We explore North Carolina’s teaching assistant (TA)-to-teacher pipeline by assessing outcomes for early-career teachers with and without prior TA experience. We find that those with prior TA experience make up a meaningful percentage of beginning teachers and possess characteristics that are needed in the teaching workforce (e.g. more likely to be a person of color and teach special education students). Former TAs are performing comparably to peers without TA experience and are much more likely to stay in teaching. Future research should assess ways to best recruit and support individuals transitioning from TA to teacher roles.
Bastian et al. (Sun,) studied this question.