The Alternate Route Teachers'' Transition to the Classroom

In the U.S. Department of Education''s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report in 2005 more than 3.7 million teachers were educating more than 54 million elementary and high school students across the country. Given the current teacher population of more than 3 million among 16,000 school districts across the country, the turnover rate is projected to be up to fifty percent (Feistritzer, Harr, Hobar, & Losselyong, 2004). With a focus on 21st century skill development, individuals with life experiences in the work place and industry will serve as a pool of candidates to fill these vacancies. According to Feistritzer (2009), all fifty states and the District of Columbia now have Alternate Route (AR) teaching certification programs to recruit individuals who have earned college degrees and worked in their chosen fields but had no prior teaching experience. The focus of this study explores issues related to the New Jersey high school alternate route teachers'' transition process to the classroom in the following three phases.