Teach For America (TFA) is an innovative program that draws thousands of talented individuals into public service.
In short, the program offers top-tier college graduates the opportunity to teach in high-needs schools for two years while earning a subsidized master's degree in education. Many corps members remain in the classroom, but continuing to teach beyond the two-year program is not an expectation. Thus, through a competitive application process, TFA recruits lots of really smart young people to teach in tough schools for a couple of years, and then many of them leave, ideally armed with a new on-the-ground understanding of poverty and education in America.
It's a compelling model, run and sustained by dynamic and altruistic people like founder Wendy Kopp, whose achievement at TFA will be recognized next month when she receives an honorary doctorate at Washington University in Saint Louis. Given its admirable mission, politically savvy leaders, and a power-class applicant pool culled from the most prestigious universities in the country, it makes sense that TFA has forged strong bonds of support at the highest levels. (President Obama praised the program during a bill-signing earlier this week.)
So let me be clear: I like Teach For America. Some of my closest friends and strongest colleagues are TFA members.
That said, I'm concerned that it's being propped up by many as a cure-all for America's education woes, when it is nothing of the kind. Teach For America currently contains 6,200 corps members, which constitutes about 0.16 percent of the 3.9 million K-12 teachers in America. And for many within that fraction of a percent, it's a two-year jump in the pool, not a long term endeavor.
In yesterday's New York Times, Thomas Friedman -- who I greatly admire -- leapt headfirst into the TFA-as-education-savior love-fest. He closed his column, which linked long term economic strength to a quality school system:
President Obama recognizes that we urgently need to invest the money and energy to take those schools and best practices that are working from islands of excellence to a new national norm. But we need to do it with the sense of urgency and follow-through that the economic and moral stakes demand.
With Wall Street's decline, though, many more educated and idealistic youth want to try teaching. Wendy Kopp... called the other day with these statistics about college graduates signing up to join her organization to teach in some of our neediest schools next year: "Our total applications are up 40 percent. Eleven percent of all Ivy League seniors applied, 16 percent of Yale's senior class, 15 percent of Princeton's...."Part of it, said Kopp, is a lack of jobs elsewhere. But part of it is "students responding to the call that this is a problem our generation can solve." May it be so, because today, educationally, we are not a nation at risk. We are a nation in decline...
Friedman's urgent excitement over TFA applications misses the larger picture.
Sure, many Ivy Leaguers are interested to work in underserved schools. TFA may represent an "island of excellence," as Friedman puts it, but it's not a replicable model, since the premise of its success is predicated on exclusivity. Its model of skimming the cream of America's top colleges to serve in 29 regions around the country (the Pacific Northwest is ostensibly on its own) is unequipped to strike at the heart of our costly teacher turnover crisis and its searing impact on our achievement gap.
Over 99.8 percent, a near-total, of America's teachers are not part of Teach For America. If we are serious about repairing our education downslide-- and I believe President Obama is-- we cannot look to TFA as our crucial beacon. Teach For America is a triumph of private sector innovation that should continue to be heartily supported and responsibly expanded, but its embedded exceptionalism innately limits it from modeling nationwide reform.
In 2007, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF) conducted an extensive and illuminating study on teacher turnover, which calculated an annual nationwide cost of over $7 billion for the replacement of people leaving the profession.
That's staggering, and doesn't take into account the invaluable institutional knowledge or student-teacher relationships lost when experienced teachers depart the job early and overwhelmed rookies run for the exit. The study's findings on the importance of recruiting and retaining quality teachers speak directly to the long term health of our education system-- and our economy.
Our country requires broadly-conceived initiatives to ensure that our schools in all 50 states are staffed with talented, well-trained, and well-supported teachers-- with or without that Princeton degree. We also need our leaders and opinion-makers to amplify these initiatives and their implementation, rather than excessively hyping one dynamic but relatively tiny nonprofit organization.
The NCTAF report's concise recommendations offer a sound recipe for better-staffed schools and higher student achievement:
1. Invest in new teacher support and development2. Target comprehensive retention strategies to at-risk schools
3. Track teacher turnover and its costs annually
4. Amend NCLB to hold school leaders accountable for turnover and its costs
5. Upgrade district data systems
I'd add to that list more competitive teacher salaries, more student loan forgiveness for educators, class size caps, less mania surrounding standardized testing, and more opportunities for teacher recognition and advancement. These are the tools that need more ink in the newspaper and more airtime in the president's speeches.
It's heartening and important that many Yalies want to teach in the Bronx, but even those best and brightest can't salvage this thing on their own.
Dan Brown is a teacher in Washington, DC, and the author of The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle. In 2003, he applied to Teach For America.
Until you work in the urban school system, it's really tough to make judgements. At my school, over 35% of staff members leave a YEAR. These school districts are not choosing between a TFA teacher and an experienced veteran teacher. As I mentioned previously, we do not have that luxury! Many TFA alums do stay teaching or in administrative roles. The education system is broken and instead we are focusing a nonprofit organization that aims to help fix this problem?
Is it fair? Probably not. But nobody said life was fair.
Like it or not, education remains a two-way street, and American Schools are bound to remain in the underperforming stature until administrators, students, and especially parents learn to partake in a certain extent of the responsibility themselves.
What if we did a complete revision of our educational system, one based on ideas of the 21st Century, not of the 19th Century, recoginzing the changes in families, parents role in educating their children in life, bring back some non-violent disipline and technology. We need to redo the leadership, with supertendents who get pay and benefits like corporate executives and too many other administrators. Most of all, we need to reform funding of all levels of education, on taxes based on income, not your home property taxes as in some states.
Additional year of study= life-long career, great benefits, approx. $35K starting salary.
Makes sense?
Why would you think picking the top students at Ivy League schools are the "best and brightest"? I would suggest that a good portion of them are well-connected, which isn't the same thing at all.
Secondly - we don't blame the assembly line workers or the materials for the demise of the US auto industry. Why do we insist on focusing all efforts for education reform on the teachers? Not to sound too capitalistic, but shouldn't we be focusing on the "CEOs" and "managers", ie. administrators, first?
Add t unwillingness to learn the basics of pedagogy (" I guess that's what it is").
Results--- a very mediocre teacher.
Suggestions--- elementary school multi-subject credential.
After thirty years in the classroom, I have observed that some of these traits can be obtained through education, but some are talents and skills that are honed through experience.
The worst teaching I have ever observed is teaching on the university level--all content, no process, as if talking is a teaching method.
Teaching is separate skill, differing from content knowledge. And only the worst teachers fail to understand that.
For a person who thinks high school students have no development issues, pedagogy education would be a must.
Think for a moment about why Friedman would be touting TFA and what else he touts and one wonders about the neoliberal program that fits TFA. In an era of retrenching, urban schools are Riffing regular teachers and replacing them with substitutes, people with "emergency" certificates, and yes, TFA teachers. What the latter groups have in common is that they are 1) much cheaper for the districts than regular teachers, 2) are almost completely untrained, are quite likely to leave after a short time, and 4) have no professional protection of their rights and work situations. Hiring them parallels the dumbing down of factory tasks so that untrained and uncomplaining robots and low-wage workers can do the work. Being bright and having the Harvard degree is no match for a trained and seasoned teacher. Research confirms this, no matter what the free-market kool-aid drinkers try to tell us.
We no longer teach children how to think but rather what to think. Until we start re-educating parents to be more involved in their childrens education and to also re-educate themselves to keep up with our expanding body of knowledge, we will continue to fall further behind the rest of the world. And at a time when we need better educated people to solve ever more complex problems we cut funding to education and make it so expensive people have to incur hundreds of thousand of dollars in debt. How about a socialist approach like Sweden, Norway, Denmark where education is free from daycare to graduate school. Wouldn't being better educated serve us better than building F-22 Raptors and Predator drones? Will the high point of humanity be that we went to the moon 50 years ago and never went anywhere else?
I agree with your premises, but also feel, like other commenters here, that the most crucial element about teacher turnover are weak administrators, lack of necessary support and teaching materials.
I am a TFA alum, (2003 coincidentially!). I taught for two years in an inner-city high school. My very first day at the school, I received a small box with a small box of chalk, my roll sheet, a blackboard eraser, and about 5 pieces of different color cardboard. That was it, for the entire school-year. The administrators always take students' sides. I constantly dealt with students using profanity toward me, and threatening me physically. The administrators hardly moved a finger or did anything.
TFA provided not only extensive training before and during our two-year commitment, but other types of support (materials, speakers, a program director who visited to observe/give feedback, etc.).
While providing great teachers is one of the missions and goals of TFA, another is to create leaders who will go into other industries, professions, with an understanding of the need that there is in these underserved schools/communities. Many others go on to leadership positions within the schools, as principals, assistant principals, etc.
I don't think TFA is "overhyped". If anything, it needs to be more broadly mentioned so there can be more candidates applying to the program.
1. Invest in new teacher support and development (TFA does this)
2. Target comprehensive retention strategies to at-risk schools (TFA must know why corps members leave)
3. Track teacher turnover and its costs annually (TFA trains teachers every single year and knows that cost)
4. Amend NCLB to hold school leaders accountable for turnover and its costs (many corps members go into school leadership and presumably believe in corps members sticking around)
5. Upgrade district data systems (TFA uses data to bolster its claim that corps members are successful)
The TFA model and knowledge can be applied to top graduates, but their model and knowledge can also be adapted for general use. You're right that we can't make TFA our silver bullet. But we can support TFA as one model of many (see: The New Teacher Project) for learning about teacher training, achievement, and retention.
But, I'm glad to see that Mr. Brown (even as a former TFA) has had enough experience in schools to recognize that thinking you know everything might be the first concern about TFA as savior.
TFA provides minimal training for what accounts to long-term substitutes. Yet districts allow anthropology graduates from Brown to teach Algebra (because they went to an Ivy League school, don't you know). Of course, only in the high-need districts. We would never let these inexperienced teachers work with "our" kids, only those "other" kids (please see the irony in those quotes). Everybody needs to think about that.
You can call that melodramatic if you want, but I know A LOT of teachers who got out of teaching. None of them got out because of the pay, lack of advancement, or the difficulties of teaching. They and I all left the profession because of the people we had to work for.
This issue NEVER seems to be discussed.
More here: http://www.publicschoolinsights.org/node/2365