New York City Teaching Fellows

Tamer Center for Social Enterprise Launched in 2000, the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) program was conceived to attract well educated, highly motivated recruits to teach in the city's underserved public schools. Part of a wider movement of alternative certification for teachers, the NYCTF program entailed a highly selective recruitment process, a seven-week training program, student teaching at summer schools, followed by enrollment in a master's program in education once placed in a teaching position—with a majority of the costs paid for by the DOE. While many in the DOE believed the program was effectively placing talented teachers in underserved schools, the program faced a variety of headwinds, including pushback from the city's teachers' union and disappointing data about retention rates for NYCTF participants once they were placed in city schools. In 2009, the fate of the program was further challenged by a hiring freeze which left the DOE in the difficult position of having recruited and trained teachers eager to teach—and no schools able to hire them. After discussing the history of NYCTF, this case asks students to consider how to best address the hiring freeze to serve NYC schools, students, dissatisfied teaching fellows who could not find jobs, and the principals who could not hire them.