Christina Hall and Jennifer Green work to train better prepared, better informed city teachers.

“Staggering.” That’s the word Jennifer Green uses. And she repeats it: “It’s staggering to realize you have students who have made it to the eleventh grade without being able to decode words on a page.”

…

The problem that UTC seeks to solve, says Julie Mikuta, a partner at the San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund, which provided $1.9 million in startup money, is that first year teachers “are coming in feeling unprepared”—as Green and Hall did—and drop out within five years. At the same time, students in the classes of rookie teachers don’t advance a full year. Successive school years with new or inadequate teachers can set a child back irremediably. “The UTC is the first program in the country to guarantee that a first-year teacher will see one year of growth in their kids,” says Mikuta.

[Read the entire article at Urbanite]