Advice for My Students: DON'T "Teach For America"

While I respect that my students might be excited to join an organization that says it is dedicated to getting young and talented people into classrooms with our most needy students, there is literally nothing positive that Teach For America offers my students that they cannot do for themselves.
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As fall semester slides into the holidays, most of my senior students turn their attention to full time student teaching. They also begin to think very seriously about how to enter the job market for new teachers beginning their careers in the Fall. It can be a harrowing time. In addition to being responsible for teaching a full load of students full time and engaging in deep capstone projects based on that teaching, they have to plan how they will seek out and apply for jobs. Adulthood and difficult choices lie directly on the other side of the most challenging work they have ever done. I certainly cannot find fault if any of them approach it all with at least some trepidation mingled with their excitement.

So it is unsurprising that I occasionally have students who apply for and are selected to join Teach For America. Their reasons are varied. TFA publicly espouses many values that are congruent with my students' sense of vocationalism in service of their future students. TFA offers to take the confusion out of the job application process by helping them find a classroom somewhere they may have never considered on their own. TFA carries with it an aura of selectivity and prestige, and certainly by this point in its history, the organization has connections and influence among the powerful in education policy.

However, I have advice for my students regarding applying for or accepting a position with Teach For America: Don't do it.

I don't come to this advice lightly, and while I respect that my students might be excited to join an organization that says it is dedicated to getting young and talented people into classrooms with our most needy students, there is literally nothing positive that Teach For America offers my students that they cannot do for themselves. And what they package with those positives is entirely negative for our profession. There are a number of truths about TFA that my students should consider before seeking an application.

First, Teach For America needs my students far more than they need TFA. TFA may be influential, and the competitive nature of their system may seem prestigious, but my students do not need Teacher For America anywhere nearly as much as TFA needs them. Anyone willing to join TFA is making two positive commitments: 1) I will go anywhere and 2) I will teach students from vulnerable families and communities. Well, if you are willing to do that, and you hold a valid teaching certificate, there are precious few barriers keeping you from doing just that on your own. Many states practice reciprocal certification with other states, and in other cases, fairly minor additional requirements are all that is necessary. For already credentialed teachers, TFA is just a middleman that makes the process of finding a job in another state less stressful, but it is hardly necessary. I know a great many of my students are deeply committed to working with students in poverty, and I applaud them for that. They don't need TFA.

On the other hand, TFA does need them, or, perhaps more accurately, TFA looks better every time a fully qualified, licensed teacher joins their corps. My students who have joined TFA arrived vastly more prepared and ready to teach than most other corps members. They have studied child psychology, education law, general methods of teaching and content specific methods, evaluation, classroom management, and they have completed full subject majors in the content they intend to teach. Teachers who graduate from my program also have spent 100s of hours in experienced teachers' classrooms where they have worked one on one with students, led classroom activities, shadowed teachers' lesson plans, and planned and taught guest lessons - all before their full time student teaching began. Our entire program is premised on the belief that learning to teach requires careful and thoughtful entry into the classroom using ideas and skills learned from both college faculty and from practicing teachers, and it is premised on thoughtfully planned experiences in classrooms that are crucial at every stage of learning to teach. My graduates have also completed capstone projects working closely with our faculty examining the evidence of how their teaching has promoted student learning - and they have done so using substantive evidence rather than standardized test scores. Further, they have passed difficult examinations of their content knowledge as required by the state of New Jersey, they have maintained GPAs well above their college peers, and all of their programs of study are subject to demanding accreditation requirements.

Compare that to Teach For America's perspective that all new teachers really need is a great attitude and a summer training institute. While all first year teachers, even those who are exceptionally well prepared, will find the experience more than the sum of their preparation, it is without question that TFA corps members who have actually studied to become teachers are vastly more ready than their counterparts who have not.

My students also benefit TFA in another manner: they all intend to stay classroom teachers. This isn't something they suddenly decided to do. This isn't a means for them to "give back" on their way to something else. This is a career they have been thinking about since they were much younger and to which they have dedicated their entire time in college to entering. TFA likes to claim that a huge percentage of their corps members "stay in education," but they use marketing language to paper over the issue. Consider TFA's claim that 4 out of 5 alumni of TFA work "in education or with low income families." TFA also claims that "the most common profession for TFA alumni" is teaching. These are cleverly stated, but hardly as impressive as TFA wants you to believe. The first claim is worded to encourage you to believe that up to 80% of TFA alumni are working directly in schools, especially in low-income schools, but it obviously means no such thing and can mean something entirely unexpected if the definition of working "in education" is treated very loosely. Finish TFA, go to law school, and end up working with education "foundations" or fake grassroots and advocacy organizations pushing various elements of today's testocracy and that easily slots in with TFA's claim. Whether "the most common profession" of former corps members being teaching is impressive or not depends entirely on how many other professions are counted and how large a percentage stay in teaching as a career. 50% teaching out of 20 professions total would be far more impressive than, say, 15% of 20 professions. The language TFA selects is precisely chosen to obfuscate those distinctions.

Survey research
conducted with Dr. Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard University has better news for TFA in this regard than many critics might expect, but hardly great news compared to traditionally prepared and hired teachers. The study, conducted with TFA cohorts beginning 2000, 2001, and 2002 found that 60.5% taught in K-12 beyond their initial 2 year commitment, and 35.5% taught more than four years with 27.8% still teaching in their fifth year. 43.6% of TFA members continued teaching at their initial school past two years, but that number dropped to 14.8% at the end of four years. Traditionally prepared education majors made up only 3.34% of corps members surveyed, but 71.3% of them taught longer than four years - well more than double of other corps members.

While not a significant portion of corps members, traditionally prepared teachers placed by TFA help bolster their image by being far more ready to teach than their modal corps members and by staying in teaching for far longer. So when my students join TFA, they get help finding a job they could have found for themselves, and their preparation and career aspirations help TFA look better.

Second, Teach For America will challenge my students' beliefs about quality education....but not in a good way. Teach For America likes to claim that they do not favor charter schools over fully public schools in their placements, claiming that they place twice as many corps members in district schools as are placed in charters. This means that basically a third of corps members get placed in charter schools - which doesn't sound like a preference until you look at the numbers. There are just over 6000 charter schools in the country, enrolling roughly 2.3 million students. That's roughly 4.6% of the public schools in the country, and charter schools are only 10% or more of public schools in Arizona, Colorado, and the District of Columbia. According to the Alliance for Public Charter Schools, charter schools account for 30% or more of schools in only 12 districts nationwide, and there are 147 districts in the country where charter schools comprise 10% or more of the K-12 enrollment in the district. There are over 14,000 public school districts in the United States. The nation's largest school district, New York City, only enrolls 7% of its students in charters while Los Angeles enrolls 21% and Chicago 14%.

So, sure, Teach For America does not favor charter schools - until you look at how its placements in charters vastly outstrips the percentage of schools that are charters nationwide or the percentage of students in our three largest cities who are enrolled in charters.

And the charter sector as a whole should give my students pause. I always tell my students to look very closely at the schools that offer them jobs to see if the school climate and leadership align with their own values, and that goes double for charter schools which are privately managed, rarely unionized, and whose leadership remains opaque to any scrutiny. With 6000 charter schools in the country, I will not categorically tell my students to never work in one, but they have to be on the lookout for schools engaging in outright financial fraud, schools whose real estate and management arrangements actively harm/steal from the communities that host them, and school chains that boast high test scores but also engage in disciplinary practices that violate everything my students have learned about caring for all children. In New York City, TFA has a strong relationship with Success Academy, a controversial "no excuses" charter chain that has extremely high test scores, but whose academic culture is high pressure to the point of demeaning children and whose disciplinary practices routinely result in suspension of Kindergarten children.

My students have been taught to fulfill a promise that all children deserve an equitable opportunity to learn, not that the only children who deserve to be in school are the ones who can quickly conform to an exercise in extreme behavior modification. But TFA has a significant preference for working with schools that do just that and then brag that they are "closing the achievement gap." That should worry any professional educator's sense of ethics.

Teach For America's own record of helping its own corps members is open to question as well. A growing number of TFA "alumni" are publicly sharing their stories of how the organization failed them and their students. Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig of California State Sacramento shares the story of his former student who, against his advice, joined Teach For America and was placed in a "Knowledge is Power Program" (KIPP) charter school:

Shame has a terrible place in this organization. I never believed that shame would become a motivator in my Teach for America experience, but shame holds onto the necks of many Corps members. Placing young college graduates in some of the toughest teaching situations with 5 weeks of training has negative repercussions on the mind, body, and soul of Corps members. The message is "If only I were stronger, smarter and more capable, I could handle this. I would be able to save my students."

My students understand that having a robust support and collegial system is crucial for good teaching, both for novices and experienced teachers, and this is validated by research demonstrating that schools with "integrated" professional cultures do the best at serving the needs of teachers at all experience levels. It is unconscionable that TFA would take college graduates with no training in education and leave them with both minimal preparation and entirely inadequate support systems. Worse, many former corps members explain that TFA substitutes what amounts to a cartoonish version of "grit" for actual professional learning, support, and development.

TFA appears frighteningly unconcerned with the school conditions and philosophies where they place corps members, plainly favoring working with schools engaged in practices that do not affirm educational equity. Further, TFA fails to provide what is critical for the development of good teaching and expert teachers, preferring shallow mantras over the complex and uncertain work of professional learning. My students are vastly more qualified than most corps members, but they should know that TFA will not help them grow further in any careful or deliberate manner.

Third, Teach For America denigrates our profession, ultimately harming children in the process. Recently, the Center For American Progress announced its campaign called "Teach Strong" based on nine principles that are supposed to "modernize and elevate" the profession of teaching. The campaign so far has some very strange bedfellows. Both national teacher unions have signed on as well the as the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, an organization of the nation's accredited university-based teacher preparation programs. Teach for America is also a partner as well as the fairly odious "National Council of Teacher Quality," a self-appointed watchdog of teacher "quality" whose signature "study" of teacher preparation quality was conducted by reading online course catalog materials. Seated at the table with some allies but also with organizations long connected to the research on learning to teach and tasked with helping to improve and "elevate" teaching as a profession, one might think that TFA would take a good hard look at their own contribution. Having signed on to a program whose stated principles include "reimagine teacher preparation to make it more rooted in classroom practice and a professional knowledge base, with universal high standards for all candidates" and "provide significantly more time, tools, and support for teachers to succeed, including through planning, collaboration, and development" one might assume that Teacher For America would be willing to reconceptualize their own "preparation" of corps members with nothing more than summer training institute and demonstrably uneven and inadequate support systems once they enter the classroom.

You would think that, but you'd be wrong.

In fact, TFA's CEO, Elisa Villanueva Beard, told The Washington Post that they see no need to change their training program, saying, "We do great, very rigorous pre-training work."

It has been clear for some time that TFA is on the side of teacher professionalism that honestly does not care if teaching is a lifelong profession. Consider their obvious favoritism for urban charter schools, which frequently welcome unlicensed, short term, teachers who are easily molded into the school's way of operating without any pesky baggage like existing pedagogical knowledge or classroom experience. TFA's perspective on this is well summed up by their founder, Wendy Kopp, who opined, "Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers....The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years." (emphasis added)

What Ms. Kopp is describing is not teacher growth and development as familiar to those who have dedicated their lives to teaching children, and I doubt that even former corps members who remained teachers would agree with her. She is describing school models that have such narrow behavioral expectations for both students and teachers that "development" is a matter of drilling people into a single, precise, way of going about business, and the preference for barely trained TFA recruits makes absolute sense because they are more easily molded. This is closely tied to TFA's continued insistence that its training model is up to the task of preparing young people with no teaching experience and no undergraduate teacher training for work in schools with our nation's most vulnerable children. The model is painfully inadequate as career teacher and former TFA corps member Gary Rubinstein has repeatedly noted in his blogging. More recently, the Network for Public Education has hosted stories from TFA alumni highlighting their lack of preparation for the often complex classroom situations into which they were placed and the lack of continued support needed to help them and their students thrive. Nothing about the stories host there or in the "preparation" paradigm practiced by TFA does much of anything to "elevate" our profession.

TFA likes to boast about their alumni who are leaders in education, and to be sure, there's a long list of such alumni who have occupied influential and highly visible positions from which they have wielded power over our public schools. Sadly, as Gary Rubinstein also observed, a great deal of that influence has been entirely negative. TFA's brand of education "leaders" are at the forefront of closing neighborhood schools in favor of opaque charters, using test scores to evaluate teachers, and breaking teacher unions. In this school of thought, there are no problems in education of vulnerable children that require increased resources and the dedication of experienced professionals. Rather, all that are needed are energetic but easily replaceable novices, a "no excuses" attitude, and school management that is relieved of any open and democratic accountability. This runs counter to everything we know about our most successful schools. Experienced teachers are more effective than novices. Money and resources matter in educational opportunity and outcomes. Wealthier districts have greater rates of teacher retention, significant levels of parental and community involvement and oversight - and higher test scores. If TFA and its alumni leaders truly cared about righting the inequities in our public education system, they would demand that teachers and students in high poverty districts have equitable situations with their peers in wealthy districts. Instead of denigrating teachers for failing to be comic book heroes, they could shine a clear light on the insanity of calling on teachers to fix some of the greatest injustices in our society armed with nothing more than youthful energy and attitude.

However, there is no sign that TFA or its enablers in board rooms, school districts, and legislative bodies across the country have the least interest in doing so. It is past time for young people to stop lining up to "Teach For America," and there is no reason that my students - who have earned the title of professional teacher through years of hard work - should ever join them. I work with amazing and talented young people, many of whom are passionate about working with our schools' most at risk children. They can do that brilliantly, and more effectively, without Teach For America.

A version of this post can be found at danielskatz.net.

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