The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) is in the midst of a push to bolster the size and quality of its teaching force and ensure that new teachers remain there. The New Teacher Project is playing a central role in this effort, providing high-quality, committed teachers--over 300 to date--and an innovative new path to certification.
When Christopher Gilmartin began teaching special needs students at the East Bay Agency for Children/Oakland Day Treatment Center, he felt that he would take one step forward and two steps back helping his most challenging student. A year later, the student is “like a completely different child,” Christopher says. “He has done more academic work in the last four or five weeks than he did all last year, and his behavior issues, though still present, are much less severe than they were. These are the moments that excite me the most when I reflect on my work as an Oakland Teaching Fellow.”
Christopher Gilmartin exemplifies the spirit of the Oakland Teaching Fellows program and its sister initiative, the Oakland City Teacher Corps. These programs—run by The New Teacher Project in partnership with the Oakland Unified School District—fill district vacancies with teachers who have strong qualifications and a commitment to remaining in challenging classrooms. To date, the initiatives have brought 309 teachers to some of the hardest-to-staff public schools in Oakland.
Promising Pipelines
In January of 2005, The New Teacher Project partnered with the Oakland Unified School District to launch the Oakland Teaching Fellows (OTF) program, an alternate route to certification initiative with a focus on recruiting teachers for special education vacancies, some of the hardest to fill positions in the district. In its first year, the program hired 48 teachers, including 35 in special education. Even though the program had launched just months before the start of the school year, the district opened the year with virtually no special education vacancies, an unheard of occurrence in Oakland.
Building upon this early success, the district reached out to TNTP in 2006 to significantly ramp up the number of teachers it recruited for the city’s classrooms. In addition to the Oakland Teaching Fellows, TNTP launched Oakland City Teacher Corps (OCTC), a highly selective program for certified teachers who have a desire to make a difference in under-resourced schools. Through targeted recruitment campaigns and a rigorous selection process, OTF and OCTC drew 123 teachers to Oakland in 2006, helping the city’s public schools open the year with virtually no math, science, or special education vacancies.
Each year, OTF and OCTC grow both in size and impact. Combined, OTF and OCTC brought 138 high-quality teachers to the city’s schools in 2007. The Oakland Unified School District continues to credit OTF and OCTC with playing critical roles in ensuring that classrooms across the district are staffed with high-quality teachers at the start of each school year.
Qualified and Diverse
John Bonham was the founder of his own investment company, vice president of a commercial real estate company, and a commercial property manager and leasing agent before joining OTF to become a middle school special education teacher. A fourth-generation Oakland resident, John left a more comfortable career path to “make a difference in my community and its future,” he says.
Oakland Teaching Fellows and participants in the Oakland City Teacher Corps are individuals like John who exhibit high standards and strong qualifications. Of Teaching Fellows who entered Oakland’s classrooms in 2007, 46 percent were people of color and 100 percent were in critical shortage subject areas (nearly three in five, or 58 percent, took special education positions). Among the 2007 OCTC cohort, the average undergraduate GPA was 3.4 and average prior teaching experience was three years. All OCTC participants who joined the program in 2007 were placed in Title I schools serving high concentrations of students from low-income backgrounds.
These teachers have brought energy, commitment and records of achievement to their schools. Of principals surveyed at the end of the 2006-07 school year, 100 percent said they would hire an Oakland Teaching Fellow again, and 100 percent said they would hire another participant in Oakland City Teacher Corps. “This is a very positive program for our district,” said Rick Gaston, principal of the Castlemont Business and Information Technology School. “Kudos to you all.”
In Focus | EXCEL High SchoolIn 2005, none of the McClymonds High School 9th graders met the “basic” level for performance on the state-wide math exam. That same year, only 11% of those 9th graders were on grade level in English and language arts. At the end of the year, McClymonds High School was broken up into smaller learning communities, and Yetunde Reeves started EXCEL High School with a mission to change the story at McClymonds. The principal hired three Fellows the first year, and EXCEL quickly set itself apart from the other small schools on the campus. It started to gain a reputation for having students in classes, not in the hallway, and for teachers who expected, and achieved, results. Principal Reeves cited Oakland Teaching Fellows as a key component of turning the school around, and actively recruited another four Oakland Teaching Fellows to join EXCEL for the 2006-2007 school year. EXCEL achieved a 94% attendance rate, and experienced a changed culture of high expectations. Fellows teaching at EXCEL included people like Derek Ang, a 2006 Teaching Fellow, who regularly invited students into his science class before the bell to work on science projects he developed to teach them California standards related to motion and force. As of 2007, 28.8% of EXCEL's students tested proficient on California English/language arts exams, up significantly from the year prior; math scores also significantly improved and were near the school’s target. Currently, there are six Oakland Teaching Fellows on the EXCEL staff, and the school is a model for leadership and reform. |
