The New Teacher Project’s long-running partnership with the New York City Department of Education has led to a profound transformation in teacher quality and illuminated human capital challenges in the nation’s largest urban district. Nearly 9,000 NYC Teaching Fellows now work in the city’s schools, most serving high concentrations of low-income students. A 2007 Urban Institute study found that Fellows are largely responsible for a “remarkable narrowing” of the gap in teacher qualifications between high- and low-poverty schools.

New York City is home to the largest public school system in the country, with 79,000 teachers serving more than 1 million students at 1,400-plus schools. Over the last nine years, The New Teacher Project has partnered with the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) to improve the quality of the city’s teacher force. Today, nearly 9,000 active teachers—or about 11 percent of the city’s total teaching faculty—were recruited by the NYC Teaching Fellows program, an initiative created by The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and the NYCDOE to bring outstanding new teachers to high-need classrooms. TNTP has also analyzed barriers to effective teacher staffing and helped to implement reforms that have drawn national attention. When New York City was awarded the prestigious Broad Prize in Urban Education in 2007, Chancellor Joel Klein credited TNTP for its positive impact on the district’s human capital strategy.

A Growing Force: Almost 9,000 NYC Teaching Fellows

In the summer of 2000, New York City’s public schools were under pressure from the state to eliminate uncertified and emergency credentialed teachers from the workforce. The district turned to The New Teacher Project for help developing and implementing a program that would inspire outstanding young and mid-career professionals to teach in the city’s under-performing schools. In collaboration with the New York City Department of Education, TNTP created the NYC Teaching Fellows, an alternate route to teacher certification program that attracted more than 2,100 applicants for 325 available positions.

The quality of the applicant pool was so exceptional that the program expanded significantly, growing from 1,100 Fellows in 2001 to 1,900 in 2002. To date, NYCTF has received 150,000 applications; in 2008 alone, the program accepted just 14 percent of the 19,020 individuals who applied. Of those, more than 1,600 would go on to teach as Fellows. “The Teaching Fellows program has attracted an increasing number of talented and driven people to teach in New York City public schools,” said Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

Today, there are more Teaching Fellows in New York City than there are teachers in the public school systems of San Francisco, Milwaukee, or Boston. The dedication exhibited by the Fellows “has been one of the reasons for our success,” says Sana Nasser, principal of Harry S. Truman High School in the Bronx. “We will continue to count on the NYC Teaching Fellows program to fill our vacancies. Without a doubt, you have the most qualified teaching candidates available.”

Serving New York City's Neediest

The Teaching Fellows program targets its recruitment, selection and training efforts to meet the district’s greatest needs. The majority of active NYC Teaching Fellows teach in Title I schools, which serve high concentrations of students from low-income families. In fact, 79 percent of Fellows who entered the classroom in 2008 work in such schools. In addition, about 17 percent of all teachers in Bronx schools—traditionally some of the hardest to staff in the entire city—are Teaching Fellows.

High-need subjects, including math, science, bilingual education, Spanish and special education are also consistently problematic areas for New York City. Fellows now make up 26 percent of all New York City math teachers; more than half of new math and special education hires each year are Fellows. About three quarters (76 percent) of the 2008 Fellows are working in the city’s highest-need subject areas.

In collaboration with the NYC Department of Education and partnering universities, The New Teacher Project has implemented the “Math Immersion” pathway to help career changers who did not major in math but who have significant professional experience meet New York State certification requirements in math education. This innovative pathway has met a remarkable need: While as recently as 2003, more than a quarter of all New York City math teachers were uncertified, today every single math teacher in the district holds state certification. Math Immersion has supplied more than 1,800 math Fellows to the city’s classrooms. Importantly, on measures of retention, student outcomes and principal feedback, these Fellows perform as well as if not better than Fellows who majored in math.

Lasting Impact

As each year passes, Fellows continue to play a critical role in New York City’s schools. Two independent research teams released studies in 2005 showing that Teaching Fellows rapidly grow to be equal or better than teachers from other certification pathways in terms of their effect on student achievement. Fellows also exhibit strong retention rates despite their placement in challenging schools: 87 percent of Fellows begin a second year of teaching, a higher rate than the national average, and nearly three quarters teach a third year.

Fellows are helping to level the playing field between students in low- and high-poverty schools. A report issued in September 2007 through the Urban Institute found that the Teaching Fellows program has been largely responsible for a “remarkable narrowing” of the gap in teacher qualifications between high- and low-poverty schools between 2000 to 2005. By 2005, nearly 40 percent of all new hires in the poorest 25 percent of New York City schools were Teaching Fellows or Teach For America corps members. These specially recruited teachers on average brought stronger academic backgrounds to their new careers and outperformed other new hires on an exam for educators. The study found a corresponding improvement in student achievement in high-poverty schools.

The successes of the NYC Teaching Fellows program have been noted in national media outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, U.S. News & World Report, Education Week, CNN, “World News Tonight” on ABC, “Good Morning America,” “The Today Show” and PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” In May 2007, the U.S. Department of Education profiled NYCTF in its “Education News Parents Can Use” program on PBS.

Now in its ninth year, the NYC Teaching Fellows program continues to exceed expectations.

Partnering in Strategic Reform

In the fall of 2004, the NYCDOE engaged in a comprehensive assessment aimed at transforming Human Resources into a more responsive, data-driven and schools- and teacher-focused entity. The district asked TNTP (which had recently published its Missed Opportunities report) to conduct a detailed teacher hiring analysis.

TNTP researchers were struck by the degree to which New York City’s collectively-bargained teacher transfer and excess rules inadvertently impeded effective hiring by giving schools little or no choice in hiring many transfer teachers; creating instability for the city’s newest teachers; and delaying new teacher hiring until late summer.

TNTP’s findings were crucial in helping to resolve a nearly two-year deadlock in contract negotiations. A new contract, ratified by the union’s members in 2005, ushered in a “mutual consent” teacher staffing system under which teachers and principals agree to all placements and no teacher is assigned (or “force-placed”) into a position. The New York Daily News has called the end of forced teacher placement, “one of the most important reforms ever won in municipal labor negotiations.”

Today, TNTP continues to serve as a catalyst for human capital policy reform in New York City. In 2008, TNTP published a new policy brief exploring the impact of the 2005 staffing reforms on teachers and schools. The brief, Mutual Benefits, found that mutual consent has been transformative for the district, replacing a closed and rigid system that denied the importance of effective matches with an open system that prioritizes choice and school fit. However, the study also shined a spotlight on a costly new problem: the lack of a sustainable policy on “excessed” teachers who cannot find new positions, even after months of searching. The study earned the support of the editorial boards of all of New York City’s daily newspapers and sparked a public dialogue that continues today.

An Ongoing Transformation

New York City’s public schools have come far in the years since TNTP first partnered with the NYCDOE. Thanks to the NYC Teaching Fellows program and mutual consent staffing reforms, children in the city’s low-income neighborhoods, from Bedford-Stuyvesant to the South Bronx, are far more likely to be taught by qualified teachers. In September 2007, the Broad Foundation honored New York City with its prestigious Broad Prize in Urban Education, calling the city “a model of successful urban school district reform.” Through its partnership with TNTP, the New York City school system is transforming into one that prioritizes the most important factor in an excellent education: teachers.

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