A New Approach to Improving Teacher Quality

Founded by teachers, The New Teacher Project was formed in 1997 to address the growing issues of teacher shortages and teacher quality throughout the country. In its first year, TNTP embarked on three projects to create and implement high-quality alternative route to certification programs to bring new streams of accomplished individuals into hard-to-staff urban schools. Since then, TNTP has worked with more than 200 school districts and become a nationally-recognized authority on new teacher recruitment and hiring.

From the beginning, TNTP engaged in a highly collaborative approach with its district partners. In contrast to traditional consulting organizations, its staff members worked in school district offices and alongside their clients, immersing themselves in the district's operations and gaining a thorough understanding of the complex challenges that each faced. As a result, TNTP became better able to recognize new needs as they evolved and to respond quickly with innovative solutions to challenges as they arose. Increasingly,TNTP was able not only to meet the immediate needs of its clients, but to collaborate with them on fundamental changes in their approach to human capital management.

Expanding Services and Knowledge

As TNTP's consulting and teacher recruitment projects began to demonstrate success and as demand for high-quality teachers continued to rise, the organization's impact on high-poverty school districts grew. From 2000 to 2001, the number of its programs tripled, from five to 15, as did the total number of teachers it recruited and trained, from 500 to over 1,800. By 2002, TNTP's programs were responsible for the hire or referral of 3,500 to 4,000 "highly qualified" new teachers each year in school systems nationwide.

During this time, TNTP staff also began to note similarities among school districts in their approach to new teacher hiring. In particular, TNTP realized that urban districts could actually build a high-quality applicant pool with relative ease, but inevitably lost large numbers of their best applicants to hiring process inefficiencies and delays. Exploring this phenomenon further, the organization released Missed Opportunities: How We Keep High-Quality Teachers Out of Urban Classrooms in the fall of 2003. The report documented the devastating impact of such delays, which caused the five urban school districts studied to lose 30-60 percent of all applicants each year.

In response to the findings of Missed Opportunities, TNTP continued to evolve. In addition to refining its teacher recruitment and hiring projects, it expanded its services to include school staffing initiatives, training and certification programs, and research and policy reform projects. Now an organization of over 150 full-time staff members, TNTP has continued to pursue innovations that demonstrate that urban districts can reform their hiring policies effectively, and to devise better ways to prepare new teachers to be effective in high-need classrooms.

Looking Ahead

The New Teacher Project's impact on public education has been enhanced by its ongoing research. In 2005, it released Unintended Consequences: The Case for Reforming the Staffing Rules in Urban Teachers Union Contracts, which illustrated that as many as 40 percent of all teacher vacancies in urban schools are filled by teachers over whom the principal had little or no choice in hiring.

Today, The New Teacher Project is working to advance a new human capital model for urban school systems. TNTP intends to realize a fundamental shift in the way quality teachers are generated, matched to schools, and trained. Leading this effort is TNTP's CEO Ariela Rozman, who assumed this position in 2007 after TNTP founder and longtime CEO, Michelle Rhee, was appointed Chancellor of the Washington, DC public schools. Timothy Daly, who ran TNTP's highly successful New York City Teaching Fellows Program and spearheaded the organization's policy work, was named President.

Looking ahead, we continue to believe that change can happen in even the most challenged of our nation's schools. We know this is possible because we have developed a keen understanding of the problems that prevent schools from securing quality teachers; because we have created solutions to these problems and worked hand-in-hand with school districts to implement them; and because we have succeeded in finding tens of thousands of accomplished citizens willing to take a stake in the future of public education by becoming teachers. For these reasons, we remain committed to our vision of a nation whose public schools are thriving organizations that offer all children an excellent education.