Rookie Teachers will Bump some CMS Veterans
By Ann Doss Helms

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will bring in 100 new Teach For America cadets, who lack teaching experience and credentials, as the district lays off experienced teachers next school year. Superintendent Peter Gorman said today he believes it's the best move for kids: “They would be bumping a teacher who's below standard.”

But the decision seems bound to raise hackles among the district's 9,000-plus teachers. “I think it is a slap in the faces of the ones who are going to be losing their jobs. It's more or less telling them, ‘We don't give a flip about you,'” said Mary McCray, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators. Some teachers, she said, are losing jobs because their function has been cut, not because they're poor performers.

More than 400 classroom teachers will get layoff notices the week of May 25, Gorman said. Teachers and other employees will be called back if the state, federal or county budget picture for 2009-10 improves.

Job performance will be the biggest factor in deciding which teachers will be cut, Gorman has said, although experience and what they teach can also play a role. Teachers already placed through Teach For America will not be exempt from layoffs if their performance has been substandard, he said.

Teach For America, a national nonprofit, was created in 1990 to recruit top college graduates for two-year stints in schools that desperately needed good teachers. It now places teachers in 29 regions, including high-poverty Charlotte schools and impoverished rural schools in eastern North Carolina.

The group recruits graduates who didn't major in education, gives them a five-week “boot camp” on teaching children of poverty, and provides support once they're hired. Districts pay the recruits the same as other starting teachers; in CMS that's $34,385 a year.

The first batch of Charlotte recruits arrived in 2004; this year CMS has more than 200. The C.D. Spangler Foundation donated $4 million to expand the Charlotte program this school year and next.

Gorman said that donation doesn't oblige him to bring in new recruits, but he believes it's a smart move in the long run. When the economy turns around, CMS will need the group's help to keep channeling good teachers into the neediest schools, he said.

But McCray says he's driving off teachers who weren't planning to move on after two years. “We're going to need these people one day soon, and they may not want to come back to Charlotte.”

Gorman frequently notes that principals praise the energy and creativity of Teach For America cadets. The district is working on an evaluation of their effectiveness that it expects to release in the fall, after 2009 test scores are in.

The tension emerging in Charlotte is playing out across the country. Applications to Teach For America surged this year, with jobs getting scarce in other fields. Meanwhile, districts that had struggled with teacher shortages have found themselves shedding teachers and even closing schools.

A Detroit teachers' union official was quoted widely as calling Teach for America recruits “educational mercenaries” who are using public schools “as a pit stop on their way to becoming corporate executives.”

But the national corps is growing, with five to six new regions signing on for 2009-10, said regional communication director Emily DelPino. It's not clear yet whether any districts that have been working with the group will decline new recruits next year, she said; most districts are in the same budget limbo as CMS, waiting to see how bad things will be and how much federal stimulus money will help.