Maria McCarthy and Ellen Guiney, Boston Plan for Excellence in the Public SchoolsApril 2004
This report surveys new teachers in Boston Public Schools (BPS) and critically examines its hiring and professional development processes to learn why BPS has trouble finding and keeping good teachers. They conclude that the answer is not money, but rather the poor job done by human resources staff (HR). The first problem is the inefficiency of the hiring process. It is often delayed and drawn-out, frustrating the candidates. (Boston's problem is validated by a New Teacher Project study that found, in four urban districts, that 30 to 60 percent of teaching candidates accepted other offers because of the length of the hiring process and that those tended to be the strongest candidates.) Once hired, retention becomes the problem-30 percent of new BPS teachers revise downward in their first year their expectations for how long they will teach in BPS. Support for new teachers comes in various forms of professional development, and though these are viewed more positively than negatively, the support is lukewarm at best. Perhaps the most successful is mentoring, but even this is hampered by HR, which often fails to match teachers with mentors in the appropriate subjects or grade levels. The report doesn't offer any radical solutions-it suggests some realignment within HR, some better systems, and other such process improvements-but it does provide some interesting insights into teachers' opinions. For example, teachers with master's degrees were more likely than those without to "report feeling especially unprepared for some aspect of their job." And teachers' greatest areas of concern were not the specific requirements of teaching, such as curricula or instructional techniques, but classroom management and relations with other teachers and staff. What's really needed is a study that reports on the practices of a good public school HR department-if one can be found. In the meantime, this study provides some useful tips for improving HR along with a short literature review on teacher hiring and retention. It's available online here.
