Placing beginning teachers in hard-to-staff schools: Dilemmas posed by alternative certification programs

2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to thank the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and Dr. Mike McKibbin, Project Officer for the California Teacher Internship Programs for making the 2002-2003 data available to us. We would also like to acknowledge and thank the following members of the Commission's staff who were instrumental in collecting and organizing the CCTC data set: The authors of this paper are solely responsible for the views expressed in this paper as well as for any errors, inaccuracies or misstatements. This paper does not, in any way, represent the views of the CCTC nor its staff. 3 Placing beginning teachers in hard-to-staff schools: Dilemmas posed by alternative certification programs Recent empirical studies of teacher assignments have revealed what educational reformers have long suspected about American public schools: not all children have equal access to fully credentialed teachers. In fact, the schools that serve children in poverty, especially those located in urban or remote rural areas, are disproportionately staffed by teachers without These schools are considered to be " hard to staff " because they have difficulties attracting and retaining qualified and fully licensed teachers. Schools serving children in poverty typically lack the financial resources to make them attractive jobs for newly credentialed teachers. They suffer from the public's perception that they lack resources for teachers and/or offer salaries and benefit packages that are lower than those offered by schools in more affluent settings. Some districts and states have tried to address the staffing problem by creating financial incentive programs in the form of forgivable educational loans for teacher candidates who commit to working in hard-to-staff schools, financial help in obtaining and buying homes, or differentiated pay for teachers with specializations in shortage areas such as science, mathematics or special education teaching. But the problem transcends financial differences between poor and affluent schools. Teacher education programs bear some responsibility for the staffing problems. Despite efforts to diversify the teacher candidate pool, teacher education programs have not been successful in identifying or attracting the types of people who are predisposed to want to work in challenging school environments. Studies of teachers have shown that individuals who choose teaching as a career typically do so because they feel a desire to serve (MetLife Inc., 2001). However, the desire to serve is not necessarily linked to a desire to work in schools and with children who present the challenges associated with …