For most of the past two decades, Dr. Mildred Hudson has been intensively engaged in pursuing various models for bringing enthusiastic, skilled men and women to U.S. classrooms as educators at a time of significant teacher shortage. In this interview, Hudson -- senior advisor and acting chief executive officer of the Boston-based nonprofit research and information center, Recruiting New Teachers, Inc. -- focuses on some of the lessons she has learned, the progress she and others have sparked, the attitudinal refinements that are needed and the challenges that remain. Formerly, she spent seven years at the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund developing and implementing a teacher recruitment and preparation program, Pathways to Teaching Careers, that was hailed by the White House and the U.S. Department of Education as an initiative to be embraced. At a time of a high attrition rate in the U.S. teacher corps, with 30 to 50 percent of all incoming primary and secondary school educators leaving the profession within the first five years of employment, imaginative thinking is the obvious response, Dr. Hudson maintains.

Question: Let's begin by focusing on the recent history of teaching as a profession.

Dr. Hudson: Historically, one reality in the culture was that teachers selected themselves for the profession. They followed various degree programs, like arts and sciences, with a few education credits on the side, or traditional teacher education programs. They graduated, but many never went into teaching. Gradually, over the past 20 years, we in the educational community -- researchers and evaluators -- came to realize that this self-selection process in itself -- how people came into the profession -- needed to be looked at. Were they serious? Did they really want to be teachers, or was it a fall-back profession? What propelled us was the fact that not only was there a shortage of teachers in the United States, but that there was a severe shortage of minority teachers, particularly African Americans. In that process of beginning to find the means of recruiting and training African American teachers through the Pathways to Teaching Careers project, we began to come up with models for recruitment for everyone. And we built on each other's experiences, and upon the knowledge base that had been established. For example, there was a belief that returning Peace Corps volunteers would be a good group to try to attract to the teaching field -- that because of their international experience, they might know different languages and be more empathetic to a multicultural student population. Paraprofessionals were another group that could be tapped, we found.

Many programs were popping up spontaneously, on an individual or independent basis, because of a need in one state or another, one region or another, even one school or another. Of course, if you're building recruitment models, you've got to do something about training. The training program had to be modified to suit the particular group of prospective teachers. Sometimes they had classroom experience but no theory, and sometimes they knew theory but had no classroom experience.

Q: You're addressing two different aspects of the subject -- first, encouraging people to become teachers and stick with it as a career, and second, to take people who have no particular interest in teaching, and bring them into the field. Are the employment needs so great that the second of these approaches is vital?

A: Absolutely. But that's one model of hundreds.

Q: I guess what I'm asking is, is there more than one route into the profession?

A: Yes. Besides the traditional way, there are all kinds of efforts that begin as early as middle school and continue through graduate programs. There are pre-collegiate teacher recruitment programs around the United States taking children in middle school, getting them interested in teaching as a profession, and even giving them what amounts to educational courses -- scaled down to their level, of course -- and involving them in tutoring or peer counseling, to work with other children. The rationale behind this is that by the time many minority or low-income children are completing high school, it's too late to get them interested in teaching. So the idea is to open up the pipeline early so that kids who might not have even gone to college can be introduced to teaching as a possible career path. Another approach is to see who's around the classroom, the school and the community who -- with some educational help -- might be drawn into the profession. That can include paraprofessionals, guards, truck drivers, lunchroom attendants, and so on, who have potential, and who often go to school in the evening on their own, but are generally taken for granted. That model has become quite successful, and is part of what's known as the "grow-your-own" movement. In education lingo this says, look in your own community, find out who's there, and support them. There's also that second-career group -- lawyers or businessmen who decide to leave their professions and become teachers. Often local universities will offer scholarships as part of the recruitment of these people. In addition, many universities offer programs that shorten the time it takes for these mid-career changers to become teachers -- without sacrificing the quality of training. Recruiting New Teachers -- which was created in 1989 to lift the esteem of the teaching profession and to provide knowledge and information -- has received more than a million calls in response to its national advertising public service campaign over the past ten years.

Q: Have you any idea of the retention rate among teachers who have come into the profession through these newer models or programs in various U.S. regions or locales that you included in the Pathways project?

A: It's tremendous. Concurrently with the Pathways program, the Urban Institute initiated a five-year national evaluation that has found that the retention rate -- particularly among paraprofessionals and returning Peace Corps veterans, the groups tapped most extensively -- has been around 90 percent. So we can no longer afford to limit ourselves to the traditional way of recruiting teachers -- which has always been haphazard. Today, we're more proactive, building upon sound theoretical knowledge and information.

Q: Tell me about some of the other independent efforts underway to recruit teachers.

A: Teach For America and Troops to Teachers tap two other viable pools. And these groups keep improving. Teach For America brings college graduates to schools in the inner cities and rural America for a two-year tenure, following a six-week summertime training program. And Troops to Teachers encourages retired members of the military to enter the teaching profession in school districts that are difficult to staff. What's exciting about all of this is that in this crunch to get teachers, we have become quite creative in our recruitment. That's really quite satisfying. What's more, concurrently, almost purely by chance, we've developed a new way of working with adult learners who might be, in fact, develop into teachers.

Q: We've been focusing on the teacher shortage and recruitment options and models as an issue unique to the United States. Is that a misguided assumption?

A: Yes. I think it's important to state that the problem is not just within our borders. It's all over the world. In Australia, for example, it's hard to get people to work in the aboriginal communities. They're trying to develop "grow-your-own" programs. In The Netherlands it's true as well. What you find with the Havasupai [Native American] tribe in the Grand Canyon region can be found in The Netherlands as well.

Q: So the point is to think creatively.

A: To think creatively, to be proactive, to be inclusive, and to build long-term solutions to resolving the teacher shortage.

Q: Let's talk for a moment about the incentives that are in place to attract people to teaching as a career, and to retain them.

A: Here, too, communities and schools and local and state governments are starting to be creative. A major incentive is scholarship support -- loan forgiveness for one's education -- as well as child care, or other services, such as a university education course taught in the community. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. There are many models already in place. Our organization has just published a series of guides for districts, outlining ways to improve recruitment efforts.

Q: Do those men and women who enter teaching through some of these non-traditional routes -- as second careers, or right out of college -- eventually complete the appropriate course work for full certification and degrees?

A: They have to. You can only be certified provisionally for so long. Certification is mandatory. It may take somewhat longer for some people -- they might need an extra course or two. But you can't stay in the profession and not be fully certified.

Q: What are some of the developments regarding retraining of teachers to update their knowledge and methodologies?

A: One of the nicest things that has come out of the alternative routes to teaching has been an expansion of lifelong learning. That's really great. Universities must find new ways of being more creative in terms of working with adult learners.

Q: Define that term.

A: An adult learner is anyone who goes back to school later in life. We're talking about someone above 22 or so who goes back to school part-time, or full-time, for some reason. It can be an 80-year-old who decides to take a language course. What happened was that -- by having alternative models for entering the teaching profession, and trying to meet the needs of that population -- the education community has had to think through how you work with adult learners in the broader sense. Let me give you an example. We have discovered the advantages of what we call "cohort groups." You bring individual adult learners in and let them take one or two courses together, as a group, at a university, or at a community center. We now know that by coming in together, and sharing a few courses, they become friends and professional colleagues. They might babysit for each other, or be supportive if one of them might want to drop out. Overall, it's very beneficial.

Q: So it expands a sense of community.

A: That's right. And over two or three or four years, we find, these adult learners do better in their courses when they're in cohort groups than as individuals.

Q: What can you tell me about mentoring programs in the field?

A: They've become very important in the last few years. In fact, universities are developing these programs for their graduates, and in doing so, are sending a signal that they believe strong induction programs are the wave of the future -- to help both the novice and also the veteran teacher who is moving from one school to another. In fact, our latest study, Learning the Ropes: Urban Teacher Induction Programs and Practices in the United States, reflects how strong programs of support and assessment, that include mentoring, can help to retain teachers.

Q: So at a time when there is an intense national concern about education in the United States, where do you see American education heading at this time, from the perspective of developing the teacher corps of the future?

A: I think that the clash in theories and the building of new models make this a wonderful time. Contentiousness is very healthy. We in education have gotten the country's attention and the policy-makers' attention. In this field, you can't have too many friends.

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The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the U.S. Government.