Whitman Elementary - Tulsa Public Schools

Teacher and Principal Recruitment, Induction, Retention and Release
Tulsa Public Schools has many noteworthy policies and strategies regarding the effective
recruitment, hiring, induction and retention of effective school personnel and the release of ineffective
personnel in a timely manner. As noted below, many of these initiatives began in the 2010 to 2011
timeframe and are already bearing fruit.
I. Recruitment of Teachers
The District uses Teach For America and its Oklahoma higher education partners to recruit
effective teachers. It uses the Teacher Insight screening tool from Gallup to identify the best candidates
for the District’s new workforce and provides financial incentives to assist with the recruitment of hard
to staff subjects.
Teach for America: Teach For America (TFA) is the primary conduit for the District’s new
teaching staff. TFA recruits the country's most promising future leaders in the movement to eliminate
educational inequity and brings them to Tulsa to help meet the greatest educational needs of the city.
TFA identifies and inspires thousands of potential corps members on college campuses and from
multiple career sectors. It has ambitious goals for the growth and diversity of its corps along racial,
ethnic, and socioeconomic lines. TFA works with the District’s Human Capital team to place corps
members in the District’s most needy schools in terms of achievement and poverty levels. TFA is able to
recruit an impressive applicant pool because of its prestige and the financial aid it provides its corps
members to help bridge the gap between college and the beginning of the school year.
Beginning with the 2009-2010 school year, TFA has provided the District with an impressive
number of effective teachers. In 2009-2010, TFA provided the District with 67 corps members. In 2010-
2011, the TFA corps class was 53. The class of 2011-2012 corps members is 74, and a similar size class of
corps members is expected 2012-2013.
The organization’s assistance in improving student achievement over the last two years is
significant. For example, even though the corps members were novice teachers, they out-performed
the District’s average value added scores for Math (overall , as well as 7 th and 8 th grade), Biology, Algebra
I, and English III. 1
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Only 2011 test data was available for this analysis. Additional analysis is underway to compare TFA members’
value-added scores with their non-TFA counterparts (teachers with two or fewer years of experience). Initial data
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