Hiring Teachers for Advanced Classes

What should be the main criteria in hiring the best teacher for an advanced class?

School districts all across Virginia are faced with increasingly harder teacher recruitment. The low professional salary of pubic education is the main cause of this situation. However, there are still many good teachers out there who would love to come into a school system and teach the best and brightest the school has to offer. How do you select these teachers? Many school districts will chose the teacher with the most seniority, and this keeps the school administration out of hot water with the other teachers. Some schools will choose the teacher with the best credentials. This may be a fair way to access who gets to teach what level of class and, this too, may keep administration from teacher rampage. But has any school district ever considered the teacher that covers the material in the most depth; the teacher that comes in early or stays late to help students; the teacher who gets the best response from lectures and best scores on standardized tests; or the teacher who the students respond to the best.

I ask these questions for several reasons. First of all, as I remember the teachers I had in elementary school all the way to now as I work on my doctorate, the ones that I remember the most are the ones I learned the most from. They may not have been my favorites at the time because they were harder and required more work that others, but they are the ones I remember. Secondly, as the public school district in which I work recruits teachers to teach dual enrolled classes, I wonder what the criteria is. To teach dual enrolled classes, the teacher must be certified in Virginia, endorsed in the area in which he is teaching, and have a master’s degree in the area in which he is teaching. Now, recruiting any teacher is hard based on today’s salary but to find a teacher with a master’s degree is even harder. These people are usually teaching for colleges or universities and making much more money than public education can afford. So, we are faced with a dilemma. Over the past few years, we have lost several teachers to the community college system for this reason. We have also lost an excellent teacher; one like was described above because he didn’t have a master’s degree and in order to teach the classes he had been teaching for years he would have to go back to school and get that degree. This teacher taught physics and chemistry and was also, according to the students, the best calculus teacher to be found. He left to return to college to get the degree but was then headed to the university level where he could make more money.

Dual enrollment has caused this problem. Dual enrollment requires teachers to have master’s degrees, the AP classes we were teaching did not require a master’s degree but only those who wanted to teach high school and had enough interest to volunteer for extra AP training. Did we hurt our students by taking away the best teachers?