New Teacher Project Helps Urban Districts

While urban districts throughout the country are still scrambling to secure qualified teachers, Baltimore’s strategy is to fill positions with an untapped pool of midcareer professionals seeking to make a career change.
Since 2002, the New Teacher Project has been finding at least 10 applicants for each teaching job it fills for the once hard-to-staff Baltimore district. Armed with unorthodox recruitment strategies, The Baltimore City Teaching Residency has been so successful that the city now hires almost one-fifth of its new public school teachers through it.
Traditional recruitment methods have failed to yield the numbers needed to fill vacancies to teach the 82,000-student Baltimore schools. Maryland colleges produce less than a third of the total number of new teachers required in the state each year.
After spinning off from Teach For America in 1997, the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization led mostly by former teachers, has partnered with more than 200 districts, including Atlanta, Chicago, the District of Columbia, and New York City.
Experts attribute the organization’s success to its holistic approach: Besides recruiting and training, it helps districts streamline and update antiquated hiring practices that, the project’s officials say, keep new teachers away. It also offers certification programs in content areas in three states: Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas.
The project has also partnered on a multidistrict basis with Arkansas, Texas, and Virginia to provide teachers for both urban and rural schools.
In its 10-year history, the project has grown rapidly. The New York City-based project now has 130 staff members and $20 million in annual revenue.
About a fourth of the new teachers New York City hires each year come through the New Teacher Project, most of them in high-need subjects.
Teachers are recruited before the start of the school year, and again for winter. Since its founding, the New Teacher Project has recruited more than 23,000 teachers for the districts the organization has partnered with. Nearly a third of the recruits are men, and nearly a third belongs to racial or ethnic groups.
In Baltimore this year, 45 percent of the recruits are men, and nearly 35 percent are members of minority groups. Teachers in the Baltimore program have two years to acquire their certification from either Johns Hopkins University or the College of Notre Dame, with the district reimbursing 50 percent to 75 percent of the costs. Those earning certification in a high-needs area have all tuition and certification costs remitted. Meanwhile, the recruits teach in the city’s schools as full-fledged teachers.

— Teachers of Color