1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Teacher, Principal, and Leader Residency Access Act . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Across the United States, local educational agencies and elementary schools and secondary schools are struggling to meet the growing demand for qualified teachers. In 2017–18, more than 100,000 classrooms in the United States were staffed by instructors who were unqualified to teach. These classrooms are disproportionately located in low-income, high-minority schools, although schools of every kind have been affected by a lack of qualified applicants in key subjects, including mathematics, special education, science, world languages, career and technical education, and teachers of English learners. (2) Teacher shortages are in significant part driven by teacher turnover. Research shows that teacher turnover is higher for those who enter the profession without adequate preparation. Teachers who enter the profession through a comprehensive, high-quality program with student teaching, formal feedback on their teaching, and multiple courses in student learning, as required in high-quality teaching residency programs, are more likely to remain in the profession compared to teachers who enter through a route that lacks these components. Not only are under-prepared teachers less effective on average, they are also 2 to 3 times more likely to leave teaching than fully prepared teachers. (3) Teacher shortages and teacher turnover are costly. Each time a teacher leaves a school, it not only increases demand but also imposes replacement costs on the local educational agency, which range from $9,000 per teacher in small, rural local educational agencies to more than $20,000 in large, urban local educational agencies. The national price tag of replacement costs for teachers is more than $8,000,000,000 a year. (4) Teaching residency programs, which recruit candidates to work as paid apprentices to skilled expert teachers while completing highly integrated coursework, have been