Student teacher stipends
To support the financial needs of candidates, the state devoted $30 million across two years toward the Student Teacher Support Program. Student teachers will receive a stipend of at least $10,000 for entering student teaching. Starting in the 2025–26 school year, the state plans to offer student teachers as much as $15,000 if they choose to student teach in an area of need (schools the state identifies as having few student teachers or a high rate of open teaching positions).
Pennsylvania established clear criteria for who is eligible for student teacher stipends, including that the candidate is placed at an approved location, that they agree to work at a Pennsylvania school for at least three years, and that they are in an unpaid student teaching position (e.g., they cannot substitute teach for more than 10 days during their placement).
Cooperating teacher stipends
The legislation offers cooperating teachers $2,500 stipends. Previously, stipends for cooperating teachers were inconsistent, depending on what prep programs or districts offered, so the state policy aims to create parity among student teachers across the state.
The new stipend program will not yet be universal. Whether cooperating teachers receive stipends will depend on whether their student teacher also receives one. The state hopes to scale this stipend more broadly if it is successful in recruiting cooperating teachers.
Redeveloping a high-quality student teaching evaluation instrument
The state has in place the PDE 430, also known as the Pennsylvania Statewide Evaluation Form for Student Professional Knowledge and Practice. This instrument must be used at least twice during candidates’ full-time student teaching experience, requires ratings and evidence across four categories (planning and preparation, classroom environment, instructional delivery, and professionalism), and results in an overall rating. Rating categories include exemplary, superior, satisfactory, and unsatisfactory. On the final summative rating, candidates must earn a satisfactory rating in each of the four categories.
The state is currently working to update and streamline this pre-service evaluation instrument to more closely align with the evaluation instrument used for in-service teachers (the instrument had last been updated in 2003). To conduct this update, the state education agency first convened a group of teacher prep program providers, as well as a policy group to draft a revised version of the form. Next, the state shared the revised form with a group of principals, superintendents, and teachers who had served as cooperating teachers; this group suggested several revisions. Changes based on this feedback included updating the ratings categories, adding a statement of recommended actions for the student teacher based on the interim and final student teaching evaluations, and adding space on the form for the evaluator to justify the rating, including a list of checkboxes for potential evidence.
While the state does not collect ratings on these instruments, they reserve the right to check the forms for candidates at any point and may check them during a program approval review.
Encouraging partnerships through legislation
Through Pennsylvania law (Chapter 354.26), the state requires that prep programs collaborate with both other higher education faculty (e.g., from liberal arts and other academic disciplines) and with public school personnel. This collaboration with public school personnel should include developing and refining knowledge bases and conducting research, as well as providing ongoing support to novice educators during their induction period.
The state looks for evidence of this collaboration through its program approval reviews, which include a major review every seven years. The review asks prep programs to answer the following in their program approval application:
- Describe collaboration activities that take place between the placement sites and program with regard to the student teaching experience.
- Report how often the program provider supervisor and cooperating teacher/site supervisor meet to collaborate.
- Describe how outcomes from collaboration meetings are utilized to enhance student teaching/intern placement experiences.
- Describe collaboration activities that occur between the Education faculty and the Arts and Sciences faculty.
- Explain improvements to this program’s design that are a direct result of faculty collaboration.
The review process also includes a series of questions for the reviewer to consider while analyzing the evidence, such as, “Does the program describe the process for collecting feedback from the LEAs on the quality of candidates placed in their site for student teaching/internship and analyze the feedback and describe the findings?”
Other features of the law include:
- Requiring “sequential field experiences” that start before full-time student teaching or internships, including opportunities to “study and practice in a variety of communities, with students of different ages, and with culturally diverse and exceptional populations.”
- Mandating that prep programs design clinical experiences with a minimum of 12 weeks of full-time student teaching, and requiring that candidates are evaluated and receive feedback from not only their higher education faculty but also from public or nonpublic school faculty (354.25).
Investigating outcomes and entry into the workforce

Meagan Steiner, state lead-K–12 human capital strategies, is working with a group of teacher preparation programs to study why the state is losing candidates, following them “from the moment they get a gleam in their eye that they may want to be a teacher, to when they’re a certified teacher in Pennsylvania’s schools.” The work explores why candidates are leaving, with a focus on aspiring teachers of color, as well as what convinces teachers to remain on the path into the classroom, for those who have considered leaving but stayed.
Her work was inspired by CALDER’s analysis of where potential teachers of color are lost from the pipeline. Steiner modified a prep program-specific pipeline tracking tool spreadsheet developed by AIR so that programs could add program-specific milestones, and shared it with prep programs to begin gathering data. This initial exploration is part of a research project, starting with a group of five institutions, with the hope to scale it statewide in the future.
Data collection for this project includes staff interviews; focus groups with current candidates; and surveys of current candidates, program graduates, and former candidates who did not complete the program. The analysis will also integrate existing institutional data. The focus will extend beyond the purview of prep programs to also include an analysis of campus-wide supports like career counseling and financial aid counseling, as these may also support people in completing the prep program.
The first round of data was expected in late 2024.
Advice
- Reach out to other states and learn from their successes and challenges:
Carissa Pokorny-Golden, bureau director for school leadership and teacher quality, Pennsylvania Department of Education “The most useful thing is talking to other states. Teacher shortages have led to more states talking to one another openly. Everyone is facing similar challenges, so we’re all trying to figure out what works. We’re doing it in a way that isn’t competitive.”
- Bring different groups of stakeholders together so that they can learn from and inform each other: The state team advocates for bringing districts and prep programs together for discussions, rather than meeting with each group separately. For the revisions to the student teacher evaluation instrument, the state started by working with prep programs to do the work, but Katina Moten, division chief for professional education and teacher quality, found that “it was important for [district and teacher prep] stakeholders to mix together and talk about the work. They aren’t doing the work in a silo, so they’re all connected.”