Radical (9 page)

I loved it. So did Randy Ward.

I hired Layla Avila to run the contract, and we were off to the races. In weeks we were fielding dozens of requests for future teachers.

The last contract of that first year was the Massachusetts Department of Education. Commissioner David Driscoll and his young deputy, Alan Safran, had set up a meeting with Wendy to help replenish their teacher ranks. Wendy said she couldn't do it. She suggested TNTP and opened the door for me. I went in for the sell.

“I can't believe Wendy pawned us off on you!” I remember Safran saying. “I mean, no offense, but come on! I want TFA, I need TFA, and now I've got some unproven, new project?”

I can endure plenty of abuse, especially when I have a lot on the line, but this guy was making me mad.

“Look,” I said, “if you don't think we can help you, that's fine. I am not going to try and talk you into working with us.”

“What are you talking about? Isn't that why you're
here
? To convince me that you're as good as Wendy?” he said. “What have you got? What can you do?”

Safran started talking like a man possessed.

“I want something big,” he continued. “I want something better than TFA! TFA is small potatoes. TFA is so yesterday. I want something new and fresh and exciting. I want to take all of the candidates away from TFA!”

In the midst of the rant, I realized I kind of liked Alan Safran. I appreciated his wild energy and decided to add my own. We started to exchange ideas. After an hour, we came up with the plan. We would start the Massachusetts signing bonus program. The first of its kind, the program would offer $20,000 bonuses to people who came into the program and agreed to teach in a low-performing school district. The bonus would be paid out over four years, but that was a detail we didn't trumpet. Instead the $20,000 number was the headliner.

It worked! This fourth and final contract of TNTP's first year was an instant hit. It attracted national news coverage and garnered thousands of applications. The participants were dubbed the “bonus babies.”

We worked frantically that first year and accomplished a tremendous amount. We found that the challenges in the school districts were immense. It wasn't just that they couldn't attract good candidates. It was that their systems didn't treat candidates well. In many cases, no one would return an applicant's calls. Their applications would be lost. No one contacted them after they had applied.

After trying to change the way some HR staffs operated, we decided the best remedy would be to try to conduct these functions ourselves. We created separate Teaching Fellows programs in each school district to take applications from midcareer professionals who wanted to become educators. The TNTP staff would review teacher applications, interview applicants, communicate the requirements to them, train them through a summer program, and deliver them to the district in time for the start of school.

It worked! So well that it surprised us. We got applications for our programs from rocket scientists, investment bankers, and judges. All of these people were willing to leave their jobs for the opportunity to teach.

As we were closing out our first recruitment season and gearing up for our summer training programs, I got a call that changed the trajectory of The New Teacher Project: Vicki Bernstein, with the New York City Department of Education, was on the line.

“We need three hundred teachers for the start of school,” she said. “Can you help?”

The assignment was nuts. The New York system was gargantuan: the largest in the nation. It included more than a million students, in 1,700 schools, with nearly 75,000 teachers. In the other programs that we'd run, we were hiring 100 teachers on average, and we had nine months to run our entire process. Vicki wanted 300 teachers, and we had three weeks to recruit them before the training program.

“We have never recruited this many people before in ideal circumstances, much less three weeks,” Tracy said. “
And
if we screw up, we screw up with the biggest and highest-profile school district in the nation. No way!”

“Who is going to run the thing?” Charity asked. “We're already all working beyond capacity. This is a major undertaking, and we'll need an entire team to pull it off!”

There was no shortage of good reasons not to take the project on. But I knew we had to do it. For all of the risks, there was tremendous upside. A foot in the door with the New York City public schools would create opportunities nationwide.

“We are taking it,” I said. “We can pull this off.”

The first order of business was assembling our recruitment materials. After another marathon late-night session we landed on another gem: a grainy black-and-white picture of an adorable young Latina child. Above her the caption read: “Four out of five 4th graders in the city's most challenged schools can't read and write at grade level.” At the bottom of the page: “Are you willing to do something about it?”

We loved it.

The New York City department hated it. The powers that be felt the message was too negative. They wanted something more positive.

I argued that facts are facts. We didn't make that statistic up. Moreover, a message that says, “Hey, everything in the school system is great—come be a cog in the wheel!” is not very compelling. Tell people they can make a difference, and they will come.

Karla Oakley, the woman I'd hired to run the contract, took our argument to Harold Levy, the new chancellor. He was a bit of a maverick. He green-lighted the idea. The response to the pitch was immediate.
New York Times
editors were so intrigued by the ad that they assigned a reporter to cover our campaign. The article ran with a picture of the ad.

Within days we had thousands of applications.

R
UNNING
T
HE
N
EW
T
EACHER
P
ROJECT
made me realize that we
could
make a real difference. Quickly, we were working with most of the large urban school districts across the country and hiring thousands of teachers a year. We partnered with the Chicago Public Schools, Miami–Dade County Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified, and many others. Our experience base was growing exponentially.

And so was my rage.

Our job was to work with the school district bureaucracies. They were our clients. And it was uncanny how they simply couldn't manage to do what a competent organization should do. In fact, they did the opposite of what must be done to recruit and hire the best teachers. It was maddening.

When we began our work, we figured that there simply weren't enough people out there who wanted to teach, so we had to inspire people to do something they hadn't thought of doing before. I quickly learned that we could get huge numbers of very qualified people to apply for teaching jobs.

Attracting candidates wasn't the problem. But we found that the school districts couldn't hire them—or wouldn't hire them. They had set up systems and processes that made it impossible for them to hire the best teachers. We were so frustrated that we decided to try to document the problem by thoroughly examining how school districts responded to applicants, cataloging the processes and compiling the results in a report.

At first we couldn't convince anyone to fund the project, but we thought it was so important that we started the research on our own dime. Jessica Levin, our chief knowledge officer, led the effort, along with Meredith Quinn, whose research and writing skills made the project a success. They asked all our site managers who were embedded in HR offices in districts across the country to begin to track who applied for teaching jobs and when they applied. We also monitored whether they were ultimately hired.

The results were shocking. They totally smashed the myth that there was a shortage of urban teachers. To the contrary, we found that experts in math and science were banging down the doors to get hired, but the school systems were turning them away. It made me crazy!

How could schools deny the best candidates? First, school budgets were often not finalized until summer, leaving many principals uncertain of how many staff they would have to hire. Second, the districts often did not make structural decisions—school closures and consolidations or changes to staffing plans—until summer. That combined with the unresponsive and unaccountable nature of the HR departments equaled disaster. Third, even if a school district could usher a new teacher through the process in time for them to show up in the classroom at the start of the school year, the union contract mandated that no new teacher could be hired into the system until all of the current teachers had been placed.

Potential teachers were essentially stiff-armed before they could get in front of the students.

Lots of politicians have stories about constituents, relatives, or friends of friends who applied for teaching jobs and became so frustrated by the process and bureaucracy that they decided to do something else. Those, however, were just anecdotes. Our report put numbers behind the anecdotes in a compelling, sixty-three-page document supported by graphs, charts, and case studies of three school districts.

We named it “Missed Opportunities” and went public in April 2003.

We were very excited about the report, but we had low expectations. Who would care? We printed a couple of hundred copies. Requests poured in. Within weeks we had to print more. Because it confirmed the suspicions and anecdotes of so many people, “Missed Opportunities” resonated. Requests came from think tanks, institutions of higher education, states, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Investigative journalists devoured it.

TNTP's first foray into the policy world was a success, but we didn't want to be known as one-hit wonders. The report and its reception made us hungry for more. We understood the impact and value of a document that presented live data and broke new ground. Lawmakers began using it to guide new policy, which had been our hoped-for ideal outcome. But we also knew that “Missed Opportunities” barely began to delve into a deeper set of obstacles. We wanted to expose more problems and recommend solutions.

Jessica Levin and I wrestled with the remaining roadblocks to hiring great teachers. We decided that the first two problems of HR processes and budget timelines could be addressed by good leadership and planning. The third issue, the requirement that school districts hold open spots for all current teachers without assignments, before offering spots to any new teachers—was a much tougher problem. This issue revolved around collective bargaining agreements and so it touched on a series of sensitive, sacred cows in public education.

“There's no doubt about it,” said Jessica, “the union issues are the seemingly intractable ones. Those are the ones that would be most interesting to delve into.”

“Okay,” I said, “let's do it.”

“Are you crazy?” she said. “The unions would go ballistic. And they are not people you want to be on the wrong side of.”

“We have to solve the problems,” I said, “right?”

“Of course,” she replied.

“And you just told me that the budget and HR issues are more easily solvable.”

“Correct.”

“Then we have to pry into the guts of the union contracts,” I said.

“Oh, honey,” she said, “do you realize what you're getting us into?”

Here's how Sandra Feldman, the well-respected head of the American Federation of Teachers, reacted to “Missed Opportunities.”

“If these transfer policies are getting in the way of recruiting new teachers in a timely fashion, labor and management should get together and create a better way of dealing with it.”

If Sandy Feldman was willing to say that, how mad could the teachers unions be with us?

A
ND WITH THAT, WE
embarked on our second major project. It required two years of research and evaluation. We collected data in five urban school districts. In November 2005, we published “Unintended Consequences.” The report enumerated in exacting detail the rules and regulations embedded in collective bargaining agreements that prohibit school districts from hiring the best teachers. In fact, we showed that union contracts required school districts to give jobs to teachers who had demonstrated their failure at teaching.

Take what school districts call “voluntary transfers.” If a teacher lost a job at one school because of budget cuts or poor performance, he or she was not fired from the system. Under the contract, they were considered “excessed.” Translation: If a teacher failed or was deemed unnecessary at one school, he could be first in line for a job at another school in the district. There was often nothing voluntary about the transfers. Bad teachers were often forced out of one school, only to be foisted on another.

“Voluntary transfer rules often give senior teachers the right to interview for and fill jobs in other schools even if those schools do not consider them a good fit,” we concluded. Most principals reported that they didn't want to hire those teachers. But contract rules forced them to accept teachers they neither wanted nor needed.

Under contract rules, terminating a teacher requires weeks of time in writing reports and evaluations and holding meetings. Often principals simply “excessed” bad teachers and passed them from school to school, a ritual some referred to as “the dance of the lemons.”

Contract rules often put promising young teachers—and their students—in a precarious position. A more senior teacher could bump a new teacher from a classroom, even if the more experienced teacher was known to be a lousy educator who had failed to teach students effectively for decades.

In reporting on these issues, we knew we were challenging powerful unions and liberal dogma.

“We hope that this report will initiate a discussion not on the merits of collective bargaining as a whole (which we support), but on the effects of the specific contractual requirements governing school staffing,” I wrote in the foreword: “When these rules were adopted in the 1960s by newly formed teachers union locals and school boards, they were an important and legitimate response to widely perceived arbitrary and poor management. Based on the now four decades of experience with these provisions, however, we believe it is time to find a new balance between protecting teachers from past abuses and equipping schools with the necessary tools to achieve excellent results for their students.”