The Back Office

A Neglected Side of Teacher Quality

By Michael DeArmond & Dan Goldhaber

In the summer of 2001, the staff of the Houston Independent School District’s human-resources department was scrambling to hire teachers. At the time, anxiety about a pending national teacher shortage was still relatively high, and the district’s human-resources director, like her counterparts elsewhere, approached the hiring season with a sense of urgency. She told her staff, “If a teacher walks through our door, she can’t leave without talking to someone who can answer her questions.”

To see if her message got through, the director used an old retailers’ trick: She sent in a secret shopper. “We had someone come in who was a certified special education teacher, but was not teaching; he was in the city visiting a friend,” she explained, “and we arranged for him to ‘come to the front door’ and go through the process.” The secret shopper’s report was discouraging. Despite being certified in a hard-to-staff subject, he was lost in the bureaucratic shuffle and left the office as he came, unnoticed.

As Houston’s secret-shopper experience suggests, questions of teacher quality as well as quantity are very much contingent on the behind-the-scenes work of school district human-resources offices. District HR departments play an important role in recruiting teachers, whether at job fairs, through advertising, or by shepherding unsolicited applicants who walk through their doors. They have a hand in selecting and hiring teachers, managing both the logistics and (often) the substance of candidate screening and interviewing. Employee evaluations, development opportunities, and benefit packages also fall under HR’s purview. For better or worse, a district’s efforts to identify, attract, and retain applicants who will make good teachers are fundamentally tied up with the work...