INTRO TEXT

Cathie Clement is trained as a lawyer, and she’s worked in industry, state government, and private practice. But the hardest job she’s ever done is the one she’s doing now: teaching math in middle school.

“The only people who understand how stressful teaching is are my trial lawyer friends,” says Clement. “You’re always on, you’re always preparing. You go home each day exhausted. And the next day you have to return and do it again.”

FRANK CURRAN

Cathie Clement: trained as a
lawyer, tested as a teacher.

So Clement feels she’s earned her bonus for entering the classroom in 2000 as part of a state program, launched the year before, that has given $20,000 each to more than 300 people who changed jobs to become teachers. Clement says she would have become a teacher anyway, and she’s still on the job not because of the money but because of her mentors, including the one who advised her not to decide whether she liked teaching until her second year. She started out in a Framingham school and is now getting on-the-job training in Southborough.

Melissa Morgenlander collected the first $8,000 installment of her bonus, but the money still to come–$4,000 for each of three years on the job–wasn’t enough to keep her in the classroom. The former educational television producer was five years out of college when she took a job teaching fifth grade in a Chelsea school. It was a rude awakening.

“I have never worked so hard in my life, and I am used to hard work,” says Morgenlander. “I got very little support. About a month into teaching, I begged the principal to evaluate me. No one was coming to see how I was doing.” Morgenlander is proud to have lasted one year. Many of the other new teachers in the building did not.

Clement and Morgenlander were among the first recruits to the new teacher corps that was supposed to inject new energy into Massachusetts schools. The two entered the state’s intensive summer training course, called the Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers (MINT), which allowed them to avoid the traditional two-year programs offered at education schools and to receive bonuses when they began their teaching careers.

Clarke Fowler, a professor of education at Salem State College, says these teachers are quitting the classroom faster than others around the country. Based on state Department of Education data, Fowler calculates that 46 percent of the first bonus-teacher class had left teaching after three years, 28 percent of the second class quit within two years, and 17 percent of the third group gave up after just one year. These compare to national attrition rates of 20 percent for third-year teachers and 9 percent for first-year teachers, he says. In all, according to Fowler, the state spent more than $900,000 in bonuses and training for 74 recipients in 1999 and 2000 who are no longer teaching.

“It would be difficult to justify this kind of expense in flush times,” Fowler says. “But in tight economic times, it’s inexcusable.”

Commissioner of Education David Driscoll questions Fowler’s figures, claiming that MINT graduates–a larger group that includes bonus teachers as a subset–have an attrition rate of just 10 percent over three years. Still, Driscoll admits that the loss of novice teachers undercuts efforts to fill the classrooms.

“Attrition is a problem across the board, across the country,” he says. A study by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, released in January, claims that nearly half of new teachers have quit the profession after five years.

In response, the state Department of Education has further refined its teacher-training efforts. Last year, the department separated the bonus program from MINT and encouraged education colleges to develop one-year programs to pair with the signing payments. “We learned [that] this is a better way,” explains Driscoll.

The department is also trying to bolster the placement of state-trained teachers in schools that need them, which was always a goal of the teacher-incentive program but was never mandatory. The Center for Education Policy at the University of Massachusetts­Amherst, which analyzed program data for the department, reported in January that few MINT participants have ended up in urban school districts. While the center found that more than 50 percent of graduates were hired into “hard-to-fill” positions (those that have few applicants, such as science, math, special education, and foreign languages), “only one-third of MINT teachers as a whole, and of Bonus recipients as a subset, are teaching in high-need schools”–that is, high-poverty urban districts with shortages of certified educators.

As of this year, applicants to the MINT program will be required to get a job offer from an urban district designated by the Department of Education before they begin their training and to teach in these districts for a minimum of three years afterward. Currently, the state-approved districts are Brockton, Chelsea, Chicopee, Lawrence, and Worcester, named in part because the districts agreed to sign preliminary contracts with MINT candidates before the start of training. (Many other urban schools are constrained by union contracts from making such advance commitments, according to Meg Mayo Brown, who oversees the MINT and bonus programs for the department.)

Though MINT is now supported by federal funds, the bonuses still cost the state about $800,000 per year. Since the bonuses are paid out of an endowment set up by the Legislature, with declining interest proceeds shrinking but not eliminating the money available for payments, the entire program has until now been immune from budget politics. And despite mixed results–and much DOE rejiggering–the Commonwealth’s original teacher-training conception continues to attract attention. Indeed, the new federal “No Child Left Behind” law encourages states to adopt the model of fast-track training and bonuses Massachusetts has moved away from. Fowler calls that a mistake.

“Massachusetts tried the methods the federal government endorses,” says Fowler. “The alternative certification route they recommend probably won’t work in other states if it didn’t work here.”

Driscoll won’t go that far. But he does think other states could learn something from the updated Massachusetts approach. “The model is, if you set very high standards, make the idealism of teaching the goal, they will come,” says Driscoll. “We have waiting lists.”

Andreae Downs is a freelance writer in Newton.