JACKSON, Miss. -- When state officials here tried last year to recruit a for-profit company to manage schools in rural Tate County, the community outcry was swift. Concerned residents spoke out in the media, argued their case to lawmakers and circulated a petition against the “privatization” of Tate County Schools.

Patricia Johnson, whose son attends a public high school in the county, described the proposal as “crazy.” For-profit companies, she said, shouldn’t be “getting paid” to run things when parents are having to buy copy paper for teachers in cash-strapped schools.

At first glance, Mississippi would seem an unlikely source of resistance to school privatization. But this year, a coalition of lawmakers and community groups is fighting vigorously against the prospect of for-profit companies opening up charter schools.

“I think people have been astounded that anyone can make money off of public education,” said Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, which lobbies for public education in Mississippi. “Our schools struggle to make it on the resources they are provided. If (for-profit management is) trying to make a profit and pay shareholders, they aren’t going to be investing very much in educating children.”

This fierce resistance in Mississippi is but the latest example of waning interest in for-profit school managers across the country. Charter schools of all types continue to spread rapidly. But schools managed by for-profit companies make up a smaller share than they did just a few years ago.

In Mississippi, the debate comes as lawmakers are poised to approve a major expansion of charter schools later this month. At the same time, renewed attention to the state’s lagging test scores and overall woeful performance in education is fueling debate about alternative ways of running schools.

Rick Hess, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said states should at least consider the potential benefits of for-profits. “I think it’s crazy to discriminate against companies because they want to pay taxes,” he said. “The bemoaning of for-profits is one reason we wind up with a system that has enormous difficulty trimming costs, and growth of even successful schools moves at a snail’s pace.”

Charter schools can be divided into two broad groups: ones that are freestanding and ones that are part of larger networks or chains. In 2007, about half of all network or chain charter schools were managed by for-profit companies. Just three years later, that figure had dropped to about 37 percent, according to the most recent data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Some states, including New York, have banned for-profit companies from running charter schools. In other cases, companies such as EdisonLearning, which used to focus primarily on managing schools, have shifted away from management after struggling to turn a profit or raise enough investment capital.

The number of for-profit companies has declined modestly, and the number of schools they operate has hit a plateau, said Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who studies charter schools. (At the same time, some of the schools’ enrollment continues to increase, Miron said, and the number of virtual schools is exploding.)

Education leaders say there are two main reasons for the increased wariness toward for-profit operators: philosophical objections to mixing public education and profit, particularly in low-income communities, and mounting skepticism over their record in some cities and states.

“The biases are deeply ingrained, especially in low-income neighborhoods where the notion of profit-making is not welcome and there’s this sense that competition and markets have not benefited these communities,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Rees said there is nothing inherently wrong with for-profit operators. She pointed to the National Heritage Academies, based in Michigan, which she said has managed to expand relatively successfully; the network now operates about 75 schools in states including Michigan, Ohio and North Carolina, according to its website. Meanwhile, a number of nonprofit operators have performed abysmally. 

“The bottom line ought to be quality,” Rees said.

Advocacy groups find a role
But in Tate County, where nearly two-thirds of public-school students live in poverty, the specter of for-profit management has been greeted mostly with skepticism.

“When you draw off funding … it can cause some great concern. It’s basically taking money we don’t have,” said Steve Hale, a Democratic state senator from the county who fielded residents’ concerns about for-profits last year. (Mississippi has only fully funded its K-12 system twice in the last decade.)

In the end, bids from management companies came in two and three times higher than what the state wanted to spend on Tate County’s schools. All were declined, and the state continues to oversee the Tate district through an appointed “conservator” -- a public employee.

But Hale’s concerns haven’t gone away, and two charter-school bills are circulating. One would allow for-profits; the other would ban them. For-profit education providers K-12 Inc., Connections Education and E2020 spent $250,000 on Mississippi lobbyists in 2011 and 2012, with more spending expected this year. That doesn’t include money from numerous advocacy groups (such as the Black Alliance for Educational Options and the Mississippi Center for Public Policy) that have a track record of promoting school choice, including vouchers and charters.

In some cases, advocacy groups are funded directly by for-profits. K-12 Inc. and E2020 contributed to Republican former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, a group that over the past year has worked to craft education policy with Mississippi lawmakers and the Mississippi Department of Education.

Proponents say for-profit management of schools could actually save money. Republican John L. Moore, chairman of the House Education Committee in Mississippi, said privatization has led to cost savings in other governmental sectors.

“We have a system in place within our prison system where for-profit institutions actually have to do it for 10 percent less than the government is doing it,” Moore said.

But in a sign of just how controversial the issue has become, even Moore has compromised on for-profit charter-school managers -- voting in favor of an amendment offered this session to forbid them.

Lessons from Louisiana
Nationally, for-profit school management companies -- as with charter schools more broadly -- have a mixed track record, but limited evidence suggests they perform worse, on average, than their nonprofit counterparts.

One 2012 study from the National Education Policy Center found that nonprofit school operators outperformed for-profits on at least one measure: 48 percent of schools operated by for-profits met minimal expectations for academic growth, compared with 56 percent of those managed by nonprofits. But even Miron, a co-author of the study, said the growth targets (officially known as making “adequate yearly progress”) are a “crude” basis for comparison since they capture only part of a school’s relative success or failure.

New Orleans has become a prime example of how for-profit charter operators’ reach and influence have waned. Eighty percent of the city’s public-school students attend charter schools, the highest proportion in the country.

When public schools in the city reopened during the two years after Hurricane Katrina, for-profit companies were hired to manage five new charters. As of this school year, however, all of the for-profits managers had left the city. Some were fired or left in disgrace.

“Their track record in Louisiana is at best mediocre, and that’s probably being kind,” said Leslie Jacobs, a former state board of education member and charter-school advocate in New Orleans.

Jacobs said that the companies, which usually ask for between 10 and 15 percent of a school’s revenue, struggle to turn a profit while also offering a quality education program with limited funding. In New Orleans, average teacher salaries have gone up considerably since Katrina, adding to schools’ costs.

The for-profits themselves disagree. Michael Serpe of EdisonLearning, one of the largest for-profits in the country, said that requiring management fees while demanding quality isn’t problematic.

“Your bottom line is frankly the outcome and performance of the children in the school,” Serpe said.

The fees could be an even bigger issue in Mississippi, where per-pupil spending is lower than in Louisiana.

But the greatest weakness of for-profits has been a failure to understand local needs, said Matt Candler, the founder of 4.0 Schools, a nonprofit group that works to address a broad array of educational challenges in New Orleans.

“The behaviors of a few for-profits suggested that they were more interested in getting contracts than serving a community,” he said. Candler added that some for-profit companies, including the Michigan-based Leona Group, applied to manage several charter schools right after Katrina. “To even suggest you can take over seven schools in the wake of a disaster so large without anyone on the ground … sends a message about gaining market share over understanding your customer,” he said.

Leona ultimately took the reins at two charter schools. One closed down in 2009, and the board of directors at the second severed relations with the company.

Charter advocates like Candler and Jacobs say it’s not necessary to outlaw for-profit operators as long as there is a rigorous charter authorization process and they can be fired quickly if they perform poorly. In Louisiana, for-profit companies cannot win charter contracts on their own; a nonprofit board gets the contract and then hires the company as a manager. That would probably be the case in Mississippi as well if the for-profit provision goes through. And many charter critics view the debate over for-profit vs. nonprofit as relatively meaningless since they believe all charter schools represent privatization of what should be a government-run enterprise.

If Mississippi decides to allow for-profits to manage charters, Miron said, he’ll worry that the state will attract only the weakest companies because of its low per-pupil spending.

“The bottom-feeders will go into any state,” he said. “They don’t have any problem with compromising their model because of limited funding.”

This story, "New skepticism of for-profit companies managing public schools," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the Southern Education Desk, a consortium of public media stations reporting on education issues in the South. Read the Southern Education Desk's version of this story here.

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Students attend a summer session at Lyon Elementary School near the city of Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta. School districts throughout the state could see increased competition from charter schools if a controversial bill passes the Mississippi Legislature this session.

Mississippi lawmaker Kenneth Wayne Jones, a Democrat, briefly became a political pariah last winter when he voted in favor of a proposal to expand charter schools in his state. He was the only African-American state senator to support the bill, which most members of Mississippi’s legislative Black Caucus disavowed. Jones liked the idea of expanded school options for families, but he also understood his colleagues’ mistrust.

“You’ve got conservative Republicans all of a sudden showing a lot of concern about the education of African-American children, while in the same breath they are denying them health care,” Jones said.

This winter, charter supporters will make their fifth attempt in five years to bring charters to Mississippi, one of a dwindling number of states without a real charter school law. (The state has an existing law so restrictive that no charters have opened.)

But the deep-rooted skepticism of the state’s black leadership remains one of the biggest obstacles to bipartisan support for charters in Mississippi and throughout the South, where powerful white Democrats are a disappearing breed. It also speaks to broader mistrust among black officials nationwide — particularly those who came of age before or during the civil rights movement — toward contemporary school reform efforts they believe are being imposed by outsiders on low-income, minority communities.

“White people cannot tell us what’s best for educating our children,” said state Sen. David Jordan, a 78-year-old African American from the Mississippi Delta town of Greenwood. “Heck, we did it for decades without even the money for books. Through the help of God we made it.”

Similar tensions have emerged in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, where veteran black politicians and venerable civil rights organizations like the NAACP have been among the most vociferous opponents of recent education reforms. Those changes include the expansion of charter schools, the recruitment of out-of-town educators through programs like Teach For America, and the weakening of job protections for teachers.

In Mississippi, which has the nation’s highest rate of childhood poverty and posts some of the weakest test scores, there’s particular urgency to improving the schools. Advocates of charters believe the autonomous schools will help boost the state’s abysmal academic performance. They say they can learn from mistakes made in other states to ensure Mississippi’s charter law is exemplary.

Critics counter that the state needs to focus on fully funding the schools it already operates and create a desperately needed pre-kindergarten program before it looks to alternatives like charters. They also worry that the charter movement will be hijacked by virtual schools and for-profit companies hoping to profit off of Mississippi’s children.

The support of the Black Caucus likely won’t be crucial to passing a new charter school law in Mississippi, though. Republicans control both houses of the legislature, some Democrats support charters, and Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, who is white, has made the issue one of his top priorities. (Last year’s bill failed largely because a few key Republicans didn’t support it.)

But the caucus’ response will be a litmus test for whether black leaders are growing more receptive—or more resistant—to the reforms that are steadily reshaping public education across America.

Charter skeptics
The debate over school reform doesn’t always fall neatly along racial lines. President Barack Obama has embraced charters and other controversial changes. Black leaders like Howard Fuller in Milwaukee and Geoffrey Canada in New York City are among the most outspoken and prominent supporters of radical changes to the traditional public school structure. And, as the divide between Jones and Jordan illustrates, not all members of Mississippi’s Black Caucus are united in full-throated opposition to charters. 

But in Mississippi and elsewhere, charter and reform backers have often struggled to win over civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as well as a majority of black lawmakers and voters.

In Washington D.C., for instance, former mayor Adrian Fenty lost his re-election bid in 2010 at least partly because middle-class black voters were frustrated with the hard-charging style of his schools chief, Michelle Rhee. She not only supported charters but also aggressively pushed to close low-performing schools and fire struggling teachers. In New Orleans, thousands of educators lost their jobs in the lead up to the rapid chartering of the city’s schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The move left many of the city’s predominantly black veteran educators feeling disenfranchised and suspicious of the changes. And in New York City, NAACP leader Hazel Dukes underscored her organization’s intense disdain for charters when she accused a parent who supported them of “doing the business of slave masters.”

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The racial tensions surrounding school reform have complicated origins. Mississippi State Sen. Jordan, a retired public-school science teacher, said he fears charters partly because they could bring more white out-of-state educators to Mississippi who won’t be able to relate to the children there. “Teachers who come in claim they can do a yeoman’s job,” he said. “But I don’t think someone can come from Illinois and do a better job with the kids of the Mississippi Delta than the teachers who are already here.”

Jordan also worries that charters could mean a loss of black power and leadership in rural communities where the black community fought long and hard to claim top positions in the schools. In the Delta town of Indianola, for example, the black community staged a lengthy boycott of white businesses in order to get the first African-American school superintendent appointed in 1986.

“If you go to another model, people are not going to hire African Americans in the top positions,” said Jordan. “The bottom line is to eliminate African Americans.”

In the Mississippi Delta, nearly 90 percent of the public-school children are black, and school districts are one of the few sources of stable jobs.

“In rural counties, the school districts are the main employer,” said Mike Sayer, senior organizer at Southern Echo, a black leadership organization based in Jackson that opposes charters. “If these school districts go down altogether, it will have a crippling effect. In a lot of these communities there are no other places to work.”

Lessons from New Orleans
Charter proponents say they hope talented local educators will open charters, and that fears of widespread upheaval and displacement are overblown.

“Forty other states have [charters] and, to my knowledge, traditional public education hasn’t been destroyed,” said Sanford Johnson, deputy director of Mississippi First, a nonprofit education advocacy organization that supports charters.

Mississippi First executive director Rachel Canter adds that charter supporters have been careful to specify in the proposed bill that all educators with strong track records will be eligible to open charters — regardless of whether their experience is with charter or traditional schools. That way, Mississippi locals will not feel dissuaded from the start.

In search of high-quality teachers, charter school network trains its own

“Whether local people can open charters has been a huge issue for the Black Caucus,” Canter said.

A draft of the bill presented earlier this winter calls for a statewide authorizing board to vet charter applicants. In low-performing school districts, applicants would need only the board’s approval to open. But in stronger districts, they would also need a nod from a majority of local school-board members.

“The most important thing is to give new opportunities to talented educators who are right there in their communities,” said Kenneth Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which advocates for charters and increased school choice for low-income black families.

Campbell points out that in New Orleans — ground zero for controversy surrounding education reform — several of the most successful charters were started by black veteran educators who ran traditional public schools before Katrina. The city has a higher percentage of charters than any other, and could become the first citywide school system comprised entirely of charters within the next few years.

New Orleans has also attracted national charter-school networks such as the Knowledge is Power Program and Future Is Now Schools, and most of the school leaders recruited by the charter “incubator” New Schools for New Orleans have come from out of town. The new, less local leadership has helped contribute to the changing demographics of the city’s teacher corps.

Before Katrina, New Orleans had one of the highest percentages of black educators of any city in the country. But starting in 2007 that percentage began to drop steadily, to 63 percent during the 2007-08 school year, and 57 percent the next year, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Education.

Overall, test scores are going up for a variety of reasons, and parents of all races and income levels have reported growing satisfaction with the city’s public schools. But “one can be as kumbaya as they come and still worry about the psychological effect on black children who come to equate both education and authority with whiteness,” wrote Times-Picayune columnist Jarvis DeBerry of the shift.

Trying to overcome history, mistrust
History might be one of the biggest obstacles to building more broad-based support for charter schools in Mississippi.

Black officials say it’s tough to trust that the state’s white leadership has the best interests of children at heart when they have underfunded the public schools for so long.

Many also fear that charters could provide a means for dozens of nearly all-white “segregation academies” to obtain public funding. The draft legislation doesn’t allow private schools to convert to charters, but that provision has not squelched the fears. Many of the academies are facing declining enrollments as middle-class whites flee the Delta, and would jump at the chance to become charters, skeptics say.

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“Claiming that private schools can’t convert to charter schools is nonsense,” said Sayer, who adds that savvy school operators will be able to find a way around the letter of the law. But Mississippi First’s Johnson says the statewide authorizing board would be able to identify suspect applicants because of the rigorous approval process outlined in the proposed bill.

“Mississippi’s history is the reason people are suspicious about all these things,” said Nancy Loome, executive director of The Parents’ Campaign, which supports a more restricted charter law that would ban virtual and for-profit operators.

Campbell acknowledges that “people have long memories” in Mississippi, which can make it challenging to build trust. But he said lawmakers and citizens of all races and political affiliations are more open to the concept of charters than in previous years.

“There’s an increased desire to learn more,” he said.

Kenneth Wayne Jones, who will chair the Black Caucus during the upcoming legislative session, agrees.

“I don’t think it will be as toxic as it was last year,” he said. “I don’t know if the Caucus will be more supportive when it comes to votes, but I know we’ll be listening more than last year. If this train is coming, we need to make sure we are on it.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. Sarah Carr, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, is the author of the forthcoming "Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and the Struggle to Educate America’s Children" (Bloomsbury Press, February 2013).

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There are some words that auto-correct or spell-checkers just don't catch. They might be spelled right, but mean something oh-so-wrong in the context. And this one proved an embarrassment for a charter school organization in Washington state.

An advertisement that ran in the Sunday and Monday editions of The News Tribune in Tacoma left out a single letter in quite the unfortunate spot, NBC station KING of Seattle reported.

"Are you interested in Pubic Charter Schools?" the ad mistakenly read.

"This was our mistake," Jim Spady, a spokesperson for the Washington Charter School Resource Center, told KING. The center wrote the newspaper ad, which was supposed to publicize an upcoming conference.

The News Tribune also reportedly did not notice that "public" was misspelled.

"It's an honest error," The News Tribune's marketing manager, Sue Piotrkowski, told KING.

The newspaper ran a corrected version of the ad Wednesday, according to KING.

Correction: University of Texas doesn't have school of 'pubic' affairs

Last month, Washington state voters passed an initiative that allows for charter schools, The Seattle Times reported.

Drew Mikkelsen, KING's south bureau chief, contributed to this report.

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Lillian Mongeau / The Hechinger Report

Amy Youngman, center, and Danny Shapiro, left, check student work during a middle school grammar lesson at ERES Academy in Oakland, Calif. Shaprio is a resident teacher-in-training and Youngman is his mentor.

OAKLAND, Calif. – Amy Youngman’s seventh- and eighth-grade humanities students had left for the day. Other than some shouts from the after-school program in the courtyard, all was quiet in her second-floor classroom here.

Youngman’s day of teaching at ERES Academy – part of the Aspire charter school network – wasn’t over, though.

Nor was Danny Shapiro’s day of learning. Shapiro, not 13 but 30, is learning to be a teacher. Youngman, three years younger than Shapiro but with six years of teaching already under her belt, is his mentor.

“Highs and lows?” Youngman asked Shapiro across the wide table that served as her desk.

Shapiro sighed deeply as he considered the ups and downs of his second week in the classroom. He is one of 34 new teachers in Aspire’s three-year-old intensive residency program, aimed at training incoming teachers like him for positions in one of the network’s nearly three dozen schools. Founded in California in 1998, Aspire currently serves 12,000 mostly low-income students in grades K-12 and will expand out of state for the first time next year with two new schools in Memphis, Tenn.

Many of these teachers-in-training are career-changers like Shapiro, who was working at a policy foundation in San Francisco focused on climate change this time last year. Now, he’s spending four days a week in a classroom in one of the state’s toughest neighborhoods.

Shapiro started preparing for his year of teacher training with three months of summer courses that will count toward a master’s degree. He continues working on that degree on his one weekday without teaching duties. A discount on tuition and a small stipend – about one third of what a first-year teacher earns – help make this program possible for Shapiro, who also took out student loans to cover his costs. By the time 12 months are up, Shapiro should have a teaching credential, a master’s in education and a job at an Aspire school.

“So, last Thursday was the low, because that was the day the stress and the [classroom] management [were] like a wave that came over me,” Shapiro said. “Friday was a high because I was so well planned.”

Youngman nodded as she wrote this down. After sharing her own high (two students scored 100 percent on their reading tests) and her own low (meetings went long on Friday, leaving her less prepared than usual for Monday), Youngman printed out the notes she’d taken while Shapiro was leading a history lesson earlier that day. Now, she asked him to highlight parts of the lesson that had gone well and underline those that hadn’t. Pulling out a highlighter and pen, he started reading.

The number of career-changers who are entering the teaching force has doubled over the last 20 years. Shapiro, who majored in politics at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is not among the much sought-after math and science career-changers, but feels his experience in international climate change policy can help him make real-world connections for his students.

Harnessing that practical work experience is a goal of programs like Aspire’s that cater to career-changers who want an alternate route to certification. Thirty-five percent of U.S. teachers report having first had careers outside of education, and more than two in five entered the classroom through an alternative preparation program, according to a 2010 survey by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation in Princeton, N.J.

Problems with first-year teachers
Now charter networks and school districts, including High Tech High in San Diego, Calif., are beginning to pioneer their own training programs. In addition to the desire to bring in new teachers from other fields, Aspire leaders report being dissatisfied with the training their first-year teachers have received. This problem – first-year teachers lacking sufficient content knowledge and classroom-management skills – has been echoed at the national level by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

Study after study has shown that the single most important in-school factor influencing student achievement is the quality of the teacher. But figuring out new ways to train and evaluate teachers remains one of the most contentious issues in education today.

In California, nearly 40 percent of teachers are over 50, and the number of new credentials awarded to new teachers each year is shrinking. The state is near the bottom for student performance nationally, and the teaching profession is facing numerous challenges, according to a recent survey by the California Department of Education.

Teacher education in the Golden State is “uneven in duration and quality,” the report found, while “mentoring for beginners is decreasing.” The authors note that evaluation is “frequently spotty” and teacher salaries are often below market value.

The youngest and least-prepared teachers tend to be clustered in the highest-need areas, they found. But critics charge that alternative certification programs are partly to blame for this disparity. A lack of supervised teaching and minimum academic coursework in many programs lead to underprepared teachers who don’t stay in the profession, they say.

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Richard Sterling, director of the teacher preparation programs in U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, says many of the most strident critics come from the ranks of traditional teacher education programs like his. Sterling worries that alternatively certified teachers don’t get enough of an intellectual grounding in the profession, but says each program should be judged on its own merits.

“My attitude is, ‘Let’s just take a look and not dismiss alternative programs out of hand,’ ” Sterling says.

The residency models, for example, offer more supervised teaching than many traditional programs and more academic content than many alternative programs. This makes for an intense schedule for residents. Aspire residents often work 10-hour days and some weekends to fulfill their teaching duties and complete their coursework. It’s hoped that the exacting residency year will provide a solid foundation in classroom management, lesson planning and grading, ultimately yielding first-year teachers who are well prepared.

Focus on classroom time
Aspire hasn’t entirely eschewed traditional teacher education. The network partners with the University of the Pacific to provide residents with master’s-level courses. The focus of the program, though, is on what happens in the classroom.

A recent study by the Washington, D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found the length of time spent in the classroom and the quality of mentoring are key elements in strong teacher preparation programs. However, few of the 134 programs studied had those elements. For example, 43 percent of programs had no criteria for choosing mentor teachers other than that they have some teaching experience.

“Student-teacher programs tend to be luck of the draw,” said Sandi Jacobs, vice president of the NCTQ. “They tend to be based on who volunteers, not on any evidence of effectiveness.”

In Arizona desert, a charter school computes

Not so at Aspire, where mentors are carefully selected and trained. Take Youngman, one of several mentor-teachers at ERES Academy. She was tapped as a mentor because of strong student performance data and positive peer reviews of her teaching based on classroom observations, along with her principal’s recommendation.

Youngman receives additional training, a formal title change and a $3,000 stipend as part of her agreement to mentor a resident teacher. This is her second year as a mentor.

Shapiro said he finds her insights invaluable.

“There’s a reason why she’s a mentor,” Shapiro said. “She’s able to see a hundred things at once and not seem like she’s doing anything.”

Looking for 'lifers'
Heather Kirkpatrick, Aspire’s vice president of education, hopes that using strong teachers to train newcomers will result in everyone staying in the classroom longer.

“I’m looking for ‘lifers,’ I really am,” Kirkpatrick said. Her goal is to keep the expert teachers interested and engaged at a time when about half of all U.S. teachers leave the profession in their first five years. Up to 10 percent of those leave in the first year, according to a 2011 study of beginning teachers by the U.S. Department of Education.

The study, which followed nearly 2,000 new teachers starting in 2007, found that well-chosen mentors can have a real effect on improving teacher retention. Among public-school teachers with an assigned mentor, 92 percent were still teaching the following year. Of those not assigned a mentor, only 84 percent were still teaching in their second year, the study found.

Once they’re through those critical first years, positions such as mentor teacher, lead teacher and model teacher offer alternative paths to promotion besides the traditional move into administration.

Want to read more on this topic? Go to EducationNation.com

At ERES Academy, Shapiro combs through Youngman’s notes on his lesson. The notes read like a script, with Shapiro’s statements in one column and the students’ statements and actions in a second column.

Shapiro highlighted something he’d said at the beginning of the lesson: “Thank you, Cristian, for showing me you are ready.”

Offering positive reinforcement for good behaviors was something he’d been working on this week. Youngman agreed he’d gotten better at it.

In the second column, Shapiro had underlined a statement by a student that made him think he’d bumbled a teachable moment. He’d called on a girl who didn’t know the answer to his question.

He had several questions for Youngman: How long should he wait for a hesitant student to answer? Should he just supply the answer himself? Should he ask another student? Or was it better to push the first student to come up with something?

Youngman advised him to write down answers he needed students to know in advance of a lesson. If he didn’t get those answers, he’d know he’d found a hole in his teaching. He could then remedy it in a follow-up lesson.

Lillian Mongeau / The Hechinger Report

Amy Youngman, left, helps Danny Shapiro plan for his next week of teaching in the seventh- and eighth-grade classroom they share at ERES Academy in Oakland, California. Shaprio is a resident teacher-in-training and Youngman is his mentor.

That kind of detailed feedback is what Youngman said she wishes she’d received in her first year as a Teach For America teacher in San Jose, Calif. Instead, she said she felt mostly on her own, a common complaint of new teachers no matter how they are trained.

It’s too soon to have enough data to make a call about Aspire’s success, but Kirkpatrick said 18 of the first 20 residents completed their first full year of teaching. One Aspire principal, she said, called a current resident-cum-teacher “more like a third- or fourth-year teacher than a first-year teacher.”

Kirkpatrick said the goal is to prove that such anecdotes can be replicable – and to back up that claim with student performance data.

If the Aspire model does succeed at better training a new crop of teachers, it will be a notable win. A recent study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington and Mathematica, a nonpartisan research group, identified Aspire as one of the nation’s high-performing charter networks. And the Aspire Public Schools ranked first in California among large districts with two-thirds or more low-income students, based on 2010-11 standardized test results, with 100 percent of graduating seniors accepted to four-year colleges or universities.

For now, the residency program at Aspire is funded by grants from foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. (Disclosure: the Gates Foundation is among the many supporters of The Hechinger Report, which produced this story.) Most public districts don’t have access to such funds, but Kirkpatrick thinks they might not need extra money to create their own residency programs. Aspire operates almost entirely within the constraints of public funding, and the long-term plan is to fund the mentoring program by shifting funds currently earmarked for teacher recruitment and support.

“We are not doing rocket science,” Kirkpatrick said. “There’s not one thing [other schools] couldn’t do.”

This story, "In search of high-quality teachers, charter network trains its own," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.