In Chicago, The New Teacher Project is helping the third-largest school system in the country effectively staff its schools by supplying hundreds of new teachers for high-need subject areas, training principals of low-performing schools to hire teachers more effectively, and spotlighting the systemic policies that prevent schools from securing the best teachers for their students.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system of 623 schools has increased the quality of teacher applicants in recent years, implementing school staffing procedures that are some of the most progressive in the nation. At the same time, CPS has improved math and science instruction, resulting in gains on state tests.

Yet persistent challenges remain and many of Chicago’s schools struggle to fill their classroom vacancies with high-quality teachers. To counter these challenges, CPS and Chicago-area education supporters reached out to The New Teacher Project in 2005 to strengthen the district’s ability to bring in teachers for even the highest-need schools. TNTP’s first project with the district, establishing the highly selective Chicago Teaching Fellows program, was an immediate success. Today, The New Teacher Project’s partnership with the district has expanded; together, TNTP and CPS are not only increasing the supply of qualified teachers, but tackling some of the most fundamental problems confronting urban schools. 

Chicago Teaching Fellows: From Cubicles to Classrooms

The individuals who lead classrooms are at the heart of any district’s efforts to improve student achievement. In 2005, TNTP partnered with CPS to implement the Chicago Teaching Fellows, an alternate route to certification program utilizing TNTP’s extensive experience recruiting, selecting and training high-quality new teachers. To date, more than 250 new teachers have taken on the challenge of teaching in Chicago’s hard-to-staff schools and high-need subject areas through the Chicago Teaching Fellows program.

In its first year, the program far surpassed its goal of recruiting and selecting 75-100 new teachers, bringing 136 promising Teaching Fellows to 75 schools. These bright, dedicated mid-career professionals and recent college graduates personified TNTP’s alternate route programs. Fellows such as Efrain Martinez signed on, using his background as a former graduate student and teaching assistant with a master’s in Hispanic Studies to teach high school Spanish and coach the boy’s varsity soccer team at Richards Career High School. James Ford, a former marine biology instructor and summer camp director, became a high school biology teacher at Al Raby High School. Efrain and James brought their skills and experience to schools where, on average, more than 9 in 10 children come from poverty.

The first cohort of Chicago Teaching Fellows had an average GPA of 3.34, and nearly one third held graduate degrees. Three of four (75 percent) were eligible to teach high-need subject areas, 41 percent were people of color, 43 percent were male, and 61 percent became math or science teachers. Most importantly, all (100 percent) Chicago Teaching Fellows taught in Title-I schools, the federal government’s designation for schools serving high-poverty populations. Even in the program’s inaugural year, becoming a Chicago Teaching Fellow was as competitive as getting into some of the country’s top colleges; of the more than 1,700 individuals who applied to the program, just 222 received an offer (a selectivity rate of 13.1 percent).

The Chicago Teaching Fellows continues to attract the best and brightest to the teaching profession. In the program’s second year, 2,074 applications poured in, or about 17 applications for every teacher hired through the program. The 119 Chicago Teaching Fellows who entered the classroom in 2007 exhibited the following characteristics:

• Nine in 10 (90 percent) were in high-need subject areas
• The average GPA was 3.36
• Forty-seven new Fellows (or 39 percent of the cohort) were people of color
• Among the group, there were 37 Master’s degrees, 3 JD's, and 3 Ph.D.'s

Lessons for School Leaders

While programs like the Chicago Teaching Fellows bring large numbers of new teachers to the districts they serve, principals must have the ability to “hire smart” in order to utilize these pools of professionals. Principals know that teachers are the key to student achievement. What they don’t always have are the tools (or time) to evaluate how to bring the best teachers to their schools.

In response, in the spring of 2007, TNTP took 60 principals in Chicago through a multi-session workshop series to give participants—some veteran, some new—valuable lessons on high-impact hiring. TNTP’s monthly principal training sessions helped participants prioritize, focus their hiring processes, ask targeted interview questions, implement selection rubrics, and think strategically about making their schools attractive to prospective teachers. “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, the head of recruitment and workforce planning for CPS, in a Chicago Tribune article about the training series.

Principals completed the workshops ready to implement their lessons in the field. “The best training opportunities of my 15 years in CPS,” wrote one participant in a post-training survey. “Every new principal or veteran principal needs to experience this workshop,” another noted. Indeed, 100 percent of participants who completed the post-training survey found the workshops to be of high quality, and 100 percent found them to be useful.

Removing Barriers and Improving Teacher-Hiring Policies

Through its work with school districts around the country, TNTP has observed root causes that lead to ongoing challenges for urban districts. Through intensive research on these barriers, TNTP has been able to make recommendations for reform and strengthen the ability of districts to recruit, select and retain high-quality teachers. In the winter of 2006, TNTP partnered with CPS and the Joyce Foundation to analyze the extent to which current CPS staffing rules and processes support effective school staffing. To conduct this analysis, TNTP carefully reviewed the district’s contract with the Chicago Teachers Union; examined Human Resources transaction data; surveyed principals, current teachers, and teacher applicants; and interviewed principals and central staff.

The results of this study were eye-opening. While TNTP concluded that Chicago benefits from some of the most progressive school staffing policies in the country, its analysis stressed that the district still hires too late in the year to capture the highest-quality teachers. In addition, CPS’s teacher performance evaluation process is highly flawed.  Only three in 1,000 teachers receive an “Unsatisfactory” rating and even failing schools are assigning very positive ratings to nearly all teachers.

TNTP’s analysis has been critical to the district’s ability to accurately identify systemic problems and begin to build consensus among teachers, principals, parents and district staff. When released publicly, the analysis was covered extensively in the local media, earning a front-page article in the Chicago Tribune (“Report: No teeth in teacher ratings,” July 30, 2007) as well as articles in the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Daily Herald, Teacher Magazine, Chicago Catalyst Magazine, and pieces by the Associated Press and Chicago Public Radio. As of November 2007, the analysis and/or executive summary had been downloaded from TNTP’s website more than 2,000 times.

The report helped shape many of the district’s collective bargaining proposals to the teachers union, and in early September 2007, the district and union came to a tentative agreement approved by 57 percent of the union’s members. The new agreement further solidified Chicago’s strong contractual framework and factored in several of TNTP’s recommendations, including:

1. Teachers wishing to transfer must inform their principals at least 30 days before the end of the school year, allowing principals to be more effective in projecting vacancies and hiring to replace departing teachers.
   
2. The contract preserves mutual consent in all teacher placements, even in cases when teachers are displaced because of budget cuts or school downsizing.
   
3. To address an ineffective teacher evaluation process, the contract calls for a joint labor-management committee that will deliver recommendations for an overhauled evaluation process by March 1, 2008.  If adopted, the recommendations would supercede the collective bargaining agreement.

Rather than merely place blame or generalize challenges, TNTP’s research and policy work in Chicago has given CPS the data and direction needed so that entrenched processes can change, barriers can fall, and students can get the teachers they need.

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