Mayor shares his plan for new teacher recruitment

Mayor Karl Dean on Monday fleshed out his plans for another year’s worth of involvement in public education.

And today, at the Board of Education’s regular meeting, board members will meet with and begin consideration of two programs being introduced by the mayor: Teach for America and the New Teacher Project.

Representatives of both organizations will be present at Tuesday’s board meeting. Board members will need to approve, by a vote, the introduction of both programs, though a vote is not on Tuesday’s meeting agenda.

School district officials say they’re on board.

“We’re excited about the prospect of both of them coming,” said district spokesperson Olivia Brown on Monday.

Dean told members of the Downtown Rotary Club that he is actively raising funds from private sources to establish both organizations in Nashville.

Getting both the New Teacher Project and Teach for America in Nashville in time for the 2009-2010 school year, Dean said, will require a total of $2 million to be raised in the next months. Teach for America will require, in addition, commitments for another $1 million per year for the next two years.

The New Teacher Project and Teach For America will improve recruitment of new teachers, he said. Currently, according to the mayor, there is a teacher turnover of 500 to 600 teachers each year, with the need for new hires allowing “virtually no selectivity” in considering the candidates.

The two new programs, combined, will not bring in nearly this quantity of new teachers. But Dean hopes they will facilitate more options for schools.

Teach For America recruits recent college graduates from non-education academic fields to teach, for two years, in troubled schools. And the New Teacher Project works within the human resources office of Metro Nashville Public Schools to help with recruiting, in addition to paving the way for non-traditional teachers to work in hard-to-fill district teaching positions.

“It is a fundamental answer to the problem we have of recruitment of teachers,” Dean said. “It sends out a message to everybody in the United States that Nashville is about school reform, that Nashville is going to do things differently, and that we want to participate in all the urban school reforms that are taking place across this country.”

If all goes well, Dean said, the New Teacher Project can begin work at MNPS in October. Teach for America may come to Nashville in time for the next school year, provided that funds can be raised in time. The only cost to the district incurred through these programs, MNPS’s Brown said, stems from the salaries of the teachers involved.

The teacher recruitment programs — in addition to urban principal grooming program New Leaders for New Schools — are part of a “blueprint” Dean identified for the role the Mayor’s Office can play this year in school improvement.

Dean said his actions won’t necessarily be limited to what is outlined in the blueprint, though the plan does tie together various projects and initiatives announced by the Mayor’s Office this year.

To view the “blueprint,” visit The City Paper’s Political Animals blog.