Teacher Residencies in Texas: Supporting Successful Implementation

In 2021, the Texas Education Agency launched a large-scale, statewide effort to establish and sustain teacher residencies. The High-Quality, Sustainable Residencies Program was funded as part of the $1.4 billion Texas COVID Learning Acceleration Supports (TCLAS) initiative, underwritten by federal COVID-19 relief funds. From 2021 to 2024, this program provided funding for more than 85 residency programs, offered by school districts in partnership with state-designated educator preparation programs (EPPs), with paid placements for more than 2,000 residents. The grant also provided technical assistance for these districts to adopt “strategic staffing” models, reconfiguring educator positions to reallocate resources toward sustaining paid residencies after the end of grant funding.

Texas is one of a growing number of states responding to teacher attrition and shortages by incentivizing and expanding residencies. Teacher attrition rates in Texas have been 50% higher than the national average, while two thirds of Texas teachers newly hired in 2024 (not including rehires returning to the workforce) entered the profession either through alternative routes or, in a growing trend, without state certification. While such pathways can fill classroom vacancies quickly, research shows that they are associated with lower teacher retention and weaker student outcomes compared to clinically intensive pathways such as residencies.

Although the TCLAS residency program and its funding have ended, its effects on the Texas teacher workforce are still playing out. Policymakers and practitioners are looking to build on progress and address gaps, and this report is intended to inform future residency-focused efforts at both state and local levels by highlighting crucial levers of the TCLAS investment. These levers include the influence of TCLAS requirements and residency design elements in residency implementation, the essential contributions of resident stipends and program sustainability requirements, and the conditions that enabled uptake of the TCLAS residency model. Building on this analysis of program levers, the report explores the implications of TCLAS for ongoing residency development and builds on these to develop policy recommendations for Texas, though these are also applicable to other states with related teacher workforce goals.

Key Program Features for Residency Implementation

The TCLAS grant program required districts and EPPs to adopt research-based residency and partnership design elements. Residency features cited as effective by program administrators and residents included full-year resident placements in PreK–12 classrooms, resident stipends, experienced and trained mentor teachers, and co-teaching models with progressively increasing resident responsibilities. District–EPP partnerships were enacted through shared residency program governance processes, required by the grant, which promoted ownership, agency, and buy-in for EPPs and districts. These partnership features, and flexibility in TCLAS implementation, enabled program alignment to local priorities and needs. TCLAS grant requirements also laid out specific roles for the EPP clinical faculty (often known as site coordinators) and PreK–12 mentor teachers who were an essential part of the day-to-day operations of residency programs.

Residency Stipends and Sustainability

The two most important financial features of the TCLAS residency grant program were paid residency placements and technical assistance to help districts sustain funding for these paid placements. Stipends of $20,000, paid to residents by districts but funded by the TCLAS grant, were intended to cover residents’ living expenses in order to enable their full participation in the residency model. Stipends facilitated residents’ engagement in their clinical placements and concurrent EPP courses and requirements by allowing them to forego outside employment while they completed their residencies; current residents shared that they were only able to participate in the yearlong residency because of this stipend support.

TCLAS technical assistance, paid for by grant funding and supplied on an in-kind basis to districts, supported district adoption of strategic staffing models. Through these models, districts assign residents instructional support responsibilities, such as substitute teaching or tutoring. The money saved when residents fill these roles can then be reallocated toward resident stipends. Strategic staffing was the intended mechanism for sustaining paid residencies after the end of TCLAS funding. School administrators and district- and EPP-level staff were consistently pleased with the strategic staffing technical assistance they received. However, some TCLAS districts—especially smaller and more rural districts—found that the funding freed up by strategic staffing was insufficient to continue stipends at the $20,000 TCLAS level.

TCLAS technical assistance was also set up to contribute to paid residency sustainability by building statewide capacity to support TCLAS districts. Staff from US PREP, a Texas-based nonprofit center, provided direct technical assistance to districts while training regional Education Service Center (ESC) staff to do the same. Embedding expertise on strategic staffing in ESCs across the state not only supported TCLAS districts but also set up the infrastructure to support additional districts in establishing paid residencies post-TCLAS.

Enabling Conditions for TCLAS Uptake

Common among TCLAS districts and partner EPPs were two conditions that facilitated TCLAS implementation. First, the EPPs in the initial group of Vetted Teacher Residency programs, designated by the state as eligible to partner with TCLAS districts, were already running residency programs when the grant was launched. These EPPs had thus already worked through residency development and implementation, though several did add new features, including paid stipends, in order to participate in TCLAS. Second, TCLAS districts demonstrated high levels of engagement in residency implementation. They initially did so through the TCLAS application process, which gave districts the lead role in acquiring funding and launching partnerships. Later, according to administrators’ reports, district educators’ positive experiences hosting residents and hiring residency completers became motivating factors for sustaining TCLAS programs.

Policy Developments and Recommendations

We developed the recommendations in this report in the context of state administrative and legislative actions that were enacted concurrently with the TCLAS residency grant. As TCLAS was running, the Texas Education Agency launched three other residency grant programs. The first was a 2-year grant for non-TCLAS districts to receive technical assistance and staff funding for the establishment of teacher residencies in partnership with vetted EPPs. The second funded training for regional Education Service Center staff to lead district technical assistance efforts beyond TCLAS. The final grant provided an additional year of funding for select TCLAS districts to sustain residency stipends while establishing their strategic staffing models. It was also during the run of the TCLAS program that the State Board for Educator Certification adopted changes to Texas administrative code, creating a recognized teacher residency preparation pathway and accompanying state teaching certificate.

Taking these developments into account, the TCLAS implementation findings in this report suggest a series of potential next steps for policymakers and practitioners.

1. Continue to require key TCLAS features in future residency support efforts. Essential features include research-based models with full-year placements in co-teaching settings; shared EPP–district governance structures enabling local flexibility, agency, and buy-in; and specified EPP and PreK–12 educator roles and responsibilities. In technical assistance, the dual emphasis on direct technical assistance and train-the-trainer roles for providers should be maintained, as should the collaborative, improvement-focused approach of the network of Education Service Centers already operating across geographic and institutional boundaries.
    
2. Facilitate residency expansion by developing new EPP partners and supporting longer implementation timelines for new residency partnerships. TCLAS grant program implementation relied on EPP experience and district uptake. The initial group of EPPs vetted for TCLAS participation drew on previous residency experience when implementing partnerships with districts. TCLAS districts benefited from these partnerships and, in some cases, from their own pre-TCLAS residency experience, but district engagement was also driven by PreK–12 educators’ positive impressions of residents’ performance during their training and as first-year teachers. Future state efforts to expand residencies should account for the time and effort required to establish residency infrastructure, partnerships, and buy-in, particularly in contexts in which EPPs and districts have less residency experience.
    
3. Support the establishment of pipelines for mentor teachers and residency faculty as new programs come online and established programs continue to operate and grow. Because both mentor teachers and EPP clinical faculty (site coordinators) were essential for TCLAS implementation, building intentionally designed pipelines for educators aspiring to these roles could support the scaling of residencies. Establishing these pipelines would likely involve districts and EPPs working in partnership, ideally with state guidance and coordination. Additionally, this work could be linked to ongoing efforts to establish and expand educator career ladders.
    
4. Create multidistrict residency consortia to enable teacher pipeline collaboration, supported by expanded technical assistance through Education Service Centers. Residency sustainability and scaling could be enhanced by creating cross-district collaboration structures, including regional residency consortia. In a region with multiple districts implementing residencies, a consortium could support local hiring for residency completers in an expanded geographic area. Specifically, a regional consortium could link smaller rural districts, with fewer teacher position openings each year, to larger districts with more residents and more yearly teacher vacancies. Creating regional flows of completers could expand hiring opportunities across districts and offer a new type of return on investment for districts that train residents who move on to other locations, provided these residents stay within the region. Setting up regional consortia would require an expansion of connective structures across districts, but these could be built on collaborative TCLAS-supported technical assistance efforts already underway through Education Service Centers.
    
5. Support residency sustainability by offering matching grants and helping districts braid funding from multiple sources. TCLAS sustainability provisions, using district funds redirected through strategic staffing, were not always sufficient to maintain paid residencies at TCLAS levels. The state can support residency sustainability through a combination of approaches, including extending state funding of paid residency placements to give districts more time to achieve sustainability; offering matching grants to help subsidize district residency stipends; and providing guidance and technical assistance to support districts in braiding funding from multiple sources, including teacher apprenticeship funds.
    
6. Provide targeted support for residency partnerships that prepare teachers for high-need assignments in rural and high-poverty districts. Establishing and sustaining paid residencies in contexts in which economic and geographic barriers exacerbate shortages could be a powerful lever to support broader access to qualified teachers. Yet it is in these same contexts where strategic staffing approaches appear insufficient to sustain paid residencies. Targeting financial support for residency stipends and other administrative costs to districts designated by the Teacher Incentive Allotment would be a step toward addressing the teacher shortage in high-need areas. Targeted funds could also be directed toward additional time for districts to achieve residency sustainability. 

Although these recommendations are focused on the Texas context, they can inform policy development in other states. Relevant lessons from Texas include requiring research-based residency features, ensuring sufficient timelines for the adoption of new preparation models, supporting EPP residency redesign as a precursor to establishing district partnerships, and providing technical assistance to districts to establish sustainable program and stipend funding. 

Teacher Residencies in Texas: Supporting Successful Implementation by Steven K. Wojcikiewicz, Kimberlee Ralph, Jon Snyder, Jennifer A. Bland, and Marjorie E. Wechsler is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Core operating support for LPI is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.