In Baltimore, The New Teacher Project and the Baltimore City Public School System are taking a systemic approach to confronting low student achievement, not only finding hundreds of high-achieving career changers to become teachers for shortage-area subjects, but also working with 40 of the city’s lowest performing schools to improve their teacher hiring capabilities.

Over the years, the city of Baltimore has faced large shortages of qualified teachers, particularly in hard-to-staff schools and subject areas such as math, science and special education. The shortages have been felt acutely at schools such as Dr. Samuel L. Banks High School, where the student population has expanded significantly and qualified teachers have been in demand for nearly every subject. But thanks to a large-scale, evolving partnership between the city’s school system and The New Teacher Project (TNTP), the face of teacher hiring in Baltimore is changing dramatically. “They’ve affected every aspect of our philosophy, our organization, how we recruit, how we screen, our interviewing techniques,” said Gary Thrift, former director of Human Resources for the Baltimore City Public School System, in an August 2007 Education Week profile of TNTP. “The New Teacher Project has changed the way we do business in Baltimore city public schools.”

Bringing the Best and Brightest to Baltimore's Schools

Struggling to meet its new teacher needs, the Baltimore City Public School System (BCPSS) turned to The New Teacher Project in 2002 to create an alternate route to certification program, the Baltimore City Teaching Residency (BCTR). In launching BCTR, The New Teacher Project designed and implemented an aggressive and highly focused recruitment campaign, proven selection strategies, and a four-week pre-service training institute focused on preparing accomplished career changers and recent graduates for the realities and challenges of teaching in hard-to-staff schools.

Since its inception, BCTR has met important district needs. In its first year, the program hired 79 teachers; by 2007, that figure grew to 187. In January 2006, BCTR added a mid-year option so the program could recruit, select and train high-quality teachers to fill hard-to-staff vacancies in the winter months. In 2007, the program contributed nearly one in five (19 percent) of all teachers hired by the school system, including:

• More than one in three (34 percent) of the district’s math hires
• Almost half of the district’s biology hires
• Nearly one in four (38 percent) of the district’s English hires

Of all BCTR teachers hired in 2007:

• The average undergraduate GPA was 3.4
• About a quarter (27 percent) were people of color
• Nearly three quarters (73 percent)  were in the district’s high-need subject areas
• About two thirds (65 percent) took positions in Title I schools serving high concentrations of students from low-income families

To date, the Baltimore City Teaching Residency has brought 860 new teachers to Baltimore City Public Schools. These teachers are having an immediate and positive impact on classrooms across Baltimore, meeting the district’s most pressing needs in its most challenged schools.

Preparing Effective Teachers

While The New Teacher Project implements a rigorous selection process, it is critical that individuals who join BCTR—and who face formidable challenges working in high-need schools—engage in challenging, relevant training and professional development. In 2006, TNTP brought its Practitioner Teacher Program (PTP) to Maryland to provide BCTR teachers with an intensive professional development experience culminating in certification.

The PTP is directly linked to the realities of teaching in hard-to-staff schools, connected to standards, and tailored to career changers. It is designed to take the place of traditional university programs, which can be lengthy and costly and too often provide students with coursework that is disconnected from their classroom experience and irrelevant to the specifics of urban schools. The PTP centers on TNTP’s Teaching for Results (TfR) framework, which utilizes “strategic design” (connecting all aspects of a teacher’s lessons to end-of-year goals) to educate program participants on how to build and execute lesson plans with content standards in mind. In Maryland, the program incorporates a significant literacy component reflecting both the state’s standards and the distinct needs of Baltimore’s high-need schools. Veteran Baltimore City Public School teachers lead the content seminars, instilling them with knowledge and experience that is crucial to the new teachers’ success.

Participants completing the PTP have provided extremely positive feedback on the program. In 2007, more than eight in 10 participants in the Maryland PTP reported that the PTP’s content seminars made them more effective teachers, and eight in 10 said the seminars were relevant to the classroom. Today, all BCTR teachers gain certification through the PTP, strengthening their ability to influence student achievement, even in difficult first months in the classroom.

Modeling Best Practices in Effective Teacher-Hiring

In February 2005, TNTP expanded its partnership with BCPSS to focus on bringing high-quality teachers to some of the most historically challenged schools in Baltimore. With support from The Abell Foundation, The Blaustein Philanthropic Fund, and the U.S. Department of Education, TNTP launched the Baltimore Model Schools Initiative (BMSI) to develop earlier, more effective school staffing procedures for a set of the district’s lowest-performing schools.

The BMSI works in four ways: It builds a large, high-quality teacher applicant pool; minimizes policy barriers that impede early, efficient placement; improves the capacity of school-based staff to hire early and selectively; and provides individualized staffing support, including technology tools and job fair assistance, to participating schools. The initiative also advocates that schools have control in selecting teachers who best fit their needs and cultures. Woven throughout all of these activities is the concept that principals must be held accountable for hiring high-quality teachers.

While the initiative worked with 20 schools during its inaugural year, it doubled to support 40 schools in its second and third years. In 2007, BMSI staff provided training for additional principals, with the goal of eventually replicating the successes of participating schools throughout the district. The BMSI has advanced important transformations both at the school level and district-wide. Key results include:

• To date, the initiative has filled 769 teacher vacancies
• BMSI arranged nearly 350 individual interviews for principals in 2007
• Of the 289 teachers placed in 2007, the vast majority were in high-need subject area vacancies, the undergraduate GPA was 3.21, and 30 percent held graduate degrees
• The current school year opened without any vacancies at a BMSI school (while the district’s other schools opened with a total of 54 vacant positions)

 

Feedback from participating school leaders has been overwhelmingly positive:

• In a survey, 100 percent of principals reported that participation in the BMSI increased their ability to staff their schools with high-quality teachers
• One hundred percent of surveyed principals agreed that the initiative allowed them to fill vacancies earlier
• One hundred percent of principals who participated in BMSI hiring and placement workshops in 2007 reported that the trainings increased their ability to effectively staff their school
External research has confirmed the positive impact of the Baltimore Model Schools Initiative. A 2006 independent study by the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at the Johns Hopkins University found that, “the most important difference between new teachers at BMSI and comparison schools noted in the end-of-year surveys was the principals’ perception of how well the new teachers understood the subject matter they were teaching.  Positive ratings of new teachers’ understanding of subject matter were significantly higher at BMSI schools (5.2 on a 6 point scale, with 6 being ‘strongly agree’) than at comparison schools (4.8)” (Mac Iver & Vaughn, 2006).

 

Tools for Change

Today, The New Teacher Project is using multiple levers to improve teacher quality in Baltimore and strengthen the district’s ability to staff its classrooms with high-quality, high-impact teachers. “There were things they knew, lessons they had learned, that they could share,” said Gary Thrift, interviewed by Education Week. “The district has now modified questions that administrators ask candidates who come in through traditional programs, created an online application process, and provided a system by which principals can go online, read résumés, and initiate contact with applicants.”

These efforts are making a lasting difference to Baltimore’s students. The Baltimore Model Schools Initiative and the Baltimore City Teaching Residency are targeting Baltimore City Public Schools’ most high-need classrooms, and the Practitioner Teacher Program is ensuring that new teachers joining classrooms through BCTR are prepared to be effective. Through its partnership with the district, TNTP is transforming the quality of teacher staffing for Baltimore’s public schools.

 

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