Training or hiring approximately 28,000 high-quality teachers for high-need schools

To date, we have trained or hired approximately 28,000 high-quality teachers for disadvantaged schools across the country. TNTP is especially proud of its history attracting excellent new teachers to fill critical shortage area subjects such as math, science and special education. In 2007, 84 percent of all teachers hired through TNTP programs were eligible and assigned to teach such subjects. The impact of these teachers on our nation's urban and high-poverty schools is exponential, affecting tens of thousands of children classroom by classroom, year after year. We estimate that teachers recruited or trained by TNTP have had an impact on over 3.8 million students over the course of their careers.

Pioneering the development of rigorous alternative certification programs

At a time when school districts were desperate for teachers and many state lawmakers had created "emergency certificates" that created low-threshold backdoors into the classroom, TNTP believed that not just anyone should be allowed to teach. Coupling the same aggressive recruitment strategies that the private sector has long-employed with a rigorous selection model, we set the bar high and created extremely challenging, selective programs that expanded the applicant pool and allowed only the strongest new teachers into our most needy classrooms. Today, TNTP runs these rigorous "Teaching Fellows" programs in cities across the country, including four of the five largest. In 2007, our Teaching Fellows programs boasted an average acceptance rate of only 15 percent, and the average undergraduate GPA of the individuals hired was 3.3. In surveys, 90 percent of principals said they would hire TNTP-recruited teachers again. Finally, the 86 percent average second-year retention rate for these candidates surpasses national estimates for beginning teachers in high-poverty areas.

Refocusing the national dialogue on teacher hiring and school staffing

Missed Opportunities and Unintended Consequences The New Teacher Project's two studies on teacher hiring and school staffing barriers, have built awareness among the education community and the public at large of the systemic obstacles that urban school systems face in finding, hiring and keeping high-quality teachers. As a result, these reports are transforming the debate on teacher quality in urban schools and spurring the re-prioritization of reform efforts. Moreover, we are utilizing their findings in our practice; for example, after our 2003 Missed Opportunities report showed that urban school systems lose 30 to 60 percent of all teacher applicants because of hiring timeline delays, we began partnering with school districts to implement school staffing initiatives aimed at improving the hiring efficiency of low-performing schools.

Innovating to address evolving challenges

As we become ever more familiar with the nuances of the teacher shortage and teacher quality problem, we have formulated new programs and strategies to target specific challenges. For example, after recognizing that traditional teacher education programs faced difficulties providing adequate numbers of teachers for the right subject areas and were not preparing novice teachers effectively for the rigors of urban schools, we developed the Teaching for Results content seminar series, which focuses on giving new teachers the skills and knowledge they need to be immediately effective in the classroom. Likewise, when it became apparent that New York City's demand for math teachers could never be satisfied through conventional approaches, we developed a math immersion program to enable career-changers with significant math proficiency to meet state licensure requirements for math teachers-to date, it has supplied more than 1,500 for New York City's high-need schools. Currently, almost a quarter of all active New York City math teachers were hired through our NYC Teaching Fellows program. Similarly, when we began to understand the negative systemic impact of recurrent mid-year teacher vacancies, we created a pilot program specifically designed to recruit and train new teachers for such vacancies in Philadelphia and have since expanded it to four other programs.