If you stop and think about it, Teach for America (TFA) and The New Teacher Project (TNTP) are well-functioning, non-profit, national human resource departments for schools. They recruit, screen, and hire candidates, all functions of a traditional HR department. TFA and TNTP do provide a lot more induction and support for their hires, but at the base level, their purpose is to find and recommend potential teachers. Of course, school districts have their own human resource departments as well, so it's worth asking why these programs were needed in the first place.
If you look at the data on the teacher hiring process (some of the best of which has been put together by TNTP itself), what you see is that districts just aren't very good at it. They're slow, which causes them to lose out on better candidates. They don't recruit all that well, which means they have fewer candidates to choose from. And they tend to privilege more experienced teachers throughout the process, which, fair or not, limits their ability to attract young and motivated applicants.
Read the whole article by Chad Aldeman
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