Beyond sink or swim
Mentors can make a career-saving difference for a new teacher

By Mike Rose

We're several weeks deep into the academic year, and novice educators across the nation are navigating the choppy waters of first-year teaching under the guidance and encouragement of veteran classroom colleagues. From hunting down paper in the copy room to dealing with a chronically disruptive student, these mentors are there every step of the way. Their keen observations and constructive advice accelerate professional growth for rookies far beyond the "sink-or-swim" systems of the past. For the school and the district, the mentor-intern culture marks the beginning of the end to teaching's "revolving door" professional image, and the result is a growing corps of dedicated, committed, career-oriented professionals who will assume key leadership roles as veteran teachers retire.

Or not.

Despite a long track record of success in several key districts, quality mentoring programs have yet to be implemented across the board in American public education. In fact, mentoring programs could suffer devastating rollbacks in today's soft economy. The estimated $11 billion in cuts that cash-strapped state legislatures already have cut from education budgets in the last year have taken their toll on a slew of school initiatives, and mentoring is no exception. In Massachusetts, for example, the state Department of Education announced last summer it was pulling the plug on a program that encouraged teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to serve as mentors to first-year teachers or to board candidates. The move added insult to injury in Boston public schools, where funding for homegrown mentoring is shrinking thanks to a budget crunch that is putting pressure on public schools.
 

STAYING POWER

For districts that find the will and wherewithal to sustain mentoring programs, the payoff can be remarkable. Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, N.Y., are two of the true district pioneers in new teacher mentoring as part of a comprehensive peer-review program, and both systems won national recognition for their efforts in the 2001-02 school year. The Toledo Plan, developed by the Toledo Federation of Teachers and the Toledo Board of Education in 1981, was named one of five winners of the Innovations in American Government Award, sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.  The $100,000 accompanying the award will encourage the district to spread its program to school systems across the nation.

Rochester's 16-year-old Career in Teaching (CIT) also features a solid mentor-intern program and was the focus of a major report by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. "The CIT program established by Rochester offers a model of how viable professional career ladders are created, supported and sustained," Linda Darling-Hammond writes in the foreword to the report. "This innovative structure was developed and established with the strong support of the city's teacher union, whose members have long understood that issues of professional support, effective teaching and student outcomes do not exist in isolation from one another."

These types of accolades were anything but certain in the 1980s, when union leaders in Toledo, Rochester and a handful of other districts were pushing the envelope of professional unionism with new mentoring and peer evaluation approaches. "We were country when country wasn't cool," Rochester Teachers Association president and AFT vice president Adam Urbanski observes.

But soft finances could prompt states and districts to sing another tune.

The rollback of the Massachusetts mentoring program will hurt, says Maureen Roach, a board-certified teacher in Boston who has worked with new teachers on everything from setting up and running a classroom Halloween party to engaging an inattentive student without disrupting the flow of a lesson. Roach, who is also a member of the NBPTS board of directors and the Boston Teachers Union, has little doubt what will happen if supports are kicked out from under new teachers--at a time when about 80,000 Massachusetts educators are planning to retire within four years. "The revolving door will swing a lot faster," she warns.

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