Teachers’ Lesson in Supply and Demand

PORTLAND, ORE. — WANTED: Potential elementary school teachers willing to trade the idyllic Pacific Northwest for smoggy, traffic-jammed and crime-riddled Los Angeles. Experience not necessary. Adequate classroom space and supplies not guaranteed. Need for Spanish fluency near-certain.

That is not the way the advertisement in the Oregonian read when Cheryl Williams spotted it and decided to respond. But it sums up the concerns she brought to her interview in a downtown Portland hotel room last weekend with Los Angeles Unified School District recruiters.

“I know it’s extremely crowded down there--traffic, smog,” said Williams, 34, a Northern California native who moved to Portland two years ago to escape urban sprawl. “I’m wondering if I could handle it. Really wondering.”

So why did Williams answer the ad? Teacher layoffs in Portland last spring dashed all hopes of translating two years of substitute teaching into her first permanent job.

As public school districts throughout California hunger for enough teachers to comply with a new state program that pays schools to shrink primary grade classes to 20 students, Los Angeles Unified finds itself the greediest among them.

The district’s immediate goal of hiring up to 2,600 extra teachers would gobble up more than half the 1996 credentialed candidates from all California teaching programs combined--and most of those graduates had found jobs by midsummer, when the state approved the class reduction plan.

So Los Angeles and a handful of other large districts are reaching out of state to regions with a surfeit of teachers. In a season when the hiring cycle traditionally winds down, recruiters are madly combing through their applicant files, attending hastily organized college employment fairs and advertising on the Internet: “Come and Teach by the Beach!” Long Beach Unified implores on its Web site.

Never before have so many districts needed so many teachers at the same time. Even the post-World War II baby boom provided schools with several years’ warning that kindergarten classes would swell.

“This is certainly the broadest recruitment and the most focused--just a particular group of grades, so you’re in one single teaching pool, the generalist primary grades teacher,” said professor Michael Kirst of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

Under the program, schools can share a pot of $971 million if they scale back classes, initially in first and second grades, followed by either kindergarten or third grade. Most districts aim to start school in September with smaller student-teacher ratios, but they have until February to prove that they have hired enough teachers and found enough space for the added classes.

Personnel administrators in Los Angeles Unified realize that it is unlikely that the district will find all the teachers it needs in time. The sprawling district has some of the state’s largest elementary classes--averaging 32 pupils, two above the state average. It also has a giant bureaucracy and an abundance of poor, non-English-speaking students, making it a hard sell even in less competitive eras.

Teacher hiring honcho Michael Acosta uses a thermometer chart to monitor his department’s progress. At the top is the 3,500-teacher mark--which includes the elementary teachers needed without the reduction--and at the bottom is red ink indicating the 700 hires made so far.

Still, realism is offset by growing recognition that no matter how difficult the challenge, no public school system can afford to be viewed as a laggard, least of all the oft-criticized Los Angeles Unified.

“If we don’t see the L.A. school district acting fast enough, it will send a very sharp message that the public schools are not doing their job, that they are not taking advantage of an opportunity,” said Cynthia Simmons, whose middle child, Chela, enters second grade next month in Silver Lake. “The question would then become for me: ‘What’s your excuse?’ ”

So Los Angeles Unified is trying to get a head start on its better-heeled competitors. It is the only district advertising for teachers in the popular press--in Portland and in Cleveland, where recruiters are headed today. Next month they plan to hit Kansas and Miami.

It is the only district setting up a special office for principals to interview teacher candidates--a bungalow moved onto the parking lot at its downtown office. It is the only one offering jobs to teachers without knowing where it will send them, confident that some principal will take them in.

And for the first time, Los Angeles Unified is holding its 32,000 teachers to their one-year contracts to prevent other districts from raiding its staff. Although allowed under the state Education Code, the move has infuriated teachers who see the new class size plan as a ticket out.

“I am not an indentured servant,” said one special education teacher blocked from taking a job in a neighboring district.

Around the state, needs vary--from a few teachers in small districts like San Marino to the thousands desired by Los Angeles. The need for bilingual teachers is especially strong. Once the class size bonanza was announced, the race to hire took off quickly, with many districts trying to nose ahead:

* Irvine Unified, which in late July became the first in Southern California to trim some of its class sizes, called teams of principals back from their summer vacations to interview candidates.

* San Francisco Unified will let intern teachers take over more classrooms, relying on the leniency of new state legislation passed to help satisfy the increased appetite for primary level teachers.

* Los Angeles Unified is working on a plan to lure retired teachers back to the classroom by lobbying the state to ease pension laws that allow retirees to earn only $17,000 a year or risk losing benefits.

* Even Fresno Unified, which perennially has more candidates than positions, sent recruiters to Mexico this week to find more bilingual teachers. And at nearby Cal State Fresno, graduates of the teaching program are being snapped up as quickly as career counselor Diana Dille can help them write resumes.

“Districts are in a frenzy now,” Dille said.

Jobs are being offered within days, sometimes minutes, of interviews to keep top candidates away from salivating competitors.

A few districts are trying to gain an edge by offering more credit for seniority or boosting entry-level salaries, while others are seeking school board approval to loosen qualification requirements. Los Angeles Unified Supt. Sid Thompson told a group of parents, teachers and principals last week that he hopes to convert some teaching assistants to full-fledged teachers--an announcement greeted by audience cheers.

As districts scramble to get new teachers in place before the Feb. 16 deadline, academics predict a widening gap among districts, between the haves and have-nots.

School systems considered desirable because of location, working conditions or pay will nab the most-qualified teachers, leaving those grappling with image problems to fight over the rest: novices, students, the unlicensed, the unemployed. Parent and teacher representatives are raising questions about whether quality will be compromised.

“There’s no question that some of them are going to fail,” said Sam Kresner, staff director for United Teachers-Los Angeles. “If it was that simple to teach, everybody would be a teacher.”

The unprecedented competition has created a buyers’ market for the first time in more than two decades, since the urban enrollment boom of the early 1970s. And this time there are openings in even the most sought-after, suburban districts.

Tamara Smith, a second-grade teacher at a San Fernando Valley parochial school, can hardly believe her good timing. Seeking the higher wages and better benefits of public schools, she filed a few applications last summer, but received no encouragement. This summer, she began looking in earnest and has received three tentative offers and turned down one.

“Now I can ask what I want, and really be picky, instead of the other way around,” Smith said.

With her numerous options, Los Angeles Unified is not on Smith’s short list, highlighting the difficult task ahead. The district must counter a reputation for offering tough duty in return for average pay by California standards, and assuage fears about who will lead the district and whether breakup advocates will succeed.

News of the district breakup drive and politicking over the selection of a new superintendent had not reached most of the 60 job applicants in Portland, but Los Angeles’ lagging test scores and troubled youth are legendary.

None of that fazed Robert Salazar, who gave up a full-time job as a Las Vegas kindergarten teacher in 1994 to join his fiancee in Portland, and has been working as a substitute and part-time game arcade manager ever since.

When he read of Los Angeles’ openings in the paper, he initially thought “no way, no way, no way,” he said. “But then I saw ‘$29,000 starting salary’, and I thought, ‘I have to do it.’ ” (Portland begins teachers at $25,000.)

Would the seemingly ample wage be consumed by housing costs? Salazar wondered, asking a visitor to bring him apartment listings from Los Angeles.

Portland is a good place to mine for teachers these days. Nearly six years after voters approved a limit on property taxes, the district has depleted its financial reserves and last spring sent layoff notices to nearly 10% of its 3,500 teachers. Despite impressive community fund-raising, which allowed some teachers to be recalled, more than 140 permanent teachers and all 85 temporary teachers lost their jobs.

Still, teachers union President James Sager said that out-of-work members would be more likely to head for smaller districts in Northern California because of a strong Northwest bias against big cities, especially Los Angeles.

“I haven’t talked to a lot of people interested in L.A.,” he said. “I haven’t seen carpools headed down there.”

On paper, recruitment may look like an easier task for California’s smaller districts, which need a comparatively minuscule number of teachers. But those without prestige or a plan may find it hard to keep up.

Recruiting is a cinch for a San Marino Unified, where teachers can be virtually assured of committed parents with deep pockets and motivated students with college aspirations.

Associate Supt. Jack Rose laughed when asked whether they had done any advertising for the eight positions necessary to lower their already small primary class sizes, which average 25 students. “Oh no,” he said. “People heard by word of mouth that we were hiring and the phone’s been off the hook ever since.”

By contrast, take Inglewood Unified School District--which struggles to attract candidates in the best of times and is faced with recent arrests of employees on embezzlement charges, a $6-million deficit and an audit criticizing its chronically low student achievement. Nowhere is the heat of competition more searing.

“Culver City, Hawthorne, Ocean View, Manhattan Beach, Los Angeles Unified--has job, has job, has job,” Evangeline Lewis, Inglewood Unified’s personnel consultant, reads off applicants lost to other districts in an exasperated tone.

Seeking 20 teachers to decrease half of its first-grade classrooms, Lewis scheduled an interview-a-thon one recent morning, where 27 candidates met with nine principals in the school board chambers.

It was an arena where energy and a willingness to learn could more than make up for a lack of full-time teaching experience.

When one principal asked Wendy Robertson to discuss how she would teach spelling to first-graders, the nervous Cal State Dominguez Hills graduate student faltered. But an hour later, her wit and enthusiasm won over Principal Nancy Ichinaga from Bennett/Kew Elementary. Robertson became one of a dozen candidates offered jobs, most of them, like her, several credits short of a teaching license, known as a credential.

“You can’t waste any time,” Ichinaga said. “Because Inglewood doesn’t pay as much as other districts, if we didn’t . . . tie them down, we were going to lose out.”

That most of her district’s recent hirees lack a credential and have never written lesson plans outside of a college classroom does not bother Ichinaga, because she encounters that frequently. All Inglewood Unified schools have training programs for new teachers.

California is one of a few states that requires teachers to attend one year of graduate school and pass several tests, including the California Basic Educational Skills Test or CBEST--a measure of general knowledge--to get a teaching credential. Through emergency permit and internship programs, the graduate year can be waived temporarily. Out-of-state teachers can be hired without the CBEST if they pass an abbreviated version of it and agree to take the full exam within a year.

As California schools strive to find the nearly 20,000 teachers needed in the first year of the reduction plan, experts say many will be forced to look toward the exceptions, the candidates who are college graduates, but have never run their own classroom. Some observers think that change is not necessarily bad.

“The bottom line is there certainly are enough people around, it’s just a matter of matching up the supply with the demand,” said Emily Feistritzer, president of the National Center for Education Information, a private research organization.

In a 1996 report on alternative teacher certification, Feistritzer pointed out that there are far more college-educated Americans than jobs requiring college degrees. To tap that resource, she said, districts have to be “open to alternative populations of people coming into teaching . . . open to interns, to mid-career people, to ex-military people, to retirees.”

Los Angeles Unified is already devising ways to reach into that pool. Later this month a flier is to be inserted in district employee paychecks asking them to “bring a friend” interested in giving teaching a try to an informational meeting scheduled for mid-September.

And recruiters hope that people who might never have thought of coming to Los Angeles will take a second look when they realize how much they are wanted--people such as Cheryl Williams, the Portland substitute who was one of 27 applicants offered jobs on the spot last weekend.

Williams nearly skipped into the hotel lobby after her interview, holding tight to her preliminary offer. She had applied at 50 Oregon districts and this was the first time anyone had even called her back. She has been working as a receptionist this summer, hoping to return to substitute teaching in the fall.

“I think I’m going to take it,” she said of the Los Angeles offer. “It would be nice to get started.”