‘Street People’ Seek Challenge of Inner-City Classroom

After 14 years on the San Diego police force, Bill Rossbach wants to teach English in a Los Angeles city school.

Andrea Hedgley has an engineering degree but believes engineers are just “highly paid grunts.” She would prefer teaching math to inner-city high school students.

Helen Yun’s only teaching experience has been in Sunday school, but the recent UCLA graduate says she believes she can transfer that background to a junior high biology class.

In Los Angeles school district jargon, Rossbach, Hedgley and Yun are “street people,” bachelor-degree holders with non-education majors who want to teach as part of the district’s teacher trainee program.

This year the district wants to hire 225 trainees. Most would be assigned to the 55 so-called “hard-to-staff” schools in the inner-city corridor.

Any trainees hired would help the district meet its goal of filling 2,500 vacancies before school starts in September. According to Michael Acosta of the recruitment and selection unit, about 5,000 people have been interviewed for teaching positions, and approximately 2,200 applicants have been offered jobs.

Before trainee applicants can be accepted, said Robert Searle, the personnel administrator in charge of special projects, they must pass the California Basic Educational Skills Test and demonstrate competency in the subject they want to teach.

So, in order to show their knowledge of subjects such as chemistry, biology, English and physics, about 200 potential teacher trainees gathered downtown Saturday at the Business Magnet High School to take a portion of the National Teacher’s Exam. Last Saturday the group took the CBEST at Roosevelt High School on the Eastside.

While there were sighs and groans Saturday over some of the questions, most of the applicants didn’t mind taking the tests and most were optimistic about their chances of teaching for the first time this fall.

“Taking the tests didn’t offend me at all,” said Nolan Curtis, a designer who would like to teach high school English. “It seems the most efficient way to assess the amount of knowledge of people outside of the industry.

“But we were just tested on our command of facts,” Curtis continued. “The difficult part of teaching is communication and the ability to relate to young people. We’re not being tested on that.”

Searle estimated that 60% to 75% of recent college graduates pass the CBEST on their first try. For those who have been out of college for a while, the first-try passing rate dips to 45% to 65%.

“The further away you are from the course work, the more difficult it is to pass,” Searle said.

While many of the potential teachers have never written a lesson plan or spent a Sunday afternoon grading compositions or tests--and some said they have heard from friends that the program is a “sink-or-swim” situation--most quickly added that they are not afraid of the challenge.

Hard for Beginners

“I worked as a teacher’s aide for six years, so I know what it’s like in the classroom. After talking to a few people before the test, I realized that they’re going to be surprised once they get in front of a roomful of kids,” said Edwin Miller, who has spent the last four years working for a nonprofit organization and now wants to teach high school biology.

The lack of a built-in guidance and support system for the trainees is one of the problems that Wayne Johnson, president of United Teachers, Los Angeles, the district’s largest teachers’ organization, has with the program.

“I know when I started teaching at Hamilton High School 22 years ago, when I walked in the first day, I knew how to write a lesson plan, I knew how to organize a class, and even with that it was hard,” Johnson said. “To walk in there cold has just got to be a God-awful experience even for the brightest people.

“I’d like to see schools set up along the hospital model,” he continued, “where you would have kind of a chief of staff for a core of mentor or veteran teachers that would work with the new teachers. Sit down with them on a daily basis to give them a little time to hash things out.”

Some of Saturday’s test takers said they hoped their experience teaching part-time at community colleges or teaching children in other environments would help them in the classroom. Dave Smith, for example, has worked for the school district for four years in the human relations section.

“I’ve worked with a lot of Los Angeles city school kids, so I know what they’re like,” said Smith, who has a degree in zoology and wants to teach biology. “My biggest fear is that I won’t be able to find my room on the first day.”