars less than replacing a retiree with a veteran teacher. Even if half of the student teachers earning the stipends leave WW-P for another district or career, Aderhold believes that the district will stay even or ahead by hiring primarily first-year teachers for new openings. After showing the multiyear budget with projections that the district could potentially save millions of dollars, Aderhold knew that the board would readily agree.

Of the 23 student teachers who participated in the program in fall 2024, 10 graduated that December, and eight are currently employed by WW-P, almost all in tenure-track positions. In spring 2025, another cohort of 17 student teachers entered the program.

While Aderhold has always believed WW-P is an attractive district for educators, it has become even more appealing with TNTP and the benefits it provides.

The way of the future

Aderhold believes this program is the future of student teaching. He hopes to see it grow and expand to communities throughout the state and beyond, because the teacher shortage is not going to simply end. The 2022 PDK Poll found that only 37% of U.S. adults would want their child to become a public school teacher in their community (PDK International, 2022). But there are still millions of students in New Jersey and across the U.S. who need qualified, passionate educators to guide them. It is the responsibility of districts to attract new employees however they can. Paying them to do full-time work is one step in the right direction.

References

Aspiring Educators Urge Lawmakers: Pay Student Teachers. (2025, March 19). Connecticut Education Association.

Bastian, K.C., Patterson, K.M., & Carpenter, D. (2022). Placed for success: Which teachers benefit from high-quality student teaching placements? Education Policy, 36 (7), 1583-1611.

Biryukov, N. (2024, September 3). New Jersey districts still face teacher shortages as new school year begins. New Jersey Monitor.

Comstock, L. (2025, January 8). Fact-checking Elon Musk’s claims that NJ teachers “Don’t need to know how to read.” North Jersey Media Group.

Goldhaber, D., Krieg, J., Naito, N., & Theobald, R. (2020). Student teaching and the geography of teacher shortages. Educational Researcher, 50 (3), 165-175.

Grant-Smith, D., de Zwaan, L., Chapman, R., & Gillett-Swan, J. (2018). ‘It’s the worst, but real experience is invaluable’: Pre-service teacher perspectives of the costs and benefits of professional experience. In D. Heck & A. Ambrosetti (Eds.), Teacher education in and for uncertain times (pp. 15-33). Springer.

Gross, H. (2024, March 4). NJ lawmakers trying to get — and keep — teachers in schools. NJ Spotlight News.

New Jersey aiming for record $7.2 billion pension fund contribution. It’s still not enough. (2024). Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy.

New Jersey Department of Education (2023, February). Initial recommendations from members of the Task Force on Public School Staff Shortages in New Jersey.

Nguyen, T.D., Lam, C.B., & Bruno, P. (2024). What do we know about the extent of teacher shortages nationwide? A systemic examination of reports of U.S. teacher shortages. AERA Open, 10.

PDK International. (2022). The 54th annual PDK Poll: Local public school ratings rice, even as the teaching profession loses ground.

Schneider, J. (2018). Clinical experiences. Teachinghistory.org.

Turner, C. & Cohen, N. (2023, March 23). 6 things to know about the U.S. teacher shortages and how to solve them. NPR.

Weber, M. (2022, June 6). New Jersey’s teacher pipeline: The decline in teacher candidates continues. New Jersey Policy Perspective.

Zahn, H. & Wilde, W. (2022, August 20). Why teachers in America are leaving the profession in droves. PBS News Weekend.

This article appears in the Summer 2026 issue of Kappan, Vol. 107, No. 7-8.