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In 2000 the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) misdiagnosed the city’s teacher retention problem as a teacher shortage problem. As a result they established an alternative route certification program for aspiring teachers in an attempt to remedy that misdiagnosis. In one way they spuriously seem to have succeeded. Presently, more than 6,000 Teaching Fellows staff some of the hardest-to-staff urban public schools in New York City. However, in their quest to staff schools quickly, the NYCTF forgot that they were supposed to staff schools with teachers.

In their literature the NYCTF states: “The NYC Teaching Fellows are people like you—accountants, nurses, recent graduates, chief executives, police officers, secretaries, artists, journalists, and retirees—who have decided to change their lives and teach in the schools that need teachers most. Almost none of them had teaching experience before joining the Fellowship.”

In other words, the NYCTF mission is to recruit applicants with no requisite training in education whatsoever and then to call them professional educators. Their success in achieving the objectives to this mission has engendered a number of new problems that rival the perceived teacher shortage problem in both significance and gravity.

I have an idea. While we’re at it, let’s recruit professionals from fields other than medicine and allow them to staff hard-to-staff urban hospitals.

The consequences, of course, would be dire. There is a reason surgeons-in-training spend semesters practicing on cadavers before they are allowed to perform their craft on living patients. The analogy is not over-extended. Allowing untrained “teachers” (no matter how motivated, intelligent or well-intentioned) to educate without any formal preparation in education has put thousands of disadvantaged children in positions of further disadvantage.

As a New York City Teaching Fellow I have struggled for the past two years to provide my students with a quality education. I joined the program because I was confident that I could confront some of the social injustice that the children of New York City’s disadvantaged communities sometimes face when they attend under-resourced, under-staffed schools. Yet, no matter how successful I may have been, I cannot deny the fact that I have contributed to some social injustice by virtue of adopting the NYCTF’s pretense that I was a teacher when I first walked into my classroom. I was not. I was well-intentioned, I was optimistic, I was aware of my lack of preparation. But I was not a teacher. My students deserved more than good-intentions, they deserved a professional pedagogue seasoned with years of study and experience under their belt.

My experience was not unique. All Teaching Fellows learn their craft in their classrooms as they practice it. With the exception of a curt cameo as an assistant teacher in a New York City summer school classroom during the weeks prior to taking over their own class, Teaching Fellows are bereft of any comprehensive understanding of what to expect when they begin to “teach.” It’s understood that Teaching Fellows will make mistakes along the way to becoming an educator. What’s less understood is how injurious those mistakes can be to the students who have to sit through them.

Certainly mistakes are inevitable and there is a learning curve to any profession. But in a profession with the precious purpose of adequately preparing children to operate in a society that puts the well-educated in positions of social and economic advantage, limiting the intensity of that learning curve for practitioners is essential. The NYCTF program exacerbates the intensity of that learning curve with the unmerited consequence of doing New York City and its children the disservice of offering them a substandard education.

Two Writers.
One Topic.
You choose
who composed
the best piece.

Topic:
The NYC
Teaching Fellows

J. Kazmark

M. Ducoing

M. Ducoing 's Article

The NYC Public School system, for all intents and purposes, is a monolithic structure resembling a vast Antarctic iceberg. From a distance it appears massive but upon closer inspection, it is beyond comprehension. With over a million students, over a hundred thousand teachers and administrators, and countless problems, the NYC Public School system is indeed the monolith.

And with countless solutions to the yearly teacher turnover desperately and concurrently underway, it was recently proposed that NYC undergo a shift in recruitment. Borrowing from the national education service model first coined by Teach for America decades ago, the NYC Department of Education decided to create, as their deputy chancellor asserted, “its flagship education program.” This program was to be aptly named the NYC Teaching Fellows program. Began in the late 1990s and counting strong with currently its 8th cohort (matriculating member group), the NYC Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) were developed to address two perceived problems in the NYC Public School System: first, the massive yearly turnovers amounting to approximately 10% of the teaching staff; second, to address the assertion that NYC Public School Teachers were unqualified.

Immediately there were countless assaults on the program, all of varying degrees of validity. Charges were made of a lack of experience, the “slaughtering of the lambs” suggestion, and overall, a lacking of support. All of these contentions are quite valid in a sense. However, overall, I would argue that the programs themselves are beneficial not only for the reasons intended, but also for reasons that came afterwards, mostly unexpected. So first I would evaluate the arguments against such alternative teaching programs and then the benefits assumed and unexpected.

Of all the arguments made against the NYCTF, the most compelling might very well be the “slaughtering of the lambs” suggestion coupled by the assertion that NYCTFs lack preemptive experience for these situations. This assertion merely states a version of reality in the NYC Public School system: there are terribly under funded, understaffed, under enriched, and frankly dangerous school environments in our city and many inexperienced teachers are forced to teach there…NYCTFs are no exception. In fact, NYCTFs are generally required to teach in such environments as per the nature of their service. To many, this might seem cruel, like taking a lamb to slaughter, an environment only truly experienced veterans should dare enter.

However, there is nothing unclear about the service expectations of public schools. Many fellows come into the experience knowing full well what they are getting themselves into. Others, like me, estimate, and are somewhat close but still shocked by the general uselessness of even our most secret weapons. But for the most part, the real issue is not that inexperienced teachers are sent to these places, but that they exist at all. Since teaching, as I’ve learned, is a matter of experience, more so than even mental preparation, to be in difficult environments is a test of one’s own abilities? Someone has to teach in these environments, and the fact that new teachers I’ve seen who are not within the NYCTF experience as many headaches, heartaches, and shocking disappointments as any other new teacher, leads me to conclude that it is not the mental preparation of years of undergraduate education but the willingness, drive, and resourcefulness while confronted with the battlefield. In the end, the real question is not why new teachers are forced into these assignments or why experienced teachers flee, but why our schools are this dysfunctional to begin with? And this question is not answered by the NYCTF or by anyone but the Department of Education.

However, even with this criticism of the NYCTF and other such programs, there are still vast benefits of this program and others like it. First, for many fellows, a choice to teach is one made after one or more previous careers. In these cases, these teachers are experts in certain fields and can bring this area of expertise to their students.

Furthermore, these fellows also come from careers and organizations that offer them a different perspective with several key benefits. First, having come from other careers, they are transitional by nature and often are not tied to these positions as teachers who sought the career from inception. As a result, they are often less willing to put up with ineptitude or inefficiency and may leave or voice these concerns vociferously. Second, as a result of this new perspective, fellows have consistently worked to change the system which is failing to meet appropriate needs. The world often operates differently from the Martian fields of the NYC Public School System. Friends at Morgan Stanley or Citibank never complain that they are not given the supplies to do their jobs, that they have to pay for their own computers or other resources integral to their projects, or that they are not given the respect to accomplish these goals. It is often unheard of. And while there are clear issues in these other forms of employment, it is often shocking to new fellows, that there would be so many support issues before the job of teaching can even begin.

It is this different perspective that will ultimately change our system. Naturally, there are weak teachers in a system of over 100,000. But these teachers are far fewer than those that are strong, experienced, and life changers. Further, many of these poor teachers are disinterested after years of disillusionment with a system that is not working, not the other way around. The problem is not our teachers nor their dedication and competence. NYC has among the most difficult certification programs in the country, Masters Degree included.

Our problem is our bureaucracy and our administration. It is cumbersome, bureaucratic, and often inept. It has been my experience that many of the weaker teachers are moved into administration, in many cases because they focus on bottom lines rather than teaching children. Further, random walk throughs, vague evaluations, and obsessiveness over irrelevant details like bulletin board display or what color marker is used at certain times are often plagues of our system. Lack of support, overcrowding, resource failures as well all stem from this lack of administration. But the buck is passed to teachers.

These new fellows and the programs are among our last hopes to expose citizens who otherwise would be among the doubting public into the foray of agitated educators. It is our only hope to gain members who will serve to infuse other teachers with the unwillingness to sit down when standing for what we believe in is the only acceptable course of action. These new fellows can act to change the world by being the outsiders who chose to become insiders and make a difference. And maybe one day fellows and their counterparts really will. Perhaps one day they may move…they may finally turn the monolith around.