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For years, the number of new teachers entering the city’s job market by way of alternative certification programs has been in the thousands. But this year the flood has slowed to a trickle.

When Chancellor Joel Klein announced a teacher hiring freeze last year, organizations that recruit and train new teachers, such as Teach for America and New York City’s Teaching Fellows, began planning to admit fewer teacher-hopefuls. Together, those two programs are planning to take fewer than 700 applicants this year, down from over 2,000 two years ago.

“We anticipate at this point that our needs will be more limited than they have been in past years, except for perhaps this year,” the Department of Education’s Executive Director of Recruitment and Teacher quality, Vicki Bernstein, told me in October. At the time, Bernstein, who oversees recruitment for the Teaching Fellows program, guessed that about 700 fellows would be admitted.

The real number of Teaching Fellows will be closer to 450, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Ann Forte. In 2009, the Teaching Fellows’ cohort numbered 700, which was already a significant drop from previous years when nearly 2,000 fellows entered the city’s schools annually. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein threw out a surprise at today’s City Council hearing on next year’s education budget — that the number of teachers currently in the Absent Teacher Reserve pool has now dipped to 1,092 teachers, down about 600 people since the fall.

In its teachers contract demands this year, the city has asked for the power to fire teachers who remain in the excess pool for more than four months. Assuming the teachers currently in the pool have been there since the fall, if not longer, they would lose their jobs under the city’s proposal. (more…)

Slightly more than a dozen schools saw their budgets take a hit as a result of Chancellor Joel Klein’s hiring ultimatum.

In early September, Klein sent an email to principals warning that if they didn’t fill their vacancies by October 30, the money would be taken out of their budgets and returned to Department of Education coffers.

The threat was meant to pressure principals to hire teachers who are still paid by the city but have lost their permanent jobs because of school closings or budget cuts. Some principals had expressed reluctance to hire these teachers and were hoping to wait out the city’s hiring freeze.

In all, only 14 schools had to return the hiring funds to the DOE, said a spokeswoman for the department, Ann Forte. (more…)

Principals union president Ernest Logan is raising questions about Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s threat to take money away from principals who don’t fill their vacancies by Oct. 30.

The point of Klein’s threat, made in an e-mail to principals yesterday and first reported by the Web site Insideschools, is to get principals who might be trying to outlast the hiring freeze to pick up “excessed” teachers from the ATR pool. Those teachers, who currently number more than 1,500, are drawing full salaries even though they don’t have permanent positions in schools. Their salaries are “a fiscal liability we cannot sustain in this budget climate,” Klein said in his letter.

But principals can’t hire teachers who aren’t eligible for their vacancies or who don’t apply for jobs, Logan emphasized in a response today to Klein’s hiring deadline. “We would like to know more about what the DoE will do if appropriate licensing matches are not made or if excessed teachers fail to show up at the recruitment fairs,” he said.

The Department of Education is requiring teachers in the ATR pool to attend borough-based hiring fairs next week, according to an e-mail obtained by union activist Norm Scott. Ann Forte, a DOE spokeswoman, confirmed that the fairs are compulsory for ATRs. (more…)

The latest ATR numbers are out, and they suggest a mass exodus has occurred in the last few days.

In the last two weeks, the so-called Absent Teacher Reserve pool has declined by about 300 teachers, a third of whom found work in the last two days. Earlier this summer, the Department of Education estimated that roughly 3,000 former teachers who had lost their jobs because of declining student populations or because the school was shuttered due to poor performance remained in the pool and on the city’s payroll. As of Tuesday, that number is down to 1,695.

The sudden increase in hiring could be attributed to principals who were holding out hope that the DOE would lift the hiring freeze, allowing them to fill empty slots from a wider selection of teachers. As the summer has worn on, the DOE did relax the freeze to allow principals more flexibility in hiring special education and science teachers, as well as teachers for gifted programs.

A spokeswoman for the DOE, Ann Forte, said that currently, there are 1,375 vacancies in the city’s schools, which is about the same number there were last September.

Though the reserve pool is, by definition, a place for teachers who once taught in the city’s public schools, this year the DOE made an exception and added 15 Math for America recruits. Forte said the recruits were given special dispensation because of their “highly specialized training.” Fellows in the program have to make a five-year commitment to teaching in public schools, in exchange for close mentoring and support from master teachers in the program. In May, the father of a Math for America fellow wrote to GothamSchools to criticize Joel Klein for instituting the hiring freeze so late in the year.

Teach for America isn’t alone in planning to keep its new members busy even if they don’t land positions before the start of school. The city’s Teaching Fellows program is also offering short-term activities for new teachers shut out by the hiring freeze.

Teaching Fellows who haven’t been hired by a school by Sept. 18 can sign on for six more weeks of “extended pre-service training,” paid for by the city, as part of an arrangement developed even before the hiring freeze was announced in May. Accepted Fellows learned about the extension option this spring, before they agreed to join the program.

Fellows who participate will earn $250 a week in exchange for four days of practice teaching. They’ll also get to attend the program’s required graduate program for free during that time. But they won’t be offered health insurance or other benefits, according to Ann Forte, a Department of Education spokeswoman. Unlike TFA, the Teaching Fellows program won’t involve home-cooked meals, Forte said.

The short-term, low-pay program for unplaced Fellows follows a fight last year over how long Fellows without jobs should be entitled to a salary. (more…)

Teach for America is calling on its sizable alumni base to help entertain new teachers while they wait for the hiring freeze to be lifted.

Despite halving the size of this year’s cohort and directing many teachers to charter schools, TFA still hasn’t found jobs for 118 of its 300-odd new teachers, according to an e-mail sent to graduates of the program yesterday. While TFA officials “continue to be optimistic” that the Department of Education’s freeze on outside hires will be lifted, they anticipate that “a substantial number” of new corps members will remain jobless when the school year begins, the e-mail said.

The organization is putting together additional training for the unplaced teachers, according to the e-mail from Jemina Bernard, director of the program’s New York region. It is also asking the more than 2,000 graduates of the program who live in the city to provide “social and cultural opportunities,” such as home-cooked meals and walking tours, between now and the end of October for the new teachers. ”I want to be very clear how critical this period of time is for our 2009 corps and how extremely important it is that we come together as a family to fully support them,” Bernard wrote.

Teach for America told its new members this spring that they would be guaranteed a salary for 40 business days after the start of classes, even if they hadn’t found a position. (more…)

The outlook for city teachers without positions hasn’t brightened much in the last month, even with the external hiring freeze meant to help them land jobs.

Just about 300 of the teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve found new jobs in the last month. That leaves about 2,000 ATRs on the Department of Education’s payroll with just weeks before school starts. And their chances of finding a spot might be tough: Though the system has 1,800 openings, some principals are signaling they are hoping to fill their spots with outside teachers, rather than hire jobless teachers from within the department.

At a hiring fair in Queens on Tuesday night, principals snapped up eligible teachers in minutes, reported a teacher named Jenn in a comment at GothamSchools.

But other principals appear to be hanging onto the hope that they’ll soon be able to have their pick of aspiring teachers, despite Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s warning that the freeze would not be lifted soon. (more…)