The Commercial Appeal - September 30, 2004

DAVID McCUTCHEON was starting to get a little bit of a complex.

The 51-year-old former teacher wants to return to his former profession after more than two decades in the business world.

However, he's spent the last few months bogged down in the Memphis City Schools hiring bureaucracy.

"I thought I was the only one,'' McCutcheon said. "I just felt like: 'What did I do wrong?'"

It turns out that there may be numerous other people like McCutcheon, job applicants who really want to work for Memphis schools but somehow get lost in the shuffle.

Fortunately, help may be on the way. Memphis has been selected to participate in a national pilot program aimed at improving recruiting and hiring methods for teachers.

The U.S. Department of Education is providing a $1 million grant to help fund the initiative.

The school district, the Hyde Family Foundations and Partners in Public Education are contributing another $600,000 to defray expenses.

The program will be administered by the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization formed to address issues related to teacher shortages and teacher quality throughout the country.

The organization's staff will spend the next two weeks assessing the recruitment and hiring procedures currently used by the school system.

Then they'll spend the next three years working on ways to fix any problems they discover.

These aren't the sort of problems the school district can afford to ignore.

The district has about 8,500 teachers, so turnover makes hiring a constant challenge.

Of the 890 new teachers hired in the last school year, about 58 percent weren't fully licensed. Also, one out of every four new teachers quit after one year.

City schools have chronic shortages of faculty members qualified to teach math, science and special education classes.

The local effort led by New Teacher Project is expected to focus on methods for using technology more effectively.

For example, changes may be necessary to make it easier for applicants to apply for jobs over the Internet.

There might also be ways for principals to get quicker access to the pool of candidates available to fill openings at their schools.

According to research done by the New Teacher Project, trying to attract teachers to large urban school districts isn't the daunting task some people think it is.

The organization's research found that plenty of people applied to fill open teaching positions in four representative urban school districts, but slow hiring practices, delays in budget timetables and teacher seniority rules often kept the best applicants from getting hired.

Because each of those four districts waited until mid- to late summer to make job offers, between 31 and 60 percent of the applicants had already withdrawn from the hiring process.

Many took jobs at nearby suburban school districts that made offers earlier in the year.

Not surprisingly, the same study showed that the best-qualified candidates were also the ones most likely to withdraw early after getting other jobs.

The group's report concluded that even the most challenging urban districts should be able to get five or more applicants for each teaching position.

The New Teacher Project is the second major reform initiative launched by the Memphis school district this year. (The other was the New Leaders for New Schools program, which focuses on intensive training for principals.)

There's no way to overstate the importance of finding the best teachers possible for Memphis schools.

When sufficient resources are available, it's great to build more classrooms and buy new textbooks, computers and audio-visual aids for our school system.

But all fancy buildings and equipment in the world can't teach children a thing.

As Michael Goar, the district's human resources director, put it: "Without a good teacher, what good is a textbook?"

The David McCutcheons of the city no doubt agree.

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