A Cattle Call for Teachers

Maybe it is only a moment, an aberrant uptick in the long decline of California public schools. Or maybe it represents something greater--the dawn, as one optimistic educator put it, “of a renaissance.” Whatever, something strange and wonderful is unfolding across the state this late summer.

A chaotic cattle call is underway for public schoolteachers. They are being recruited and hired by the thousands--part of a statewide initiative to lower the ratio of students to teachers in the primary grades. The idea is that smaller classes will help levitate rock-bottom reading and math scores. More fundamental, the idea is that, in the riddle of education reform, the best answer might be the simplest: More good teachers.

At the Los Angeles Unified School District, which seeks to hire more than 2,500 additional teachers, the recruiting operation is run out of Room C-102 of the downtown headquarters. This spare room of beige walls and fluttering fluorescent lights has taken on the trappings of a boomtown hiring hall. Hundreds of prospects pass through daily, circulating resumes, meeting with screeners, weighing offers.

“Good morning, again,” an administrator announced Thursday to the 40 or so candidates crammed into the waiting room. “We are still looking for a bilingual teacher for a middle school. Are any of you interested?”

“What’s the location?” someone called out.

“Well, it’s in Pacoima.”

This brought only silence. The administrator shrugged and retreated back behind the counter. For the would-be teachers of California, it is a buyer’s market.

*

Ben Lujan, the district’s recruitment director, occupies a cubicle in the back corner of Room C-102. In the past month, he said, his staff has processed nearly 3,000 applications. They have come from across the L.A. Basin, California, the whole country: “We’ve heard from all different types of folks--from folks who never considered teaching previously, from teachers in private schools or other districts, from people in the space industry, from middle-management persons who have been given early retirement or whatever.”

The variety was apparent Thursday. Fresh college graduates sat beside retirees, talking softly, filling out forms, reading. A man in nylon sweats flipped through the “Sharper Image” catalog. A young woman who, it turned out, was about to leave a private school to teach in South Los Angeles, carried a copy of a teachers handbook: “Back to School With Assertive Discipline.”

One applicant--a thin, dapper man in a long-sleeved white shirt and tie, wearing loafers and a beeper on the belt of his dark blue slacks--said he had worked in sales all his life, peddling industrial supplies across the Los Angeles Basin. He had raised four kids with the job, and yet it had never felt, as he put it, “like me.” Over time the uncertainties of commission work had begun to wear on him: “I wake up every morning with a knot in my stomach, wondering if I am going to make any money today, or just burn gas.”

And so he had come, at age 54, looking to reinvent himself as a teacher. He wasn’t sure he qualified, had not told anybody in his business he was looking. He simply knew the idea had captured his imagination: “It’s an important job,” he said, eyes almost shining. “I’d like to make a difference with the children. Once I started thinking about it, something in my body said: This just feels right.”

*

And so it does. The call to hire more teachers was sounded by Gov. Pete Wilson, and some critics have questioned his political motives and commitment. The political machinations, however, seem far less important than the result. For whatever reason, and for however long it lasts, something positive and large-scale is at work, finally, in California public schools. And, as the salesman said, it just feels right.

It feels right to parents, who might not be able to sort through reform-speak about principal empowerment and voucher plans and phonics-vs.-whatever, but who can certainly--as one administrator put it--”count to 20.” Teaching is about good teachers, as anyone who sat in a classroom with one can attest.

And it must feel right to teachers. While no district is throwing around any Deion money--that is, the big bucks our society reserves for free agent cornerbacks and dunk shot artists--it must still comfort them to be courted a bit, to be treated for once as something other than the architects of educational failure.

And it should feel right for all Californians. For far too long, in schools and everything else, the story line from the once golden shores has been one of decline and slippage. This is different, this drive to enlist some 20,000 new teachers in a single summer. It feels, well, Californian.