Growing our Irreplaceables Pt. 4: Recruit Only the Best

The Green Bay Packers are my football team.  There are many things to love them as both a team and a franchise.  One of my favorites is that 50 of their current 53 players have played only for the Packers.  This is because of the Packer’s GM, Ted Thompson.  he commits to building the team by drafting talented young players right out of college and developing them into high quality starters.  Not everyone stays.  But the fact that 50 players have chosen to stay with the team in a league where talent is at a premium speaks volumes to the way in which the Packers have been able select and develop young talent from the get go.  And it’s paid off as their record has shown in recent years.

Just like a football team is only sustainable if it can recruit and keep top quality talent, a city’s education system is only as its ability to recruit keep top quality educators.  Memphis is no exception.  As such, it’s absolutely vital to develop the educators we already have.  But its vital that we also start recruiting the best and brightest educators to come and start their careers here in Memphis and Shelby County.

The best argument for focusing on recruitment is human nature. Our default is to stick with the status quo.  If we can establish Memphis as a high quality status quo, our best and brightest are more likely to stay once they start their careers here.  But the first step is to get them here as early as possible.  For that, it’s vital that we as a city focus on recruiting from institutions that consistently produce high quality educators.

However, all education training programs are not created equal.  Fortunately, Tennessee is at the forefront of evaluating the effectiveness of teacher training programs thanks to the TVAAS system.  While it is not perfect, it does help us detect differences in which programs are most successful in impacting core subject academic outcomes.

Shelby County should make every effort to target programs that have a track record of producing successful educators with our recruitment efforts.  A quick look at this table, taken from the Tennessee Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs from 2013, allows us to see which programs are and are not producing effective educators (the whole report can be accessed here):

This report makes it clear that we know which programs are effective and which are not at recruiting effective teachers from the use of data.  And it’s a reasonable assumption that programs that produce effective teachers are more likely than others to recruit those teachers classified as irreplaceable.  Therefore we would be remiss if we did not use this report to target these programs for recruitment efforts.

As we stated at the beginning of this series, these policies all work together to retain and attract top talent.  Therefore, this policy rests heavily on improving school culture and leadership in high needs schools.  If we don’t fix that area, all the recruitment in the world won’t matter if we continue to drop high quality educators into extremely challenging environments.  But when coupled with the right policies such as improved leadership and bonuses for teaching in high-need schools have the potential to make a noticeable impact on the number of irreplaceables we can attract to our highest need schools.

By Jon Alfuth

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