WASHINGTON -- With the nation facing a severe shortage of teachers in coming years, Chicago Public Schools will serve as a model for innovative recruiting and retention, a panel of experts said Tuesday.

Chicago's efforts, which include reserving visas for foreign teachers and creating a "farm system" to recruit teachers locally, have drawn the attention of school administrators nationwide. But without government funding, programs like these -- designed to recruit, train and retain teachers in urban areas -- will not last long, the experts said.

"We need leaders to stand up for these urban schools," said Robert Rice, senior vice president and chief operating officer for the Council for Basic Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes a curriculum strong in traditional subjects. "We need Congress to work on these issues and provide funding."

Schools in the United States will have to fill an estimated 2.2 million teacher vacancies in the next decade, according to a study by the National Center for Education Information, a private nonpartisan research organization in Washington. The shortage is driven by two demographic trends: growing student enrollments and the looming retirements of thousands of baby boomer teachers.

Carlos Ponce, head of personnel at Chicago Public Schools, has experimented with solutions.

"Grow Your Own" is a program set up to identify Chicago high school students interested in teaching and provide them with scholarships to universities.

"In essence we're trying to build a farm system for Chicago public schools," Ponce said. "It's a small feed right now, but we want more students."

Of the projected 2.2 million teacher vacancies, roughly 700,000 will take place in urban systems, said David Haselkorn, president of Recruiting New Teachers, a national nonprofit organization committed to increasing the pool of new teachers.

Urban schools face more severe shortages than schools generally because they have more students, fewers resources and offer lower pay. Consequently, many urban districts have had to hire underqualified, inexperienced teachers for jobs in schools where students persistently post low test scores.

The need is greatest for teachers in math, science and special education. In Chicago, the Global Educator Program, begun last year, works with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to reserve visas for high-quality teachers from foreign countries in these short-staffed specialties.

"Since we couldn't get these teachers from local universities, we had to go outside of Chicago to get the people we need," Ponce said. "We've had no problem convincing foreign teachers to teach here in America."

Chicago also uses recruitment incentives, including salary advances as high as $5,000 for teachers in high-need subjects.

Chicago Public Schools will hire 3,000 teachers -- both for classrooms and as substitutes -- for the upcoming school year. During the 1999-2000 school year, 80.4 percent of 932 high-need teacher vacancies were filled, while 90 percent of the daily demand for 1,500 to 2,000 substitute teachers was met.

Shirley Schwartz, director of special programs for the Council of Great City Schools, a Washington-based association of large urban districts, said such districts usually fill between 70 percent and 75 percent of teaching vacancies.

But the nation's public schools can't expect policymakers to help without some assurance that more generous support will produce results, one expert warned.

"It is not feasible to push for more resources, especially state and federal sources, until people become convinced that they're not pouring money into a bad system," said Dr. Tom Loveless, a senior fellow in government studies at the Brookings Institution. "The perception of the public today is that urban schools are failing and those systems are failing. Any efforts to raise the resources for urban schools need to be tied very concretely to efforts to improve the quality of schooling in these systems."

Loveless feels that there is no shortage of teachers, but rather a problem with distribution of teachers. Brookings' studies estimate that there are 3 million teachers in private and public schools, while 6 million people have formal teacher training.

"What we have to think about is that we have 3 million teachers who aren't teachers," said Loveless. "That's a pool that's currently untapped."

(Jose Alfredo Flores can be contacted at flores78@yahoo.com)