New-Career Teachers Join City Schools

By DANI MCCLAIN

Justin Ippoliti has a law degree and a date on Saturday to marry his longtime girlfriend.

But instead of closing a deal or writing a brief in the weeks before the wedding, the 26-year-old has been prepping for his first year as a special education teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools.

Choosing students over high-paying clients was a no-brainer.

"To be able to make a difference with kids who don’t always have the opportunities — that’s as rewarding as it gets," said Ippoliti, who graduated from Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, Va., last year.

The Kenosha County native is part of the first cohort of Milwaukee Teaching Fellows, a recent venture of the national New Teacher Project. The organization places recent college graduates and career changers into hard-to-staff schools. Like participants in the highly publicized Teach for America program, the fellows spend a summer cramming the basics of the profession, then fly solo in their own classrooms while working toward certification over two years.

In Milwaukee, just over half of the 40 fellows will teach special education at the elementary, middle and high school levels. The rest will work in elementary bilingual and high school math and science classrooms. As of Thursday, MPS had not informed fellows of their placements. But Sean Roberts, who manages the Milwaukee program, said he expects the Marshall, Northwest and Custer high school campuses to be on the receiving end when the academic year kicks off Sept. 2.

The fellows placed in special-education classrooms will move as a group through a program at Cardinal Stritch University. Those in bilingual, science and math classrooms will be licensed through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Education.

Some question programs

Questions about the value of alternative certification programs have been raised by national teachers union officials and, most recently, in a report published in May by Gene V. Glass, a professor of education at Arizona State University. Under the old model, teachers got their training as undergraduates. Critics of programs like Teach for America and the New Teacher Project wonder whether they water down the profession with people who are more interested in resume padding than a decades-long career. Do they place people with little to no experience with the kids who most need veteran educators? Do they send recruits from middle- and upper-class backgrounds into urban environments without anticipating how the culture shock will affect teachers and students alike?

But Deb Heiss, chairwoman of the special education department at Cardinal Stritch, welcomes novices like Ippoliti, who worked as a substitute teacher and tutor after law school. Heiss said she sees the program as an answer to the high turnover in special education teachers, which has led to the perception that a four-year stay in the job is the long haul.

"What alternative certification does is provide another pathway to meet a significant need," Heiss said. "There is a critical shortage of special educators in MPS, in Wisconsin and nationwide."

MPS didn’t respond to requests this week for the number of special education, elementary bilingual, and secondary science and math teaching slots currently open in the district. But in the 2005- ’06 school year, about 43% of emergency licenses granted statewide went toward staffing special education classrooms, according to a Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction report. Emergency licenses are granted when a district can’t find a licensed candidate to fill a vacancy.

Milwaukee Teaching Fellows will be on the path toward becoming bona fide licensed teachers, Heiss said. And they’re able to get in a classroom long before traditional Cardinal Stritch education students, who must wait until they finish coursework and pass the Praxis II, a subject-area test, before they can begin student teaching.

Still, Heiss urges vigilance as this new corps of teachers enters MPS.

"Do we need to do this cautiously? Do we need to consider studying as we do this?" she said. "Yes, I think we do."

Options for people who have left college before they realize they want to teach have skyrocketed in the past two decades. According to the study by Glass at Arizona State, the percentage of regularly certified teachers in the nation’s public schools dropped from about 94% to 88% between 1994 and 2004.

Direct path to MPS

Locally, people seeking alternate certification have been able to turn to the Milwaukee Teacher Education Center, or MTEC, which offers three semesters of training and a direct conduit into hard- to-staff MPS classrooms for $12,000. The program is just entering its 12th year and has partnered with Cardinal Stritch, Rockford College and, most recently, Lakeland College for the training curriculum.

This year, MTEC will send 46 teachers into MPS classrooms: just over 30 into special education and the rest spread among bilingual education, language-immersion programs and science classrooms. About a third of MTEC’s participants tend to be former district employees, mostly people who have worked as substitute teachers or paraprofessionals, said Sue Ristow, who administers the program for MTEC.

Typically, about three-fourths of participants in the MTEC program pass the Praxis II, Ristow said. So a quarter of people who have spent at least a year as full-time teachers are eventually unable to clear the final hurdle and become fully certified teachers.

Administrators of the new Teaching Fellows program said its cohort is made up of highly qualified recruits. The program offered the fellowship to 70 of more than 480 applicants, a 15% acceptance rate in line with the program’s national average.

A biotech convert

Another of the 40 fellows who accepted the offer is Katherine Worzalla, who graduated from UW-Madison in 2005 with a double major in biochemistry and French. Since then, she’s worked as a manager in a biotech company, and she admits that the move to teaching will mean her salary will drop by several thousand dollars. But money’s not the point for Worzalla.

A first-year teacher in MPS with a bachelor’s degree will make just under $36,000 this year. The fellows are responsible for the cost of their coursework, but are also eligible for AmeriCorps grants to offset costs.

"Coming out of college, I tried the private sector, but I think this is something I want to do permanently," she said.

Copyright 2008, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

(c) 2008 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.