Journal 1
During my three weeks of summer holidays, I interned for the New York City Department of Education (NYC-DOE), specifically in the Office of Teacher Recruitment and Quality. This is a small but growing office, led by a Columbia alumnus, with the mission to guarantee that all the schools in New York City have the best teachers available and to provide all students with an excellent teaching experience and quality.In order to accomplish their mission, the Office runs several programs to improve teaching quality and to allocate resources to the areas that need them most. To do this, they must individually track the best teachers throughout the 1700 schools in New York City.
The Office has implemented the following programs:
- Master Teacher
Master Teachers are teachers selected to serve as instructional leaders in their content area, who are dedicated to working collaboratively with their colleagues to drive instructional improvement. They are peer leaders and will be an integral part of a school’s transformation strategy.
- Turnaround Teacher
Turnaround Teachers are selected as model educators in high-need schools. They help drive instructional improvement for their colleagues by maintaining a laboratory classroom, displaying exceptional results with their students, and facilitating lesson study with their peers. These teachers will be comfortable deconstructing their effective practices into teachable segments and will be an integral part of a school’s transformation strategy.
- Lead Teacher
The Lead Teacher spends half of their time in the classroom and the remaining half of their time providing professional development to other teachers in their school. In addition, the Lead Teacher works closely with the school’s literacy and math coaches. The Lead Teacher’s classroom serves as a lab for utilizing best teaching practices and for demonstrating new pedagogical strategies and curriculum, and the Lead Teacher supports the professional development of other teachers.
In addition to these three programs, the office manager wanted to launch a separate project, to analyze teacher movement between schools and to try and understand these patterns in order to create the right incentives to get the best teachers to move to the schools that need them most — typically schools in underprivileged locations or with very low budgets.
Finally, the Office wants to organize the available information, which comes from all kinds of sources and in all kinds of formats. This organization would allow the office to work more efficiently, which in turn would give them more time to focus on the actual projects.
Journal 2
These are my objectives regarding the teacher movement project:
- Build a model that will let the Office identify and categorize the school transfers that teachers request. The model will grade each school based on more than 10 different criteria — ranging from formal evaluations to geographical location — and will classify each transfer by assessing if the teacher is requesting to move to a school that is high-need or not. The model will also take into consideration teacher evaluations, to understand what kind of teacher is trying to move to what kind of school.
This model is the first step of an incentives project — by understanding the trends in teacher movement, effective incentives can be developed to get the best teachers to move to schools that are high-need.
- Build the database to manage the Lead Teacher, Master Teacher, and Turnaround Teacher programs. This database will allow the office to reconcile all the sources of information into one single database that will contain all the relevant information about the Lead, Master, and Turnaround teachers. This information will allow the office to quickly make decisions regarding: including teachers in these programs, authorizing the payments, and incentivizing these teachers to move to where they would have more impact.
- Improve the daily reports processes. Currently, the office employs an external consultant that performs a daily report. This consultant is leaving and the office is facing the issue of adding this workload to their day-to-day activities. My objective was to understand the report created by this consultant and to create a process that would replicate this report with the minimum amount of effort and time.
- Build a flexible and linked office budget in order to help the office negotiate their budget more efficiently and to plan for different scenarios.
By achieving these goals, I will be helping the office achieve its mission by helping them reallocate the best resources to where they are needed most, therefore improving the learning experience for all the children in the New York City area.
This internship allowed me to apply several skills that I have learned in my classes through the MBA program, specifically the lessons learned in Decisions Models, Leadership Development, and Power and Influence. I used both the harder skills — like Excel proficiency, model planning, and scenario building — and the softer skills — like establishing productive relationships with my coworkers and trying to understand how they would react to my presence, objectives, and responsibilities.
Journal 3
After two and a half weeks at the NYC-DOE I am happy to say that all the objectives were achieved. I was able to build the model that analyzed teacher movements. This was very well received by both my boss and the director of the Office of Teacher Recruitment and Quality. This was the first step in their project of creating intelligent incentives that will allow unattractive schools to have the best teachers for their needs.
A Microsoft Access database was deployed that will allow the office to gather, store, and analyze all the different reports they receive. This database will allow the office to extract information from one, many, or all the reports at the same time, in order to have more accurate information. This will help tasks such as payroll management and recruitment.
I was also able to improve the daily processes by improving a daily report that usually took a whole morning to do. After improving the process, the report now takes one hour. This report is widely used on a daily basis by the top authorities of the Office to quantify the number of teachers that are in excess, where they are, the reasons why, and in which type of areas of expertise.
Also, the office now has a flexible budget that will allow them to easily create different scenarios to better negotiate their yearly funding.
As for my personal objectives for my internship, I was able to learn a lot about the public sector from within, and specifically the education sector. I have a personal interest in this area, and this opportunity was exactly what I was hoping for. I got to experience firsthand how things happen inside the NYC-DOE, and I was pleasantly surprised. I saw that the public sector stereotype of bureaucracy or unmotivated employees did not apply here. People in the NYC-DOE are extremely passionate for what they do. They love the education field, they love New York City, and they love the fact that they are having an impact on children and their futures.
I also learned how the city is planning to improve the quality of its education. This was an invaluable lesson that I plan to take back to my home city one day in hopes of improving the education there.
I am very grateful to both the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School and the Office of Teacher Recruitment and Quality (especially Tania Shinkawa) for giving me such an interesting and enriching opportunity.
