teacher recruitment

Wow. You set a HUGE teacher recruitment goal and the team responds like no other. Our work recruiting teachers in Pittsburgh and then Harrisburg has so far generated over 500 leads and we have 35 new enrollments which is a solid start. Our Allentown and Philadelphia teacher recruitment events will finish out the week.

Boldly going where no group has gone before - that is what ABCTE is all about. This month, we have set the unprecedented goal of recruiting 900 new teacher candidates into our program. To do this, we have discounted the program by $150 for January to give people the incentive to enroll.

Every one of our 34 employees are focused on making this goal a reality. We are going to be traveling across all our ABCTE states to talk to people who want to teach and get them focused on making their dream a reality.

The “coolest map ever” award has to go to the Leaders and Laggards report on education innovation from AEI, Center for American Progress and the Institute for a Competitive Workforce. Besides being very slick, it presents some interesting information on education innovation. It will be really cool if they do this map again in a year or two to see if the billions spent by US DOE actually move any of the state grades on innovation.

It is appropriate for the blogosphere to recognize the transformation in DC right now. Since our birth occurred during the Bush era I am often asked how we will fair with the new administration. The answer apparently lives at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/education/

Ed Sector and Andy Rotherham put out a pretty ambitious plan for the Obama Department of Education. In this chapter, he takes on Title II – the $3 billion in spending each year where “tangible results form these efforts are scant and there is little evidence that these funds are driving the sort of changes that are aligned with broader human capital reform efforts in education.”

Just over a year ago, I predicted extreme belt-tightening ahead in state budgets. After looking at my retirement savings, I wish that I wasn’t so right. Now we read that 29 states face a total shortfall of $48 billion. And the states that were immune last year to the real estate crumble because they had oil and natural gas revenues are going to be hit hard with oil down under $80.

Teaching quality continues to move forward in the news. Mike Petrilli has an excellent write up in the Gadfly from last week and now a new article in the Washington Post about what the newly canonized Michelle Rhee plans to do. But they are all trying to run before we learn to walk.

Management texts will tell you that you need to focus on improving staff. In teaching, the staggering numbers always tell the tale.

I had an interesting day in Richmond speaking with education leaders from all over the state. I keep hearing from all around the country that no one can find high school teachers and this was certainly evident in Virginia. It is rapidly reaching crisis level. The irony is that states claim that they don’t want to lower standards and try other alternative ways to recruit, prepare and certify teachers while districts continue to just ignore the current standards to fill critical positions any way they can.

MO – it stands for Missouri and momentum. We got a little of both yesterday when the Missouri State House voted final approval of Senate Bill 1066 without any new amendments. This means it goes on to the Governor who has shown he is in favor of the bill. This will allow ABCTE to recruit, prepare and certify new teachers for Missouri schools.

Recruiting teachers is not an easy task as any principal can tell you. But there are a lot of people out there that want to teach. In April 2007, the Tarrance Group conducted a survey of Florida residents and found that 28% wanted to teach at some point in their lives.