Mark Meredith and Jennifer Galvin have little in common. 

Meredith, 42, grew up in rural Harrisonburg, Virginia. He spent eight years in the Navy before studying economics and technology at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts. For the last 10 years he’s lived in Pusan, South Korea, teaching English.

Galvin, 22,  grew up in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia, which she described as “homogeneous and stereotypically WASP-y.” She graduated from Penn State last year with a degree in engineering and now teaches ninth grade math at Manhattan's Urban Assembly School of Design and Construction. There, she is one year into the three-year program.

Last year, one-third of the teachers hired by the New York City Teaching Fellows Program were from someplace other than New York.

See a recruiter explaining the Teaching Fellows program. Watch as teachers currently in the program talk about the appeal of New York City.

Unlike Teach for America, the more well known program that assigns teachers to a public school in cities across the U.S., the fellows program supplies teachers exclusively to New York City. The fellows are assigned to one of the city’s 10 educational regions where they find a school to teach.

While all teachers in New York City are required to hold a degree in education and take a state certification test, the fellows program employs teachers who lack that education background, said Scott Hechinger,
a program recruiter. Instead, they fulfill the state requirements during their three-year followship.

Teachers accepted to the program go through a rigorous seven-week training program before the school year begins. During the school year, they simultaneously pursue a master’s degree in education at CUNY or a private university, subsidized by New York’s Department of Education. At the end of the program, they receive full certification to teach in New York.

In 2000, then education chancellor Harold Levy founded the teaching fellows program in response to the greatest teacher shortage the city had faced in decades. Since then, the program has hired about 2,500 teachers per year, assigning them to about 800 low-performing schools and to high-need subject areas like math and science, said Hechinger. Currently there are close to 7,000 fellows teaching in the school system. Starting this fall, a new batch of teachers will be instructing more than 60,000 students of the city’s 1.1 million students in grades K through 12.

“We recruit our teachers in many different ways,” Hechinger said. “We go to college campuses, job fairs, and we also advertise on all the major job Web sites. Our goal is to get the best and the most talented teachers for New York’s kids, and from very diverse backgrounds.”

The prospective teachers hear about the program from recruiting events or from an outside source.

Galvin first heard about the program from a friend at Penn State. Meredith applied to the program after his teaching position in Korea ended and his Visa expired. While traveling from Korea to New York City, he logged onto a United Airlines lounge computer at a Tokyo airport. He Googled “teach in NY” and the Teaching Fellows Web site came up. He immediately filled out the online application. Six weeks later he was accepted.

While it was their love for teaching that brought Galvin and Meredith to the program, they were both keen on living in New York. Both think they will remain in the city after the three-year program.

“It’s an amazingly international city,” Meredith said. “I can’t imagine, after having lived overseas most of my adult life, being in a place where English is the only language you hear in the streets.”

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