Do We Need a GYO Intermediary?

To do Grow Your Own (GYO) well, districts must build and integrate multiple systems and components, which can quickly become overwhelming. If your district is trying to grow and develop its own educators, a quality intermediary could save your district time, costs, and effort—and provide a path to sustainability.

While there are some technical definitions available, we have some nuances that we think are important to share based on our experience as an intermediary.

Before jumping into intermediaries, let’s back up and first look at what options a district has for planning and managing its workforce—and why it would select Grow Your Own to begin with.

Getting the Best Teachers Possible

If we look through the lens of getting the best teachers possible, like any employer, there are limited workforce strategy options that school districts have available to execute. Broadly, the categories are:

1 - Do Nothing
Count on the macro situation to change to your district’s benefit without your intervention. This could include betting that colleges of education will produce enough extra candidates and start reopening job fairs that shut down a few years ago and/or a rough job market will send people back into public service in droves. (Although the April jobs report was better than expected.) It’s possible—but it’s not in your control.

2 - Buy Talent Strategy
Outbid other districts for new graduates. Offer signing bonuses. Launch international teacher programs. Raise salaries (like Chicago did when it recently raised average teacher pay to $114K). 

3 - Build Talent Strategy (Grow Your Own)
Create on-the-job pathways for professional and career advancement for people already working in your buildings: paraprofessionals, long-term subs, instructional aides, career changers. In K–12, this is often called "Grow Your Own." In other industries, it’s simply called apprenticeship pathways.

Pros/Cons of a Build Strategy

There are practical reasons to lean toward the “Build” strategy. Doing nothing isn’t proactive. For most, Buy strategies aren’t financially viable in the short and long term and run the risk of damaging culture. A major pro of the Build strategy is its potential to develop a staff that is deeply connected to the community.

However, unlike buying talent, building talent requires integrating multiple systems and components—apprenticeship models, teacher certification programs, accredited degree partners, mentorship models, tuition financing, recruiting, policies, and evaluation—to create the infrastructure to sustain this effort.

This is where the role of a quality intermediary steps in. Because they have the platform for it, they increase the potential for sustainability by reducing the effort and resource intensity required.

Intermediaries Facilitate

An intermediary is a partner for your Grow Your Own strategy whose purpose is to facilitate the process to minimize the effort and maximize the value of your efforts. You can think of them as a platform for your Grow Your Own: they do some things themselves and host the rest. They ensure all the right parts show up, work together, and are compatible. And if there is a need that is not covered, there is a path to adding it.

At MathTrack Institute, we serve districts as this intermediary. We manage the connections between your district, educators, and higher ed partners. Some parts we handle ourselves—like math licensure, K–12 apprenticeship design, and mentor development. Other parts, like degree conferrals in SPED or elementary education, we defer to our partner higher education institutions.

We haven’t gotten it to a “one-stop-shop level” yet. However, it is appropriate to consider it a curated, consolidated experience for the district, like a clearinghouse for activity. If a unique program is needed, we can work with universities to bring the pathway in if there isn’t one ready off the shelf.

Key Criteria for an Intermediary

From our experience, here is what matters most in enabling us to be an effective intermediary:

1 - Deep Understanding of Apprenticeship
It starts with having a deep understanding of apprenticeship. It’s not just putting competencies on a rubric and ensuring they get completed, or deciding whether the apprenticeship should be a Registered Apprenticeship. It’s fundamentally understanding that your district already has a significant base of knowledge and that the goal of apprenticeship is not to bring knowledge, but to transfer and evolve the knowledge you already have (I wrote about my view on this here).

2 - Subject-Area Expertise
General knowledge of subject areas is important, but having deep expertise in at least one subject area is equally important—ideally, one of the core subjects. For example, ours is mathematics. That expertise allows us to go deeper into program design and serve as an academic partner to accredited institutions. This increases the job-embedded capability of the programming and fosters better collaboration to meet district needs. Our GROWTH Framework is one unique way we bring this to life in our programs. [We just published a book on it. If you’re interested, email or message me and we’ll ship you a free copy.]

3 - Accredited Partnerships: Quality over Quantity
Our philosophy is to build with the most innovative institutions that equally aspire to be transformative in K–12 teacher preparation. For this reason, we aim to have a limited number of highly integrative partnerships with accredited institutions. While we build and deliver a lot of programming ourselves, our approach is to leverage the unique domain expertise of our institutional partner. At the other end of the spectrum is creating canned content and looking for accredited universities to deliver and put their accreditation on it. Intermediaries will exist between these spectrums. It’s important to understand how these philosophies of partnership could affect your district context.

4 - Strategic Framework for Sustainability
An intermediary should offer more than programs. They should help you make sense of your situation and identify what you can do next to deliver the highest value with the least amount of effort. Overexertion kills strategic initiatives more often than neglect.

Your intermediary should reduce the risk of your initiatives by lowering the required resources. The outcome of decreasing the intensity of effort and resources is increased sustainability. Sustainability of Grow Your Own comes from three pillars: Cultural, Financial, and Programmatic. I’ve provided a section on this below.

5 - Online-Based Programs
These are working adults. Many of them are working full time and have families. We cannot expect them to do in-person classes. This creates a significant risk in completion that is unnecessary. The intermediary should have the technology to host the programs online, facilitate the mentorship process, and track competencies that can be transferred into the online accredited university partner degree program.

The Three Pillars of a Sustainable Grow Your Own Strategy

As mentioned above, a key value your intermediary will provide is a path toward sustainability. The three pillars we have identified that are important for sustainability are below:

1 - Cultural Sustainability
Culture is the most fundamental for sustainability. Grow Your Own is as much about belief as it is about structure. It starts with leadership. Leadership must believe the district already has the talent it needs. From that belief, you will be able to find the inspirational stories that are needed to get buy-in and make change. After that, are staff willing to share knowledge freely? Experienced teachers have to be willing to be a mentor, either intrinsically or extrinsically (if needed). You can leverage intrinsic motivations more effectively if the teaching culture is highly supportive.

2 - Financial Sustainability
The first key to financial sustainability is to decouple programs from financing as much as possible. Secondly, it's important to reduce reliance on external funding. If your strategy depends on outside funding (grants, workforce dollars, etc.), there is a high risk that it is not sustainable. That’s why, from Day 1, our approach is to help districts design pathways that work with local dollars—through predictable district investment, manageable educator costs, and smart use of funding streams.

To decouple finances from programs, we help districts delay spending unless it is absolutely clear it's necessary. Mentorship, for example, is a sticky one that often is assumed to require extrinsic payment via stipends. If it’s not viable to leverage intrinsic motivations, we can look for other forms of compensation before monetary ones—such as evaluating whether mentors can be rewarded through PGP credit or if the university partner would be willing to provide credit/advanced standing toward master’s degrees for mentorship.

This is just one example to highlight the importance of decoupling finances as much as possible for sustainability purposes. The fewer budget approvals you must seek each year for various aspects of the strategy, the fewer financial contingencies there are to sustainability.

3 - Programmatic Sustainability
This should be the easiest of the three if the first two are solidly in place. A good intermediary already has a strong base of programs, with the ability to design and build additional programmatic needs over time. While the Grow Your Own market is progressing, I’m not aware of a comprehensive solution that considers every program possible. So the key should be that they have a strong base and a framework for expanding alongside your district over time.

Closing Thoughts

A strong intermediary is more than a program provider. They are your sustainability partner in workforce development. If you are considering Grow Your Own for the first time, you can talk to your local university—but I recommend exploring intermediaries. If you are already doing Grow Your Own and you feel like your strategy has been stuck and not progressing, it could be that your intermediary is not being effective—or you should consider partnering with one if you aren’t already.