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Apprenticeship Pathway Use Case: Apprenticeship Domain Development

Background​

The National Teacher Registered Apprenticeship Program (RAP) is a groundbreaking initiative designed to address the critical teacher shortage facing our nation. By combining classroom learning with hands-on experience, this program provides aspiring educators with the skills and support they need to succeed in the teaching profession.

Teacher RAPs are designed to tackle the nationwide teacher shortage by creating a pipeline of well-prepared educators. These programs combine classroom instruction with hands-on experience, ensuring apprentices gain practical skills. The developed national guidelines for apprenticeship standards, ensuring high-quality educator preparation programs. These standards help maintain consistency and excellence across different states and districts

Apprenticeships have long been a pathway for individuals entering a trade or occupation or expanding their skills. The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has the legislative direction to regulate and support apprenticeship across a broad spectrum of industries and occupations. The apprenticeship program also provides a structured pathway for aspiring educators to gain practical experience and mentorship while working towards their teaching credentials, ensuring a well-prepared and diverse teaching workforce.

As of 2025, 45 states, along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, have implemented registered teacher apprenticeship programs1. This significant expansion reflects the growing recognition of these programs as a vital solution to the national teacher shortage.

Leveraging the Ed-Fi Standard for Enabling Essential Data Use and Reporting​

Driven by the needs of the Ed-Fi community, the standard is continuing to be pulled to cover adjacent data domains. Ed-Fi Alliance in partnership with the Pathways Alliance engaged in field research. Ed-Fi began to explore how to expand the data standard into a new educator apprenticeship pathway domain, leveraging the existing Ed-Fi and EPDM models

Ten Thousand Foot View of Comprehensive Entity Model

Ten Thousand Foot View of Comprehensive Entity Model

The effort started with the process of detailing underlying the data models, leveraging the existing Ed-Fi and EPDM data models, which are well defined and proven in the field. Though the domain design was targeting Teacher Registered Apprenticeship, we believe that other industry apprenticeship programs could benefit from leveraging this domain.

Other related goals included:

  • Tackling RAPIDs data elements. RAPIDS is the federal system (DOL) that provides for the automated collection, retention, updating, retrieval, and summarization of information related to apprentices and registered apprenticeship programs.

  • Creating a comprehensive entity and association data model

  • Attempting to begin to capture source system data related to RAP

  • Capturing the various uses of the data

  • Conceptualizing the Ed-Fi Architecture applied to the Teacher RAP data ecosystem

Access the initial version of the Apprentice Report and related documentation:

Feedback & Interest​

As this is an initial version, the Ed-Fi Alliance will continue to look to the community for review and suggested refinement, which may incorporate additional needs for other industries. Please contact Lindsey Judd, Manager, Educator Pipeline at Lindsey.Judd@ed-fi.org if you are interested in learning more or/and would like to provide feedback on this initial documentation.