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Across the city yesterday, high school teachers hunkered down for a day of extra training. Some sat in on sessions at their schools, while others scattered across the city for sessions held in the offices of educational consultants.

I stopped by the Midtown offices of Math for America, a fellowship program for math and science teachers, and saw teachers working on student work to better understand why they thought the way they did. Here’s what some said about some of the topics dominating the policy agenda these days (interviews edited for clarity and brevity):

Bill Lamonte, Millennium High School
Subject: Science
Years: 10 (eight in New York City)

How long will you be a teacher for?

I may be a different case because I know I’ll be teaching until I die. But it is hard to see colleagues that start out putting in that time and then get frustrated and end up leaving.

I am challenged professionally, but some people don’t want to deal with the bureaucracy of the system. The DOE is a tough place. It’s very top-down. It’s hard. But if you have a supportive administration and you’re in a school that has ideals that you believe in, it’s easier to stay because you feel you can work with people and that you can actually make a difference.

Would you ever consider a school leadership position?

I know I’ll be teaching, but I steer clear of the administration path just because I see what happens to teachers when they become administrators. They take on another personality, in a way. Again, it’s very top-down, so they have to meet certain requirements themselves. In order to do that you have to put a lot of pressure on your teachers. When you have to have a checklist – are they doing this, this, and this? – I can see how it can become a struggle to balance.

Although I do find that a lot of schools struggle with having good administrators. There are a lot of weak principals out there. I’ve seen it first hand, especially at my old school in the Bronx. Luckily now I do feel that the administration is batter and that does make a huge difference. To feel supported in a school is really what’s going to keep a teacher there. (more…)

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…)

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.

A father of one of the frozen-out teachers-to-be who works in higher education sent us a letter today that he requested we forward to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The letter chastises Klein for essentially revoking hiring decisions so late in the school year, long after many teachers-to-be have already found apartments and stopped looking for other jobs.

The father writes that in higher education, “we take care not to waver from the commitments that we have made to our people and new hires,” despite serious budget pressures. He asks why the New York City public schools would not do the same.

The father gave me permission to publish the letter in partially edited form to keep his and his child’s identity anonymous.

UPDATE: Klein just wrote to me in an e-mail that he hopes to find fall jobs for teachers in the program this man’s child is in, Math For America. “We will work with them to find them jobs,” Klein wrote. “We said at the outset there would be exceptions — e.g. new schools — and this is a group that we want to place given their training and support and our challenges in finding math teachers.”

Math For America places recent college graduates and career-changers who are talented at math in inner-city schools. 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.

Here’s the father’s letter to Klein: (more…)