The Chicago public school district is reporting gains in teacher hiring following significant changes in its recruitment system.
In a release issued earlier this month, the district announced that it opened schools this year with a record low teacher-vacancy rate. As of Oct. 4, there were 1,204 vacancies in the city’s schools, compared to 1,468 and 1,604 in the previous two years, the district said. In all, the district employs some 27,000 teachers.
The district also announced that it received more than 15,000 applications for teaching positions, another recent record. The number of applications was up from 12,500 last year and 9,000 the year before, according to data cited by the Chicago Sun Times.
In addition, Chicago released numbers showing that more than 1,000 of its new teacher hires in the past two years came from “top tier” colleges, as defined by the rankings in “U.S. News & World Report.”
In its release, the district said its improvement in filling teacher spots was partly the result of taking steps to avoid late hiring. Specifically, it said it eliminated a budgetary rule “under which principals were not given final staffing numbers until the end of September.” With earlier projections, principals had a stronger sense of their staffing needs and were able to recruit more aggressively from a better pool of candidates, the district said.
The reported gains in the quantity and quality of candidates, meanwhile, were largely the result of a more “concerted focus” on recruitment, Nancy Slavin, manager of teacher recruitment for the district, said in an interview with edweek.org. In particular, Ms. Slavin cited the district’s Human Capital Initiative, a high-level task force created in 2001 to reevaluate the school system’s recruitment processes.
Among other things, the tasks force’s work produced detailed data showing where Chicago’s teaching recruits were coming from (and where not), enabling the district to better target resources and forge closer relationships with universities, Ms. Slavin said.
The district’s recruiting efforts have also benefited recently from good public relations, Ms. Slavin said, citing positive reports in the press about the schools’ leadership and test scores.
While the district’s recruitment numbers are up, it acknowledged it still has work to do on retaining teachers: Currently, only 60 percent of teachers in the district stay longer than five years, the district’s release said.
In one effort to improve that rate, the district has begun hiring retired teachers to mentor and support new teachers. Since they are not tied to classrooms of their own, Ms. Slavin said, retired teachers often have more freedom and energy to work with younger teachers and listen to their problems than do traditional teacher-mentors. They can act as “a confidante, or even a mom or grandmother,” she said. “We’ve found that helps a lot.”
