PINE BLUFF — Mary Quinn broke out of a serious expression to throw her voice into falsetto tones, eliciting laughter from her classroom of sophomore English students at Pine Bluff High School.
“Ah-woo-buss,” she chanted Thursday, teaching her students a mnemonic device she uses to remember words used in adverb clauses.
The word is a way of pronouncing the first letters of after, although, as, when, while, until, because, before, if, since and so, Quinn explained, sliding a pen across a poster as she readit aloud.
“Ah-woo-buss,” the students repeated, mimicking the sweeping pitch of her voice.
“Whether they admit it or not, they get a kick out of it,” Quinn said later, explaining how her expressions help her students master concepts.
Pine Bluff High School Principal Kelvin Gragg identified Quinn as an unusually strong first-year teacher, although her degree is in public relations, not education.
But he wasn’t always so confident.
In August, Gragg and Superintendent Frank Anthony were in a panic.
With less than a month until the start of 2010-11 classes, the superintendent had six teacher openings in the 4,740-student Pine Bluff School District, including Quinn’s position.
Calls to the leaders of education programs at every university in Arkansas and several surrounding states yielded no candidates.
“I always say Pine Bluff is the mouth of the Delta,” Anthony said. “And, in the Delta, the demand for qualified, certified educators in most content areas is exceeding the supply.”
At the recommendation of colleagues in other Delta school districts, Anthony called Teach for America.
The highly selective nationwide nonprofit organization recruits and trains college students without education degrees to fill classrooms in urban and rural districts that typically struggle to find qualified personnel.
Ron Nurnberg, director of the program’s Delta division, which includes Mississippi and Arkansas, arranged a day of interviews with recent graduates of colleges across the country.
By mid-August, the organization helped the superintendent fill all the vacancies in that one interview session.
Students from large cities like Chicago - trained in fields such as media, medicine and finance - seemed eager to make a home in Pine Bluff, population 50,000 - for a few years, at least.
Gragg and Anthony were initially somewhat unsettled to see that would-be math teachers had degrees in social studies, for example. But those fears eased as they saw their scores on subject-specific tests required by the Arkansas Department of Education and as they warmed to their engaging personalities.
Arkansas districts hired 169 Teach for America teachers in the 2010-11 school year - more than ever before, Nurnberg said.
But that number is in danger of dropping in future years as other states contribute far more to the program’s teacher training and recruitment than Arkansas, Nurnberg said.
Teach for America development staff make up the difference by seeking private donations.
“From a public funding source, Arkansas has lagged behind,” Nurnberg said. “Obviously, if the [private] funding doesn’t increase and it seems like the public side is low, we would potentially have to scale back.”
TRAINING AND RECRUITING
For Anthony and Gragg, filling open positions through Teach for America meant stepping outside the comfortable norm of a traditionally trained teacher.
It meant trusting that a teacher with a degree in neither math nor education could teach a roomful of rowdy teenagers the information necessary to pass the state’s high stakes standardized tests.
It also meant believing that idealistic recent graduates with no classroom training could manage the arguments, note passing and constant requests for bathroom breaks that come with running a classroom.
Fears turned to hope for Gragg as enthusiastic recruits quickly fit right in with experienced veterans.
“I want to get more next year,” he said.
Teach for America teachers pass tests in their content areas and complete a summer training program before they enter classrooms in the fall.
They work under a provisional teaching license, which can later be converted to a permanent license with additional testing and training, and they earn a beginning teacher’s salary.
The program claims impressive gains in academic achievement result from its extremely selective recruitment process.
Last year, Teach for America recruited from the largest pool of applicants in its 20-year history, selecting only 4,500 of the 46,000 people who applied.
It costs $21,000 each year to recruit and train a corps member, Nurnberg said.
The Arkansas Department of Education contributes $3,000 each for up to 100 Teach for America members annually, but the program typically staffs more than that, underwriting the rest through private contributions.
By contrast, Mississippi - the other member of the organization’s Delta program - contributes $13,000 per teacher annually.
Mississippi has more than twice as many Teach for America members as Arkansas for the current school year, 354 compared with 169.
It’s likely that Teach for America would reduce its presence in Arkansas if it can’t find the private funds to pay for its programming, Nurnberg said.
In Mississippi, “there’s a whole lot less money to have to be made up,” he said.
STATE CONTRIBUTIONS
Recently, other states have questioned public support for the nonprofit organization as dwindling public revenue leads to tighter budgets.
In December, Texas lawmakers ordered an analysis of Teach for America’s impact in the state, the Houston Chronicle reported. They plan to determine whether to continue the state’s $8 million annual expenditure on the program.
Only three states - Tennessee, North Carolina and Louisiana - have completed reviews of Teach for America teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom.
A 2009 study by Louisiana State University found Teach for America teachers outperformed their traditionally trained peers who were also new to the classroom and kept pace with experienced teachers in all core subjects.
Studies in Tennessee and North Carolina had similar results.
Internal research in Teach for America’s Delta region has shown that 68 percent of firstyear and 80 percent of second year Mississippi and Arkansas teachers in the 2009-10 school year achieved test-score gains demonstrating more than a year’s academic progress in one year, Nurnberg said.
Arkansas has not completed its own study of Teach for America’s effectiveness in the state, said Beverly Williams, assistant commissioner of the state Department of Education.
The state included plans to expand funding to 200 teachers in its application for Race to the Top, an education grant provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. But those plans were abandoned when Arkansas was twice passed over for the federal funds, Williams said.
Now there are no plans to expand funding to the program, she said.
“I don’t have that kind of budget just laying around,” Williams said. “With the budget so tight, we have to be frugal.”
‘SORTING PROBLEM’
Rural superintendents rely on nontraditional teacher-licensure programs, such as Teach for America and the state’s program, Teach Arkansas, to fill gaps in their staffs, they said.
“This year, we could not have started school without them,” Joyce Vaught, superintendent of the Lakeside School District in Chicot County, said of Teach for America teachers.
Twenty-two of the district’s teachers - or one of every five - are current or former Teach for America members, she said.
The recruits exposed Vaught’s rural-raised students to things they may have never seen before after raising money for class trips to Italy and New York, she said. And they put in extra hours, using their own money to buy students hamburgers at McDonald’s while tutoring them in the restaurant.
Vaught has been so impressed with the program that she created a “retention plan” that included finding large houses for members to split rent on and paying for school buses to take them on weekend trips to Little Rock and Memphis.
She’s even joked about finding the young teachers spouses so they’ll stick around.
Delta district leaders said it’s difficult to compete with higher-paying peers in Northwest and central Arkansas.
In Lakeside, starting teachers with no experience earn $31,000 a year. In Springdale, the same teachers could earn $43,220.
“The teachers that are here go where the better jobs are, and we can’t blame them for that,” Vaught said.
Williams said Arkansas doesn’t lack teachers. Rather the state has a “sorting problem,” which means that qualified teachers aren’t evenly distributed throughout the state, she said.
About 1,600 Arkansas teachers retire each year, she said. The state licenses about 2,400 new teachers each year, with about 1,200 of those graduating from Arkansas universities.
The other portion of new teachers comes equally from nontraditional programs, such as Teach for America, and through accepting teachers from other states, Williams said.
“All of these components are essential to properly equip our school districts,” Williams said.
Critics of Teach for America have argued that some participants seek the prestige of passing the rigorous application process with no intent to remain in the classroom.
Donna Morey, president of the Arkansas Education Association, said the state’s teachers’ union supports “multiple pathways to enter the teaching profession,” but it favors spending state funds on scholarships for Arkansas students who are more likely to remain in the state.
A 2008 study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that 43.6 percent of 2,029 corps members surveyed remained in their initial schools for at least a year beyond their two-year placements. Some stayed more than four years - about 14.8 percent.
Williams said fewer than a dozen corps members each year obtain traditional certification in Arkansas after their two-year placement, a process that requires completion of a Praxis III teaching test and some additional training.
The Arkansas Board of Education on Dec. 13 approved a modification to its nontraditional-licensure standards that loosened requirements forTeach for America participants who wish to obtain traditional licenses.
Corps members previously had to complete two mentoring programs - one state-run and the other organized by Teach for America. The state board determined the Teach for America program was rigorous enough to fill both requirements.
‘WAH BAM !’
Gragg, the Pine Bluff principal, has already requested more Teach for America recruits next year.
“These teachers have changed us with new and innovative ideas coming from outside of the world of education,” he said.
One Teach for America geometry teacher who was trained as a financial analyst developed a system to track student understanding of state-developed learning expectations.
Quinn, the Pine Bluff High School English teacher, uses the system while tracking her students’ daily quiz scores and reteaching lessons up to three times until each pupil gets at least 80 percent of the questions correct.
At the end of class Thursday, Quinn handed her students “exit tickets,” a euphemism for end-of-class quizzes. Displaying sentences on the screen in the front of the classroom, she asked her students to identify adverb clauses on the small pink slips of paper.
“Use ‘ah-woo-buss,’” she said, her students giggling as they repeated after her.
Quinn, a petite graduate of Ohio University, paces quickly through her classroom while she teaches, leaning over desks to ensure students are taking notes. She drops to eye level to answer every question.
Her classroom walls are plastered with vocabulary words and calls for students to learn to express themselves.
“You are responsible for writing your own life story,” a poster reads.
During her sophomore English class, nearly every hand raised as Quinn asked her students about noun clauses, and students yelled “wah bam!” when one of their peers answered correctly.
“I said it once, and it caught on,” Quinn said, of the exclamation, now written on a poster hanging above a bulletin board of successful quizzes.
To teach a vocabulary lesson on the word “hiatus,” she had her class read the word in context in a paragraph about pop singer Beyonce Knowles’ solo career during a hiatus from her group, Destiny’s Child.
While students struggled to pronounce “hiatus,” “Beyonce” flew flawlessly from their lips.
The 22-year-old Quinn interviewed with several public relations firms before deciding to forgo her plans in favor of teaching.
“It just seemed more meaningful to me,” Quinn said. “One of the challenges is just overcoming the reputation these students have. They have great potential, and they need to realize that.”
Her parents, a doctor and a nurse in Columbus, Ohio, were a little hesitant about sending their youngest child to a far-off state to work with people she’d never met in a field she’d never studied.
“They kept telling me I didn’t know what I was getting myself into,” Quinn said.
Now they send her books to fill shelves at the back of her classroom, where the Harry Potter series sits next to guides to entering college and obtaining financial aid.
The students have taught Quinn a thing or two, as well. She was quickly introduced to her new environment in the fall, when a student invited her to an event where she was working.
“It was a fishing derby,” she said. “That was something I didn’t even know existed before.”
Quinn hasn’t decided whether she’ll continue in teaching beyond her two-year experience, but Gragg hopes she will, calling her skills “administrative quality.”
“That does not look like the classroom of a first-year teacher,” he said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/23/2011