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| Student teacher Mike Bordogna goes over a problem with Central East Middle School students. New state regulations are cutting into the numbers of newly certified teachers, and few new teachers want to be assigned to middle schools. Photo by: Harvey Finkle |
Certification issues
Very few of the new middle school teachers in Philadelphia want to be assigned to middle schools. The overwhelming majority of the certified teachers coming into middle schools are certified to teach from kindergarten through sixth grade and have done their student teaching in those grades, usually the younger grades.
Unlike a number of other states, Pennsylvania allows elementary-certified teachers to instruct seventh and eighth graders. But suburban middle schools are largely staffed by secondary-certified teachers who are qualified to teach in a content area for grades 7-12.
Quite often, middle grades teachers are assigned to classes for which they have very thin preparation in the content area. Very few have a major or minor or even a concentration of four or more academic courses in the subjects they are teaching.
A further problem is that middle school teachers are often rotated among subjects from year to year, a problem documented by researchers at Johns Hopkins University who work with 11 of the District's high-poverty middle schools. This pattern of internal
transfers makes it hard for teachers to develop expertise in a content area.
Such mobility of teachers among school
subjects combined with high rates of transfers and resignations means that many middle schools have highly unstable teaching staffs, a factor associated with lower rates of student learning. Schools' investments in subject-specific teacher training evaporate when these teachers leave the school or a particular subject area.
School size a factor
The severity of the hiring crisis varies
substantially among the middle schools. Those that are small - fewer than 450 students - have few openings for new staff.
Middle schools with low rates of poverty and comparatively large numbers of white
students also have a better record in retaining teachers and attracting transferring teachers. Schools with outstanding principals are more likely to keep teachers as well.
The most serious hiring situations occur in 9 to 11 of the 43 middle schools, where it is not uncommon to have 20 percent or more of the staff new to the school each year. These tend to be large, high-poverty schools.
The problem that the middle schools have in finding and keeping teachers is part of a
larger pattern of teacher shortage across the country and in Philadelphia.
School enrollments today are now as high as they were during the "baby boom" years of the 1960s and 1970s. Rapidly growing
suburban communities outside of Philadelphia compete for new teachers. New state regulations that set higher standards for entry into teaching are reducing the number of newly certified teachers, perhaps by as much as a third in some of the Philadelphia-area colleges and universities that supply teachers to the city.
A further problem exacerbating the teacher shortage is that large numbers of teachers are retiring. In Philadelphia, 650 teachers are eligible for retirement at the end of the 2000-2001 school year.
The difficulties many districts across the country are having in finding qualified teachers are made worse for Philadelphia by certain conditions peculiar to this city.
Philadelphia's rule that teachers must move into the city after three years of employment is a major barrier to hiring and retention, according to a series of studies conducted by the Philadelphia Education Fund. The studies found that this residency requirement is one of the three chief reasons that student teachers in the District cite as a barrier to teaching in the city, and it is the main reason given by new middle school teachers as to why they might leave the District.
A 2001 report by the Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth and the Alliance Organizing Project shows that this policy is not commonly found in other cities.
Other factors keep qualified teachers from applying for jobs in Philadelphia: lower salaries; larger classes; run-down facilities; the fact that the District doesn't help pay for graduate school tuition (additional coursework is a state requirement for remaining certified); the wage tax; high car insurance rates; the drawn-out hiring process and late notification of hiring and school
assignment; fears about personal safety; and concerns about shortages of supplies and materials, and student disciplinary issues.
Many of these conditions, of course, are caused by the state's inadequate funding of the city's schools.
The District has taken several recent steps to address the staffing crisis, including:
• a hiring bonus of $4500; a $2000 bonus for teaching in 19 "hard-to-staff" schools (13 of them middle schools); and a $1500 bonus for teaching in certain subject areas where there are serious teacher shortages - math, science, languages, and special education. Apprentice teachers do not receive these bonuses.
• provisions in the new teachers' contract that will speed up teachers' notification of resignation or retirement, thereby allowing the District to hire their replacements earlier in the summer.
• permission for schools to select their own teachers from among a pre-qualified pool as long as two-thirds of the teachers in a building agree to adopt this process (15 schools have done so). Teachers have traditionally been assigned to schools in a centralized process that is based on teacher seniority.
• an aggressive recruitment campaign.
These are important steps, but the growing dependence on emergency-certified teachers and a decline in applications during the
2000-2001 school year show that the problem is intensifying, even in the more advantaged Philadelphia schools.
At a time when enrollments are growing in other districts and a wave of retirements looms, Philadelphia has great difficulty competing successfully for qualified new teachers and retaining experienced teachers.