Thursday, September 02, 1999
Teacher union wants to recruit for CPS
Diverse, qualified candidates sought
BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Cincinnati Federation of Teachers has offered to take over teacher recruiting — for a fee — to draw highly qualified and more diverse applicants to Cincinnati Public Schools.
Union President Tom Mooney submitted a proposal Wednesday to Superintendent Steven Adamowski and the school board. He'll announce the proposal at a news conference this morning.
Under the proposal, the district would hire the union — in a contract subject to renewal annually — to recruit more job candidates. Hiring decisions are made by school leaders, so the union would expand the pool of qualified candidates, not hire new teachers.
Mr. Mooney said he hasn't finished budget estimates but expects the union would need about $100,000.
Superintendent Steven Adamowski declined to comment, saying he hasn't seen the proposal.
The district, which hasn't had a permanent personnel director for about a year, tried to improve its candidate pool this year by changing its hiring timetable. Administrators used to wait until August but found many candidates had already landed jobs elsewhere. This year, they started hiring in the spring.
The district also launched a partnership with the Universi ty of Cincinnati and CFT several years ago to create a more rigorous teacher preparation program at UC that requires a year-long professional internship in a CPS school. The program, which attracts a lot of local students, helps the district “grow its own” teachers and boost diversity.
While such efforts are laudable, the district has insufficient standards to ensure quality candidates are hired, Mr. Mooney said.
“Right now we have no clear-cut, defined hiring standard,” Mr. Mooney said. “When you don't have a clear standard, it's a lot easier to compromise and settle for what you can get rather than what you should get.”
The proposal recommends that CPS:
• Hire teachers who graduated from accredited teacher preparation programs, have a cumulative grade point average of at least 3.0 and are licensed to teach in Ohio. Teachers should be hired to teach subjects in which they majored or minored in college.
• Give preference to graduates of teacher preparation programs that include an extensive clinical internship, such as the University of Cincinnati's College of Education.
• Seek out applicants with advanced degrees in the subject area they plan to teach.
• Require applicants to submit portfolios outlining their preparation and experience, including research papers or lesson plans they wrote.
• Raise minimum scores on the Praxis II exam, which tests candidates' knowledge of specific subjects and general knowledge about teaching.
School board member Lynn Marmer said she looks forward to studying the proposal.
“Any ideas the union has on how to improve the quality of teachers we recruit is very exciting,” Ms. Marmer said. “Recruiting good teachers goes to the heart of improving student achievement.”
To find better candidates, the union would advertise in nationally circulated publications and on the Internet, visit colleges (especially those with solid academic records and many minority graduates) and recruit talented teachers from other districts. It also would tap into businesses and the community to recruit nontraditional candidates.
About 25 percent of the district's 3,400 teachers are minorities, down from a peak of about 30 percent in the 1980s, Mr. Mooney said. The district typically hires more than 300 new teachers a year. This year, it hired fewer than 150 due to budget cuts.
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