A Quest for “The Very Best”: Teacher Recruitment in Six Successful, High-Poverty, Urban Schools

This qualitative analysis of teacher teams is part of a larger, comparative case study, “Developing Human Capital Within Schools,” conducted by the Project on the Next Generation of Teachers. Within one city, we interviewed 142 teachers and administrators in six highpoverty schools (three charter and three district), all of which had achieved the highest ranking in the state’s accountability system. Here, we analyze how each school approached the process of teacher recruitment and how both administrators and teachers experienced that process. Each school described strategies that were far from the “passive and provincial” efforts (DeArmond, Shaw, & Wright, 2009, p. 54) that have long characterized teacher recruitment in public schools. Instead, each actively developed a pool of candidates from which it could hire when teaching positions arose. Schools carefully pursued candidates by cultivating relationships with nonprofits, universities, and the school district, and with the personal and professional networks of those working in the school. Often, they depended most on those who shared their mission of educating low-income, minority students and were able to provide the school with candidates who had already been carefully vetted. We are indebted to the Spencer Foundation and to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for funding this project, although all views presented here are our own. We appreciate the comments and recommendations of Judith Warren Little at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, 2015. David Cohen and Andrés Alonso also provided feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also deeply grateful to the administrators and teachers who participated in this study. A Quest for “The Very Best”