Our experience working closely with urban school districts and our research of urban school staffing policies have shown that how and when teachers are hired can have a dramatic impact on teacher quality. As urban districts strive to provide the best possible education for all students, flawed hiring practices pose some of the greatest barriers to success. We believe that effective school staffing is an essential component of any plan to improve student achievement, and we partner with urban school districts to put what we have learned into action. Specifically, we assist districts in hiring the best new teachers possible by:

• Training school principals to hire teachers more effectively
• Establishing Model Staffing Initiatives that ensure the lowest-performing schools have access to the highest-quality teachers and can open fully staffed

Principal Training

We believe that a key strategy to ensuring all schools are staffed with excellent teachers is educating principals and key school-based personnel to make smarter and more efficient teacher-hiring decisions. TNTP has designed a series of workshops focused on the essential skills school-based hiring personnel need to master in order to recruit, select, cultivate and hire high-quality teachers effectively. These skills are perhaps most important to principals of urban schools, who face multiple challenges on a daily basis and struggle the most to attract and secure the most talented teachers. To address these challenges, TNTP offers training workshops on topics that include, but are not limited to:

• Overview of the research that supports early and effective hiring
• Determining school vacancies early
• Developing a school-based selection rubric for identifying quality candidates
• Successful interviewing strategies
• Accessing the applicant pool
• Marketing a high-need school
• Cultivating and inducting new hires

Participating principals' response to these workshops has been consistently positive. In 2008, 92 percent of principals who participated in TNTP’s Model Staffing Initiative/workshop series agreed that it increased their ability to staff their schools with high-quality teachers.

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Model Staffing Initiatives

TNTP has developed a Model Staffing Initiative (MSI) to focus on effective staffing in a subset of a district's lowest performing schools. These schools serve as "models" for effective teacher hiring by embracing staffing strategies that enable them to find the right teachers for their classrooms in a timely manner, with the goal of filling all vacancies by the start of the school year. Ultimately, the improvements that these schools are able to achieve may be spread to others in the district as well. Through the MSI, we take a five-pronged approach to ensure that participating schools open fully staffed with the highest-quality candidates possible:

• Tap into and maximize the district's existing applicant pool of high-quality candidates
• Supplement the district's recruitment efforts to strengthen the applicant pool in shortage subject areas
• Eliminate or minimize policy barriers that impede early, efficient hiring and placement
• Build capacity of principals and other school-based staff to hire teachers early and selectively
• Provide individualized staffing support and assistance to schools

The New Teacher Project has demonstrated success in improving school-level hiring capacity in Baltimore, where our Baltimore Model Staffing Initiative (BMSI) has aided a subset of 40 of the district's lowest-performing schools to identify their vacancies and make smart hiring decisions far earlier than others in the district. An independent study of the first year of the BMSI by researchers at Johns Hopkins University suggested that the Initiative enabled participating schools to hire better qualified teachers and strongly encouraged the district to expand it. "The most important difference between new teachers at BMSI and comparison schools... 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)," stated the authors. The district also expanded the reach of the program, requesting that TNTP train an additional 20 principals in the critical skills required to make effective hires for their buildings.

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Questions?

For more information on our services, contact us at info@tntp.org.