The New Teacher Project is helping the nation’s third-largest school system carry out a comprehensive strategy aimed at strengthening low-performing schools. TNTP is supplying Chicago Public Schools with new teachers—392 to date—while also providing extensive hiring support to the highest-need schools and spotlighting systemic barriers to improvement.
Over the last several years, the Chicago Public Schools system (CPS) has increased the quality of its teacher applicants and implemented school staffing procedures that are among the most progressive in the nation. Partly because of Chicago’s success, President Barack Obama chose Superintendent Arne Duncan to be his Secretary of Education.
Yet filling classroom vacancies with high-quality teachers remains a critical aspect of the district’s efforts to raise student achievement. The New Teacher Project is helping to transform the human capital pipeline in Chicago Public Schools with multiple programs and a national perspective.
Chicago Teaching Fellows: Cubicles to Classrooms
Jaime McLaughlin was an accountant who felt a calling to teach. He joined the Chicago Teaching Fellows program in 2007, and was the only teacher at Albert R. Sabin Magnet School to use a new mobile computer lab to lead students in a stock market competition. That year, Jaime’s students’ SAT-10 scores averaged 15 percent gains. Heidi Sally, also a 2007 Chicago Teaching Fellow who began teaching at Sabin, holds an MBA from the University of Chicago. At Sabin, she has tutored low performers and prepared advanced students for the Algebra Exit exam. In 2007, one Sabin student passed the exam; in 2008, seven did. “I’m a lifer now,” McLaughlin said of his career change to teaching.
The Chicago Teaching Fellows program launched in 2005 to bring outstanding career changers and recent graduates like Jaime and Heidi to high-need schools and subject areas in CPS. Operated by The New Teacher Project in partnership with the district, the program has hired 392 new teachers and provided a highly selective and rigorous human capital pipeline. In 2008, 2,552 individuals applied and 143 went on to become Fellows (in other words, only one in about 18 applicants went on to teach through the program). Among the group of new Fellows, 100 percent were in high-need subject areas* , 41 percent were people of color, and the average undergraduate GPA was 3.18. All took positions in high-poverty Title I schools.
Chicago Teaching Fellows have been hired by more than 160 schools across Chicago. Barton Dassinger, principal of Sabin Magnet, is among the many school leaders impressed by Fellows. “I can’t believe what these teachers have accomplished in their first year of teaching,” he said, referring to Fellows at his school. As their ranks grow each year, Chicago Teaching Fellows are playing a vital role in the district’s efforts to ensure that all students get the best possible chances to succeed.
Impact In Focus“One for all! All for one!” Rob Harman shouted as a group of students echoed the cheer. Harman, a 2007 Chicago Teaching Fellow, teaches special education at the Howe School of Excellence, a K-8 school in Chicago’s struggling Austin neighborhood. Howe is one of Chicago’s “turnaround” schools, chosen for dramatic restructuring with a new principal and staff in 2008 after years of low performance. After Rob began teaching at Howe, he launched a wrestling team to provide a healthy outlet for students, some of whom had lost family members to gang violence. (Rob lost his own brother to a shooting in 2004.) In just its first year, the team competed in and won a citywide championship; fellow students cheered the win, giving the wrestlers a hard-earned ovation. “It made me feel good,” team captain Lamont Peters told the Chicago Tribune. “It made me feel that I can accomplish anything that I want to accomplish.” |
Lessons for School Leaders
Effective teachers hold the key to student achievement, but principals don’t always have the tools or time to attract the best teacher applicants to their schools.
In 2007, TNTP established a workshop series to train principals in Chicago on high-impact teacher hiring. “We’re trying to empower principals to think about hiring the best teachers as one of the most important parts of their job,” said Nancy Slavin, officer of recruitment and workforce planning for CPS, in a Chicago Tribune article. In 2008, TNTP expanded its work with principals of high-need schools while maintaining a sharp focus on effective staffing. TNTP’s Area 14 Model Hiring Initiative (MHI) provided intensive hiring support for struggling schools on Chicago’s highly impoverished South Side, while its Turnaround Model Hiring Initiative focused on six chronically low-performing schools that were fully re-structured and re-staffed with new teams of teachers.
Both initiatives directly helped leaders of challenged schools optimize the CPS applicant pool and hire teachers who had been screened and referred by TNTP staff as strong matches for the schools’ vacancies. Don Fraynd, Turnaround High School Officer for Harper High School in the West Englewood neighborhood, noted that the MHI site manager “went above and beyond the call of duty” to support Harper’s staffing efforts.
Because of TNTP’s Model Hiring Initiative, schools that long struggled to attract qualified teachers were able to be strategic in their hiring choices. In 2008, the Turnaround Model Hiring Initiative drew nearly 2,000 applications, referred more than 500 candidates (about 70 percent of whom had two-plus years of experience) and filled 271 positions by the start of the school year. The six Turnaround schools opened the 2008-09 school year with just five vacancies, while the rest of the district opened with 544 vacancies. Based on its initial success, the MHI will support the six original Turnaround schools as well as four new ones in 2009.
Improving Teacher Hiring Policies
While providing direct, school-level staffing supports, TNTP has also helped the district enhance its understanding of its human capital policies and map out a clear teacher quality strategy. In the winter of 2006, TNTP partnered with CPS to analyze how well its school staffing procedures and policies supported high-need schools. TNTP reviewed the district’s contract with the Chicago Teachers Union, examined HR data, conducted surveys of principals, current teachers, and teacher applicants, and interviewed principals and central staff.
The results of this analysis were eye-opening. TNTP found that while CPS benefits from progressive staffing policies, it hires too late to capture the best quality applicants and employs a flawed teacher evaluation system. In the years TNTP studied, only three in 1,000 CPS teachers received an “Unsatisfactory” rating. Even failing schools gave high marks to almost all teachers.
TNTP’s report helped shape district proposals to the teachers union. In September 2007, the district and union came to a tentative new agreement that factored in several of TNTP’s recommendations and further solidified Chicago’s strong contractual framework. The agreement preserved the city’s “mutual consent” hiring policies, provided early hiring incentives to principals, and put in place new notification requirements for teachers wishing to transfer schools. Based in part on these reforms, CPS was able to open the 2008-09 school year with 60 percent fewer vacancies than in 2007.
A Cumulative Impact
The Howe School of Excellence, a “turnaround” school that was almost entirely re-staffed in 2008 due to a history of low performance, embodies the multi-pronged approach that TNTP takes to supporting teacher quality. TNTP’s Turnaround MHI worked closely with Howe Principal Keisha Campbell to ensure the school’s vacancies would be filled early and with high-quality teachers in advance of the 2008-09 school year. Six of Howe’s vacancies were filled through MHI referrals, and Principal Campbell completed TNTP’s training workshops for principals. “It was enlightening to have the opportunity…to reflect on the hiring process, and have the support to lay out a specific plan,” she said.
The Chicago Teaching Fellows program also helped Principal Campbell bring in excellent new teachers. Two of Howe’s three special education hires for the 2008-09 school year were second-year Fellows; the school also hired a first-year Fellow to teach science to middle-grade students. Due in part to TNTP’s programs, “I have a building that is staffed with outstanding, highly qualified candidates,” Principal Campbell said.
A ready supply of highly talented new teachers, a support structure to aid principals in their staffing efforts, and a policy environment that prioritizes quality teachers for poor and minority students: Through the Chicago Teaching Fellows program, the Model Hiring Initiative and policy analysis work, TNTP is playing an essential role in strengthening Chicago’s schools.
* Includes 50 special education Fellows who taught in general elementary education placements in their first year, as required by the state.
Chicago Principal
