Classrooms needs new infusion of applicants

The state of Georgia and the nation face two major challenges in education in the next few years: getting more quality teachers into classrooms and keeping them there.

In the next seven years, the country will need 1.5 million new teachers, including 200,000 math and science instructors.

A 2007 University System of Georgia report, “Math+Science=Success,” outlined the desperate need for teachers in the “STEM” disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math. By 2010, the report warned, Georgia will need to produce 2,060 middle school science and high school teachers of life sciences, chemistry, earth science and physics.

“We can prepare someone to be a very good physics teacher,” says university system official Mark Pevey. “The problem is getting someone interested in teaching period and then getting someone interested in teaching physics. All too often, students are told by those they respect that they can do better than teaching. It’s a real problem for the profession.”

It’s also a real problem for a state attempting to develop a 21st-century work force with a strong science base. In the graduating class of 2008, Georgia’s public colleges and universities produced 4,240 teachers. Three were physics teachers and eight could teach chemistry.

A beginning

The state has taken steps to improve those numbers. Through a $34.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the state founded the Georgia Partnership for Reform in Science and Mathematics (PRISM) to both raise student achievement and teacher quality. Public campuses are offering expedited paths to teaching credentials, and a task force has been devising a plan to woo and keep math and science teachers.

While worthwhile, such initiatives can’t create supply to meet the urgent demand. However, another source of potential new teachers — midcareer college graduates willing to switch careers — is far larger than anyone realized.

A study released last week by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation found that 42 percent of college-educated Americans aged 24 to 60 would consider becoming teachers. However, many of those would-be teachers have a list of qualifiers.

“In order to turn this pool into teachers, we have to increase their salaries, better their preparation and improve the support they receive on the job,” says Arthur Levine, president of the Wilson foundation and the former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. “We have to take people who are older, who are proven, who have substantial careers behind them and give them much more rigorous preparation programs than we’ve traditionally had. What we should not do is pull people out of jobs, give them quickie programs and put them into the classroom without ongoing support.”

Many programs designed to fast-track new teachers into classrooms rely too much on on-the-job training, including Georgia’s Teacher Alternative Preparation Program. Under TAPP, individuals with no formal preparation in teaching and little or no experience secure a teaching job, attend a summer boot camp of sorts and then march into a classroom while attending education courses at night.

Intense training

A more effective alternative would be intensive teacher internships modeled on medical residencies. Rather than being sent directly into the operating room to remove a spleen, newly minted doctors work for several years under the tutelage of veteran physicians. New teachers could benefit from a similar approach.

When asked about the ideal preparation, aspiring teachers rhapsodize about clinical training in real classrooms with experienced teachers at their elbows. They talk about yearlong internships alongside talented teachers who know how to teach challenging kids, supplemented by relevant class work that makes sense of the classroom.

If teachers are well prepared before they enter the classroom, they remain in the profession longer, an important consideration in an industry where a third of new teachers flee within five years, says Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford. When teachers have stronger preparation, the number that leave within five years drops to 20 percent, she says.

Improving retention would also cut costs. Each time a teacher leaves, a district spends between $15,000 and $20,000 recruiting and training a replacement.

That’s why there’s growing enthusiasm for teaching residency programs such as the Coalition of Urban Teacher Residencies under way in Denver, Boston and Chicago. Fledgling teachers are matched with classroom veterans for a yearlong internship. The novices receive stipends of between $10,000 and $30,000 and earn a teaching license and a job at the end of the residency.

Once in their own classroom, they’re paired with mentors for at least two years and receive ongoing professional training. Thus far, residency graduates have had retention rates of 95 percent.

“Right now, we are wasting a tremendous amount of money in the revolving-door, leaky-bucket approach to managing the teacher force,” says Darling-Hammond.

Rewarding performance

States are also wasting money on an outdated salary structure that rewards longevity rather than performance. In New York City, which has become a leader in innovative strategies to attract and retain teachers, Chancellor Joel Klein criticizes pay systems that save most of the rewards for the end of a teaching career. “We have to think of alternative compensation that frontloads payments,” he says. “A lot of people entering teaching in midcareer are not going to be around to accrue long-term pensions.”

Teacher staffing also needs a hard look. While 70 percent to 80 percent of school personnel in other countries are classroom teachers, only 40 percent of employees in American schools are full-time classroom teachers.

“We have lots of people paid to manage, control and tell teachers what to do,” says Darling-Hammond, “but we don’t invest as much in teachers themselves.”

Without that investment, school districts will remain locked in the costly and time-consuming cycle of recruiting teachers for the same positions over and over. And they’ll never be able to spend time on the vital task of reinventing how they develop and deploy teachers.

— Maureen Downey, for the editorial board