November 4-10, 2004

city beat

Good Fellows

transition year: Having earned his chops as a mental-health counselor, Icy Jones doesn't worry about what he'll face in a city classroom. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

The school district taps into a brand-new market for teachers.

by Doron Taussig

Icy Jones was running off at the mouth again. This time, the topic was the Philadelphia School District. "School is supposed to be the great equalizer," Jones was telling a friend, but "it only exacerbates disparities."

Jones opined about No Child Left Behind, race and class, offering his diagnosis: The school system hasn't been able to harness students' "positive energy." As a result, "our children are in a state of crisis."

His friend, a teacher, sat across a cafe table and listened patiently to the tirade. When it was over, she said, "Why don't you do something about it?"

Well, for one thing, Jones had no background in education. He is a mental-health counselor by trade and was pursuing an MBA in public policy from Wharton. Not to mention that it was the middle of the school year. What could he do?

He could apply to the Philadelphia Teaching Fellows (PTF), his friend said with a sly grin. PTF, an initiative established this September by the school district and a teacher-recruitment agency called The New Teacher Project, hires people with no teaching credentials, puts them through a monthlong training and then places them in a classroom. The new teachers receive a starting teacher's salary ($37,622) while working toward their education degree at Temple at night.

Jones had a choice: Put up or shut up.

Every year, a number of teachers throw in the towel before the school year is over (last year, recruiters estimated about 200 teachers out of a total 11,500 resigned from the Philadelphia public school system midyear), and it's very difficult to find certified replacements. There is a substantial pool of people without education credentials who are interested in teaching, but it has historically been very difficult and expensive for someone to get on the teaching path once he or she goes another direction.

For the past few years, the district has swerved around these roadblocks by giving out "emergency certificates." However, No Child Left Behind requires that all teachers meet a higher certification standard in 2005.

PTF is the district's new strategy for dealing with midyear attrition. Instead of getting emergency certificates, which require a bachelor's degree, teaching fellows will receive "intern certificates," which require they pursue an education degree while teaching. The intern certificates satisfy federal guidelines, and the long hours spent in night school ensure that the recipients are committed to education. But the district isn't the only one getting a better deal here: The fellows will receive higher pay and more guidance than did their emergency-certified predecessors, who made $35,855 and were tossed into classrooms with no training whatsoever.

Jones, 33, is a sturdily built man whose pristine appearance suggests a formal occasion. He attended Central and then South Philadelphia high schools, where his "main concern wasn't grades, it was survival." After college he worked for several years at an addiction-treatment center in Baltimore. He always hoped to return to Philadelphia to teach, but planned on doing so "eventually, after establishing my other career." When his friend told him about PTF, he was on a leave of absence from Wharton, and he decided that waiting would be "a cop-out."

Jones decided to put up.

According to PTF site manager Amy Lynch, many others have done the same. PTF plans to hire between 50 and 75 new teachers, primarily in math, science and special education this year for a February start; to date, it has received 265 completed applications and 151 partial applications (PTF will accept applications until Nov. 15). Most, Lynch says, have been from "career-changers"—people who, like Jones, have no background in education but want to try something new.

Jones will be coming to teaching from social services—a predictable transition—but many of the applicants hail from other job sectors.

Since 1983, Ginger Agnew, 44, has co-owned and operated a small business with her husband. They manufacture industrial signs for places including hospitals and universities out of a factory in Kensington. Since 9/11, the company has struggled mightily, and the toll on her family recently became unacceptable.

"If two members of the same household are involved in the same business, when the business is down, the household is down," says Agnew, a mother of three with a bonfire of red hair.

She first heard about PTF from a radio advertisement ("Right after, I heard an ad from the teachers' union," she recalls, "so I was hearing both the good and the bad of it").

"I've been intrigued with teaching for years," she says, but "I could never afford going back to school full time."

The prospect of a teaching job with a reliable income and benefits seemed like an oasis in a bleak financial landscape. So Agnew applied and will soon find out whether she's been accepted.

Still other applicants—like lawyers and accountants—will be taking significant pay cuts. Clearly, the school district has found fertile ground for teacher recruitment among career-changers. But will the career-changers make quality teachers?

Tomas Hanna, the district's recruitment director, says that as a principal at Sheppard Elementary, Willard Elementary and Kensington High School, he always appreciated the temperate approach of career-changers. "I loved working with [fresh-out-of-college] teachers, because they were going to save the world," he says, but "in the career-changers I found a level of maturity that I didn't find [in others]."

Career-changers, he discovered, understand that "it takes four or five years to really get good at this," while younger teachers have their hearts broken easily.

Victoria Van Cleef, the vice president of business development for The New Teacher Project, echoes Hanna's observations. TNTP has run similar programs in other cities, and though its most successful advertising campaigns appeal to people's idealism (often employing a similar phrase to the one that trapped Jones: "What have you done about it?"), they are not attracting people who have "missionary zeal." Van Cleef's overall impression is that career-changers combine the essential ingredients of patience, maturity and knowledge about the subjects they teach. The programs haven't been around long enough to collect data on student achievement, she says, but "our principals tend to be highly satisfied."

Van Cleef also observes that TNTP teachers have a higher average GPA than the national education school average and are more ethnically diverse. People of color represent 12 percent of education school graduates and 42 percent of TNTP teachers. She speculates that some talented African-American and Latino professionals may be attracted to teaching once they reach a comfortable enough financial stage to contribute to the community full time.

All that being said, the teaching fellows will be entering a very difficult situation. A teacher departing midyear creates a sense of chaos in a classroom, and students often respond by acting chaotic. The fact that the fellows understand it takes some time to get good at teaching will not change the reality that they are not very good at it yet.

Additionally, says Hanna, the fellows may face resentment from certified teachers who put in the time to get education degrees, only to earn the same amount as other liberal arts graduates. But most teachers will probably be happy to have committed people filling vacancies. "They were losing time having to go cover the classes," he says.

Agnew seems simultaneously confident that she'll make a good teacher and nervous about the emotional trials that lie ahead.

"In my head I understand what these kids are going through at home, but knowing what they went through and then asking more of them," she expects, will be challenging. Hanna's remarks about the resilience of career-changers elicits a laugh from Agnew. "We who have changed careers also have hearts which can be broken."

As for Jones, he does not hesitate to predict that he'll make a good teacher. He says his experience as a mental-health counselor will enable him to motivate students and redirect their energy; he also cites his background as an advantage, because he'll be unfazed by poverty, aggression and decrepitude. Even the prospect of students mocking his name does not cause him concern.

What does frighten Icy Jones, he utters in the words of a true idealist: "I'll only be destroyed if I don't make a difference in one person's life."