In all my time as an education and play advocate I have often glazed over my teaching experience. I mention I'm a former teacher and leave it at that. Why am I so closeted about it? Come closer and I'll tell you the secret I've been keeping, but please promise not to tell. Pinky swear? OK. I'm a Teach For America alum. Not only that, I am also a former staff member. Shhh, keep it down! Don't gasp like that. Someone will hear you! Why have I kept quiet about this? Because mentioning it makes people squirm. They get shifty. They get a fake smile on their face. Sometimes they look at their feet, as if they need to make sure they are still attached to their legs. Sometimes they want to debate me about the good vs. bad of the organization, but regardless it's never an easy conversation. So I've avoided it until now.
Many educators don't like TFA. They think TFA teachers take over jobs held by veteran teachers and flaunt their success despite their lack of "proper" teacher training. They feel TFA isn't interested in creating teachers, but rather is looking to create an army of charter school founders, policy makers and corporate reformers that will align with its mission. Well, OK. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I'm not going to deflate those arguments today. That's for another column. Rather, I'm going to share my experience.
Before I keep going, I'd like to state that I know a thing or two about the teaching community. My mother is a veteran teacher. All her closest friends were teachers and, like most American kids, I was taught by teachers. Then I became a teacher. Then I started my site Let Children Play where I write about and work with teachers as an advocate for kids. Then I had three of my own kids and sent them to school where they were taught by teachers and I'm friends with teachers now! I understand the pain that is felt in the teaching community over the wave of new teachers, programs, and funding flooding the education community. It's not surprising that resentment is so rampant, but it saddens me to know that this resentment inhibits kids from getting the education they need for a world more innovative and competitive than any we have ever seen. Each day adults battle over the traditions of the teaching profession is one more day wasted, and when our kids can't successfully negotiate life's challenges they will resent us for being unable to see that their futures were more important than our disagreements.
These days I work as a play and education advocate and I have my time with Teach For America to thank for inspiring me to do this work. When I became a TFA teacher I never knew I couldn't succeed in the classroom. I was set up to believe, that despite the odds, I would. Neither failure nor mediocrity were options.
The experience taught resilience. It taught me flexibility. It taught me how to hold my ground with 21 wiggly kindergarteners. It taught me how to reach people I had nothing outwardly in common with. Instead I had to reach inside for the most intrinsic human experiences on which to build relationships. Most importantly I came to understand that our children are more important than anything else in the world and we must work with urgency to ensure their health and happiness. It is with this urgency now that I work each day as an advocate for children on Let Children Play.
I don't believe Wendy Kopp, founder of TFA, ever set out to fix our education problems with teachers that would teach for two years. She knows this isn't a solution; it is only one step in educating young people on all that needs to be done to make lasting social change. Many TFA alums stay in the classroom. Many don't. Regardless I have never met a TFA teacher that was not profoundly altered by their experience. Whether they loved it or hated it, their eyes were opened, their mind engaged in a vision of how they believe our schools should be run. Whether they are critical of the movement or supportive doesn't matter. Kopp has achieved her goal of starting a new conversation, opening a new window through which young people pass, altered and alert to the problems we face as a nation. There is nothing that can take the place of that sort of encounter. They will go forth and take part actively in their society, working for the change they believe in.
We can save this generation of kids if we put aside our resentment and fear and begin to accept that never again will our schools look as they have for the past fifty years. Whether we like it or not, our culture is moving forward. The important thing is to find how we can contribute in a positive way to this change.
Follow Megan Rosker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@megrosker
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Refer to http://reconsideringtfa.wordpress.com/ for more on why TFA is not meeting its mission.
My criticism of TFA is not done out of resentment, but about what good public policy should be.
After finishing my first year in the corps, I am not returning. 5 weeks of training is hardly adequate for learning what you should know in order to be able to teach a class of 30 middle schoolers. I have always wanted to teach, care about the achievement gap, and am very hardworking. But after a year of working with my full heart and mind to help my students succeed, I'm through having things thrown at me, coping with extreme disrespect, having my classroom vandalized, spending hours planning lessons I don't teach because I can't get students to be quiet for the 15 minutes it would take to complete the lesson.
TFA threw me into a classroom after barely training me or even preparing me for the challenges of teaching in an urban environment, and I've spent the entire year trying to figure out how exactly I'm supposed to combat these challenges. This was not fair to me or my students.
If we really want the "best and brightest" to teach...why don't we train them adequately instead of leaving them to fend for themselves?
But they were different teachers.
Your kids weren't best friends with every kid in the school, either. But they connected with some kids. Much like they connected with some teachers. Other kids had other best friends, and other favorite teachers.
That's not much of an argument for letting unprepared kids who are only really qualified to be substitutes or classroom aides into the school and pretending that they're "teachers."
The simple truth is that while some fantastic teachers do devote themselves to teaching in low-income communities long-term, for the most part, people don't want to make careers of teaching in the worst schools. And there's very little being done systemically to convince them otherwise.
I think you are grossly mischaracterizing the qualifications of TFA teachers. First of all, they aren't just any folks with a college degree. The organization selects its teachers through an rigorous application process, looking for people with proven track records of high achievement and perseverance. As a TFA corps member, your official teaching institute lasts for just 5 weeks, true, but the full scale of your training begins before that with about a dozen books you need to read, and extends throughout the duration of your commitment with state-approved teacher prep coursework.
Now I'm not going to tell you that this is a viable substitute for 4 years of college teacher prep work, but it's not meant to be for everyone. For some people it is sufficient, and those are the people that TFA is trying to select. It is meant to augment, not replace, the overall pool of educators.
Consider this: TFA is often used, they claim, to fill "hard to fill" positions. Because real teachers don't want the job, they fill it with a revolving door of unqualified TFA'ers. If they didn't, there's a much better chance that the district might eventually have to give teachers higher pay for the unattractive prospect of working there, leading to a much more stable staff in the long term. That'd be good for the students that go there, though admittedly the 22-year-olds looking to polish a resume would have one fewer option.
We like to compare ourselves to countries like Finland in order to convince people we need corporate-minded reforms. However, Finland's teacher education program is so rigorous, many people are weeded out before they step foot into a classroom. I hold a M.A. from a prestigious university, but I know that 5 weeks of TFA training would not prepare me to stand in front of a classroom full of disadvantaged students. A Federal Court recently ruled that the U.S. Dept. of Education could no longer label TFA teachers as "highly qualified". There are so many layers to teaching that go way beyond expertise in subject matter (child psychology, classroom management, pedagogical methodology, etc.). I suppose if the goal is to get students to "perform" on high-stakes tests, then TFA teachers will do just fine.
I live in a district that has a surplus of teachers (both out-of-work and graduates), but TFA ships in hundreds of new recruits every year. Why do you suppose that is? Until we start treating teachers and their profession with the respect they deserve, we can forget about improving public education.
1) No school district is forced to hire TFA...and many choose not to. When a district works with TFA, they must agree to a variety of terms....and must pay TFA a certain amount (since TFA provides support and training beyond what the district does). Ultimately, Teach For America is present when a school district ASKS them to come in. So, in that regard, it sounds like your real issue lies with superintendents and less with TFA itself.
2) Respect is earned. There are many great teachers out there, but there are many who are not. Ultimately, we need to pay teachers more, give them more authority...and then expect more from them. Sadly, in this country, our society's "respect" for a profession is strongly correlated with the salary. But I also don't think you should just give raises to people for just showing up. I'm not in favor of "merit pay" based solely on test scores....but there does need to be a way to recognize top teachers.
No one will ever convince me that replacing veteran teachers with recruits who have had five weeks of training is good for public education. It certainly is not respectful to the teaching profession.
"These days I work as a play and education advocate...", seriously? You can make a living doing this, where do I sign up?
Done. Nope. Wendy Kopp is part of the problem, though.
(I am someone who generally supports TFA)
Life is becoming harder for educators because politicians and taxpayers, who generally know very little about education, keep thinking they can squeeze more and more performance out of the schools with less and less public investment. As politicians continue to make the jobs of teachers harder, the unfortunate truth is that people staying in the profession forever is actually not going to be productive. Education needs advocates outside of the classroom, in positions of power and even just as regular joes in other professions, spreading awareness about what is going on.
You don't have to agree with what TFA does or with its philosophy, but a lot of strong critics of TFA are missing a huge opportunity to partner with TFA teachers, themselves. If you don't see TFA as a new and potentially powerful tool for education advocacy, you're looking at the situation myopically.