The City University of New York wants to help the Department of Education tackle one of the most pressing problems for the city’s public school system: the shortage of math, science, foreign language, and special-education teachers.

CUNY is developing a special teacher-training program that would attempt to lure high-performing undergraduates into teaching careers, particularly in those subjects that are most difficult to staff.

“We feel an urgency about the need to educate teachers in high-need areas,” CUNY’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, Selma Botman, said.

Through its eight schools of education, CUNY already trains most of the city’s public school teachers and offers undergraduates teaching certification programs. Under the new program, called the CUNY Teachers’ Academy, the Department of Education would play a greater role in helping to design the curriculum of students enrolled.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education, Margie Feinberg, said it would be a “focused program that will meet our needs.” CUNY officials said the program would be developed within a year and would enroll around 200 students at first.

CUNY is modeling the Teachers’ Academy after its Honors College program, which attracts competitive high school applicants by offering enrolled students free tuition, a stipend, a free laptop computer, and special courses.

“The Teachers’ Academy will recruit dynamic students who are committed to improving the lives of urban youth,” CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, said at a speech before the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association. “It will embrace a cohort model for educating students across CUNY and build upon the best elements of existing programs.”

Some educators, however, are skeptical whether a separate teacher-training program will help alleviate the teacher shortages. A member of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, attributes the shortages to the difficult working conditions in the classrooms and to the pay scale of the teachers’ union contract, under which math and science teachers are compensated at the same level as teachers in other subjects.

“We can do whatever we want to recruit higher quality young adults,” Ms. Tisch said, “but until there’s the ability to pay commensurate to their quality, there’s no reason to believe we’ll hold onto them.”

The Department of Education has supported extra compensation for teachers in the harder-to-staff subjects. The union that represents the city’s public school teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, says it is opposed to pay differentiation because it says such a change to the contract would come at the expense of other teachers’ salaries.

The creation of the program is part of Mr. Goldstein’s efforts to enlarge CUNY’s role in the city’s public school system. CUNY has partnerships with more than a dozen New York City high schools and has also encouraged 11th- and 12th-graders to enroll in college level courses designed by CUNY under its “College Now” program.

Mr. Goldstein also announced yesterday the creation of a task force led by City College’s president, Gregory Williams, and a CUNY trustee, Valerie Lancaster Beal, to look into the problem of the poor academic performance of black men at CUNY colleges.