Making an Impact
Baltimore City Teaching Residency Program
Innovative Program Eases Teacher Crunch
With an estimated need for close to 8,000 new teachers next year, the state of Maryland has seen firsthand the impact of the nationwide teacher shortage. According to the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, the number of students continues to grow and the rate of teacher retirement continues to increase. In addition, up to 50 percent of teachers choose to leave the profession within their first five years.
Fortunately, the Baltimore City Teaching Residency Program, an initiative of the Baltimore City Public Schools managed by the New Teacher Project, is addressing the problem in a way that has given some school systems new hope.
The program has grown so fast since it began in 2002 as the Residency Teachers Program that it “accounted for approximately a quarter of all the hires for the system,” according to site manager Ami Magunia.
Since 2004, it has brought in an average of 200 to 225 new teachers who are fast-tracked to certification and offered the option of gaining a master’s degree in teaching arts from Baltimore’s College of Notre Dame or John Hopkins University.
The program offers a variety of perks, including partial to full tuition reimbursement, access to home-ownership programs as and access to master’s degree programs. Last year alone, more than 2,000 individuals applied to the program to become teachers in Baltimore, but only 200 were chosen after a strenuous interview process.
The last group averaged a 3.3 GPA and possessed 39 advanced degrees, including three PhD’s and one MD. Many of the perks prove crucial in recruiting teachers in an increasingly competitive market, yet many are leaving their former careers with the same desire as those who begin their professional careers as teachers—to make a difference.
“A lot of times we get folks from the financial world, the business world or from law,” said Magunia. “In our latest cohorts, we have people who want to make the leap into teaching for more socially meaningful work and a way to impact society,” she added.
Despite the altruism of many professionals and added perks, getting the teachers needed to fill jobs in urban areas such is still a tough sell. According to data from the National Education Association, teachers are paid only half what other workers earn on average with a four-year degree.
Add to that the shrinking resources available for school systems and challenging student-to-teacher ratios and one begins to realize the need to provide additional support to teachers and find ways to increase salaries and resources. It was this plight that pushed Magunia from her role as an elementary school teacher into the residency program.
“Before I got to this position, I started in 2002 as a teacher for the Baltimore City public school system through the Teach for America program. I taught in the classroom for four years — elementary education – and at the end of my fourth year, I determined that I wanted to make an impact on teaching and help teachers do the same things and overcome the same challenges and obstacles that I faced,” said Magunia. Her initial foray began, like those of so many changing careers to become teachers, as a means to make a difference. “I absolutely wanted to jump in and reach a larger group and effect change on a larger level.”
This “make a difference” attitude comes through as well in the works of the New Teacher Project, which manages the teacher residency program in Baltimore and works with more than 200 school districts around the nation.
Since its formation in 1997, the project has recruited more than 23,000 teachers. Additionally, as is the case in Baltimore, that group has made huge inroads in attracting male teachers and those from ethnic backgrounds. Currently, 45 percent of the Baltimore recruits are men and close to 35 percent are from underrepresented ethnic groups. Magunia notes that the project’s relationships with Morgan State University, Coppin State University and other historically black colleges in the Baltimore area are important in pulling in African-American male teachers.
This philosophy of aggressive recruitment and problem-solving extends to other aspects of the program as well. Recently, in an attempt to address the shortage of math teachers in Baltimore City schools, the school system worked with the residency program to develop a math immersion program to lure professionals with analytical backgrounds.
“That training program actually is an innovative way to bring in people who have a very strong background in not necessarily math, but math-related fields such as chemistry and physics, and it gets them to become math teachers in the Baltimore City area,” Magunia said.
While the teacher recruitment, the math immersion program and support systems for residency cohorts represent various facets of the program, Magunia notes that at the root of their efforts is the goal of improving student performance. She added: “The entire program is designed to increase the academic performance of the students in Baltimore City, so everything we do is designed to increase academic achievement. In some ways that’s addressed through making sure there are teachers in every classroom so helping the district in recruiting teachers and making sure that the training that we are providing them and support we provide is getting them to be the most effective teacher to raise that student achievement in our city.”
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Malik Russell is a freelance writer based in Oakland, Calif.
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