To get around uniform salary schedules that prevent schools and districts from paying extra for teachers with rare skills, these teachers could be hired on a contract basis and shared by many schools, suggests education policy thinker Paul Hill. An advanced physics teacher could work in two or three different high schools rather than just one, maybe even while still working part-time in industry. Hill suggests that the specialist teachers could be employed by teacher cooperatives, which would contract with districts and pay salaries and benefits to teachers based on scarcity of skills and individual performance. For more, see "Solving Shortages through Teacher Cooperatives," Hoover Institution Weekly Essay, September 17, 2001, http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/we/current/hill_0901.html
Neighborhood activists in Chicago think hiring illegal immigrants who taught in their homelands could be a solution to chronic teacher shortages in the Chicago Public Schools. Lawyers for the school district are researching the many hurdles facing this proposal; opponents argue that rewarding immigrants who have broken the law sends the wrong signal to children. For details, see "Answer to Teacher Shortage May Be Near," by Oscar Avila, Chicago Tribune, September 16, 2001. http://chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0109160392sep16.story
We need to stop thinking of teacher training as imparting a set of prefabricated solutions to predictable problems and instead encourage prospective teachers to delve into the subjects they love and then apprentice themselves to master teachers, according to Deborah Wadsworth of Public Agenda and Daniel Coleman of Bennington College. The authors describe an innovative program offered at Bennington, which has no education school or department and offers no traditional "methods" courses, but nonetheless trains liberal arts students as teachers. For more see "From Training to Transformation: How Liberal Arts Colleges Can Bring the Best Students into Teaching," American School Board Journal, October 2001 (not yet available online).