In a class by themselves, new teachers often flunk.

• Author: Miller, Jeff

In 1979, when Cindi Rigsbee arrived for her first day of work at Eastern Guilford High School in Gibsonville, another teacher handed her the instructor's edition of the textbook and pointed her to a classroom with naked cinder-block walls. "That's all the help I was given," she says. "I had no idea where to begin."

She taught four sections of English. She taught drama, too, though she had never acted in, nor directed, a play. Once in a while, another teacher might stop by, but only to volunteer what she was doing wrong -- such as the colleague who poked a head in the room to scold her for sitting on her desk during a class discussion. At the end of the year, she quit.

In 1987, Rigsbee returned to teaching in Vance County. This time, another English teacher, Fred Westbrook, "baby-stepped" her the whole way, she says. He watched her in the classroom and gave her materials, ideas and suggestions. "I didn't know how to make eighth-graders sit in their seats. Fred helped me with that."

Twelve years later, Rigsbee remains a teacher, and she is convinced that Westbrook and a subsequent mentor in Durham County -- both of them unofficial -- made the difference. (She is on leave from Brogden Middle School in Durham to work for the N.C. Department of Public Instruction in teacher recruiting and licensing.)

Until recently, for many teachers, the situation was little different from Rigsbee's first one, two decades ago. New teachers, often just out of college, were typically given the worst students and little guidance on curriculum and classroom management. Mentorships, or any formal on-the-job training programs, were haphazard -- if they existed at all.

"If Fortune 500 companies spent as little on staff development and training as we do in teaching, they'd close," says Phil Kirk, chairman of the State Board of Education and president of North Carolina Citizens for Business and Industry, the state's largest business lobby.

Ditto for Big Five accounting firms. Which is why new employees at Arthur Andersen LLP spend from a week to a month training at the office where they'll work, then another week to a month at the firm's St. Charles, Ill., school, says Phyllis Champion, the firm's national training coordinator. On average, new hires get 100 to 150 hours of training before going into the field. Once there, they work under the direct supervision of senior staff their first three years.

Sure, teachers do student-teaching stints while in school. But it's an...