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Teacher recruitment takes nontraditional twist: EBR public schools are counting on private business people to fill the teacher void - Education - East

Greater Baton Rouge Business Report - June 19, 2001

Until recently, Lisa Reese considered herself a banker. Her skills, her economics degree and 15 years of hard work in the industry had earned her a vice presidency and a paycheck not to be scoffed at from a well-heeled Baton Rouge financial institution. Her secretary took care of nagging details like filing, photocopying and answering phone calls; her clients for the most part spoke to her with civility and respect.

This spring, Reese stepped from the well-ordered, albeit dog-eat-dog, corporate world to the dog-ate-my-homework classroom as part of Teach Baton Rouge, the East Baton Rouge Parish School System's power corps of new teachers for the 2001-2002 school season.

On a manhunt to find the "best and the brightest" to fill longtime, gaping holes in his staff of educators, Interim" Superintendent Clayton Wilcox has turned to a national nonprofit consulting group, The New Teacher Project, to help him reverse the school system's dismal recruitment failures of years past.

The New York-based New Teacher Project has won two contracts from the public school system with a combined worth of $170,000. The project is a spin-off of Teach for America, an AmeriCorp program lately championed by First Lady Laura Bush that places bright young college kids as teachers in at-risk public schools nationwide.

The Teach Baton Rouge component has grabbed the limelight for the pure chutzpah of wooing talented accountants, engineers, scientists and other high-achievers from private business into the classroom, despite their lack of teaching experience or specific training from schools of education.

"Who says only those people going through colleges of education can be teachers?" Wilcox asked. "The New Teacher Project sees it differently; if there really is a teacher shortage, let's look to expand the game. Let's look to people, in accounting, chemistry and physics departments."

His point is simple: if business doesn't limit its recruitment to business school graduates only, then education should be able to go wherever it can to find individuals with the ability to teach. "I'll provide them with skills to be successful in my environment," Wilcox said.

Not that educational background doesn't matter. The 32 professionals taking part in Teach Baton Rouge have four-year college degrees, and Wilcox said all have recently taken and passed portions of the PRAXIS exam, which education majors are required to pass before they receive certification in Louisiana.

In addition, the group will undergo a five- to seven-week intensive training program this summer under the guidance of master teachers in the parish school system. The densely-packed Practitioner Teacher Program kicks off the initial component of an alternative teacher-certification process that was approved by the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Regents last month to eliminate the barriers to teaching for individuals with impressive professional or life skills but without an undergraduate degree in education (see story, page 28).

During their first year and a half of teaching, TNTP educators will move along the road to alternative certification by attending a series of seminars, participating in collaborative learning teams, observing master teachers and working with mentors. As a last hurdle, candidates must pass a portfolio assessment.

Participants in the Teach Baton Rouge program applaud the alternative certification process, a required element of the program, because, as Lisa Reese notes, it "gets me in the classroom now, instead of someday--not just when I get around to signing up and going back to school."

Like Wilcox, TNTP officials make no bones about the unorthodox approach: "Any school district--whether they need to fill two or 200 positions, should be casting a wider net," said Michelle Rhee, the program's CEO, who maintains there is no evidence, that education graduates necessarily make better teachers.

But, as Wilcox is quick to admit, $170,000 is no small change to a cash-poor school district. "People say, 'Clayton, you could put five teachers in the classroom with that money.'

"But we are a people-intensive resource. I've got to be recruiting the best and the brightest. I'm investing in people," he said.

At the end of the day, when a school district that for years has struggled with chronic teacher shortages finds itself sifting through 240 applicants for 32 positions, Wilcox and staff are ready to start dancing in the streets.

The traditional route

Certainly, Teach Baton Rouge will grab most of the headlines, but it's only half the game. TNTP also has a contract to overhaul the school system's entire recruitment strategy for attracting traditional, certified teachers.

"We fully believe it makes sense to start with the college of education folks--to make sure the recruitment process is in place there," said Meredyth Hudson, site manager for the EBRPSS/TNTP partnership.

Quality and quantity aren't at issue when discussing the state's college of education graduates, said Hudson; the problem is that local school districts have done a poor job of tapping into that pool. Even worse, particularly in East Baton Rouge Parish, is the record of retaining those newly certified teachers who have been hired.

According to a January 2001 report--entitled "The Essential Profession: Improving Teacher Quality in Louisiana"--by the nonprofit Council for a Better Louisiana, one-third of the state's education school graduates leave the state immediately after college. After, five years, Louisiana loses another 30 percent, bringing the portion of certified teachers from the average graduating class remaining in Louisiana down to one-third.

The numbers look even worse when compared to the teacher demand in East Baton Rouge Parish alone. Each school year, the parish has between 37,000 and 38,000 teacher positions. At the start of each of the last two years, the school system faced a 7 percent vacancy rate for certified teachers.

By the end of the school year, the numbers typically jump to 20 percent as a result of retirements, relocations and resignations, said Wilcox.

Teacher uncertainty

Last summer, with the start of school a week away, a third-grade teacher at the Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, a public magnet school, decided to take another job.

Two days before the classroom doors opened, parents finally learned the name of the person who would teach their children. But the woman had only reluctantly--and temporarily--agreed to help and within a few weeks she was gone. That move prompted the school to hire a substitute for a week while the principal scrambled to find a full-time replacement. This fourth educator ended up staying, and "fortunately did a great job," according to one parent.

At Glen Oaks High School, the only school in the parish with two distinct magnet programs, Principal Mildred Henry lamented that her school was one of many in the EBR system that did not have enough certified teachers. As a result, these schools had to rely on teachers known as "665s," instructors with an undergraduate degree in a major other than education who have yet to pass the PRAXIS exam.

"It's not to say they are poor teachers--they don't have all their credentials," she said.

Which explains the partnership with TNTP--with the result, according to Wilcox, being the development of a pool of four certified applicants for every vacant position.

Looking for a solution

As part of the TNTP approach, the low energy recruitment efforts of past years have been replaced by a more youthful, aggressive and honest campaign to attract the right kind of person to the parish's public schools.

"Simply showing up at job fairs and handing out flyers wasn't recruiting. We are setting up long-term relationships with education students early in their college careers," said Wilcox.

TNTP is also helping the system develop a more data-driven recruitment strategy. For example, school officials will not only track the number of applicants who reject job offers, but the reasons why. Also recorded will be the type and number of contacts between the system and job seekers.

One of the key questions TNTP asked when formulating its recruiting strategy was, "What kind of people would teach in an environment like Baton Rouge?"

Wilcox said the answer prompted the school system to try a new message--and a new target audience of potential teachers. "We're now saying, 'If you're the kind of person who is motivated by getting the most out of folks in underachieving schools--we're your place.' Our recruiting material is a little more honest."

Zanovia Chube, a third-grade teacher at Magnolia Woods Elementary and a part-time recruiter for the system, wishes EBR had employed this kind of recruitment process when she was in the job market three years ago.

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