Urban schools need more flexibility in hiring teachers
Schools in urban and other high-poverty districts face distinct shortages of high-quality teachers. But it’s not because of a lack of applicants, said Tim Daly, president of The New Teacher Project (TNTP).
The main reason, he told the audience at a conference workshop, is due to entrenched policies and rules that "undermine the ability of urban schools to build strong instructional teams and boost student achievement."
While these rules might have been well-intention, they prevent schools from exerting sufficient control over the most important school-based factor influencing student learning -- the quality of the classroom teacher.
A 2005 study by TNTP looked at some of these rules in five urban districts, such as "voluntary transfers," which refer to incumbent teachers who want to move to another school, and "excessed teachers," incumbent teachers who are removed from a school often in response to budget cuts or enrollment declines.
These rules "place a premium on teacher seniority and result in systems that hire too late to secure the most talented teachers." They also are often used to "pass around poor performers," Daly said. "Novice teachers are treated as expendable regardless of their quality."
Often, schools must wait to hire and place new teachers until after the forced placement of incumbent teachers, which means a majority of new teachers are hired a month or less before the start of school.
As a result of these rules, it's difficult for urban schools to build strong instructional teams and sustain meaningful improvements.
TNTP has found that systems that have at their core a process of "mutual consent" teacher placement, in which teachers and schools have a say in the hiring process, lead to improved staffing, higher levels of satisfaction and lower risk of teacher turnover, Daly said.
In 2007, TNTP worked with the Milwaukee school system and the district's teachers union to develop new hiring policies that call for more teacher placements based on mutual consent. Vacancies are being identified earlier, and high-need schools will be able to hire teachers in shortage subject areas early.
In California, TNTP helped pass legislation that mandated statewide reform of collective bargaining agreements. Local teacher transfer rules can no longer interfere with the ability of schools to make timely job offers to the best possible teachers. Today, a teacher in California can never be transferred to a low-performing school if the principal refuses to accept him or her.
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