The Pathways Program: A Model for Increasing the Number of Teachers of Color (Report‪)‬

Introduction According to the Alliance for Excellent Education (2005), an accumulation of teaching personnel data reveals that teacher retention is a costly expense to individual states and to the nation. Yearly, thousands of teachers leave the profession or change schools in pursuit of better working conditions. About half of the teachers entering the teaching profession will leave their jobs in the first five years (Lambert, 2006). The field of teaching is much like a sieve: as one teacher enters, another leaves, costing the nation an estimated $4.9 billion each year (Alliance for Excellent Education, 2005).