There are more potentially skilled teachers and school leaders out there than we know, and some of them are miles away from the existing paths leading into the educational profession.

That’s the thinking behind current efforts by the state Department of Education to forge alternative ways to become certified as a public school teacher or administrator. The other primary concern, though, is seeing that such new recruits also get the basics provided by the conventional path, the one followed by students who know from the start that they want to be educators and do the years of college course work and student teaching.

The point they are making: Education is its own discipline, and expertise in a certain subject doesn’t equal readiness to teach or run schools.

"You are teaching kids the subject matter, and you need to know both your subject matter and the technique of teaching kids," said Joan Husted, someone who, even after retiring as executive director of the Hawaii State Teachers Association, maintains an interest in the issue of educator certification. "So often, that second part gets overlooked."

Husted’s first day in the classroom was more than 50 years ago, but the memory is still clear.

"Thank God my mother was a teacher," she said. "I didn’t know how to do a lesson plan, I didn’t know what to do with the youngster that kept popping out of his chair."

Bringing noneducators into school administration, similarly, is territory that is approached with care. On Friday, the DOE launched its Alternative Certification for School Administrator Program, funded with a $900,000 federal grant, a sliver of the $75 million Race to the Top education reform initiative.

The money will cover the costs of training and mentoring 24 candidates for vice principal over a two-year course (see box for a schedule of community briefings on the project). They then will apply with school principals for VP slots, along with job candidates coming up through the schoolteacher ranks.

The contract is with Chaminade University, which will provide most of the course work for the candidates, in partnership with School Turnaround, a New York-based provider of educational training.

"In many ways, the Race to the Top grant we won is about trying new things," said Alex Harris of the Office of Strategic Reform, the DOE division that’s carrying out the elements in the Race school improvement blueprint.

"We have a window of opportunity to test out whether this alternative route for certification will identify and train up the kind of talent we need to augment our administrative ranks."

The Race also has enlisted the work of Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits new educators from other disciplines, looking in particular for those who have the motivation and skill to help kids in lower-income areas excel in the classroom. Jill Baldemor is executive director of the agency’s Hawaii office.

"Our mission is tailored to the achievement gap, so kids growing up in under-resourced communities are receiving the same opportunities as those in higher-income areas," Baldemor said.

Bringing more highly qualified teachers to poorer zones is part of Hawaii’s Race game plan. Teach for America is partnering with the University of Hawaii and Chaminade to prepare such teachers, as well as those who can teach students with special education needs; faculty members in both areas are in especially short supply, Baldemor said.

Applicants to the program are screened to identify those most likely to succeed, she said: self-starters, quick studies, those who aren’t afraid of trying something new. Baldemor said they also look for "leadership, perseverance through challenge and strong critical thinking skills." About 15 percent of all applicants are accepted nationally, she said.

A cohort of about 100 are undergoing intensive coursework now in  Phoenix, Ariz., where they will get their first hands-on experience teaching summer school. They will return to Hawaii and be interviewed by principals for hiring this school year, but their training and mentoring by Teach for America will continue through their two-year commitment, Baldemor said. At the end of the first year, they will earn the same teaching license that’s required by the DOE, certification that’s approved by the Hawaii Teachers Standards Board.

Teach for America was founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, who proposed its creation as her senior thesis at Princeton University. Over the years the alumni of the program have been tracked, Baldemor said, and the organization has found that about two-thirds end up staying in the profession, either as classroom teachers or working in education of some form.

There’s been no track record yet for the alternative certification of school administrators. Harris said that vice principals are usually selected from among teacher applicants who have put in enough classroom time. Now the minimum is three years; until the rules were rewritten recently, he said, it was five.

With the alternative certification route, talent outside the system can be recruited, too. However, the applicants will undergo two months of Chaminade studies in October and then in July 2013; those selected will start working as vice principals with mentors toward the end of the first quarter of the coming school year.

Some of the coursework to be offered at Chaminade:

» Introduction to educational administration.

» Leadership.

» School and community relations.

» Managing personnel issues.

» Helping teachers improve practice.

» Curriculum administration and student interventions.

» Financial management.

Woven through these courses will be supplemental instruction on the special approach that is needed to boost performance of low-scoring schools, one of the purposes in the Race to the Top campaign, said Katherine Kawaguchi, the former DOE assistant superintendent who now oversees the certification program at Chaminade.

That instruction will be provided by Chaminade’s partner in the contract: School Turnaround, a project of the Rensselaerville Institute of New York City.

The contract also covers the hiring of mentors to supplement the training of the vice principals over the course of their two-year training. These generally will be retired principals, veterans of the DOE, Harris said.

Teach for America, which has operated in Hawaii since 2006, also makes sure teachers get one-on-one mentoring and small-group support in the supplemental classes that run concurrently with their classroom teaching. About 20 percent of the Hawaii placements are Hawaii residents, but there is also training in Hawaiian culture for those who aren’t.

Diversity among teachers is an asset that can benefit the students, she added.

"We need to cast as wide a net as possible," Baldemor said. "At the end it all goes back to what’s going to make a difference to the kids."