TFA, Yea or Nay?

Two students debate Teach for America, the achievement gap and transforming the system.

By Amy Schiller and Mat Schutzer, Brandeis University
Monday April 10, 2006

Teach for America is a program for college graduates to commit to two years of teaching in low-income communities. In the highly competitive program, over 17,000 college graduates apply annually for about 2,100 positions. Campus Progress presents two views- pro and con- of this program and its methods.

"A stopgap social welfare program masquerading as a systemic transformation"
By Amy Schiller

When I tell my fellow college seniors that I don’t like Teach for America, I immediately become the Grinch who stole youthful idealism. Sure, the relentlessly optimistic and eager recruitment for TFA applicants on my campus can make me feel like Eeyore, but I need to clarify up front that I don’t disagree with the idea behind Teach for America: “We believe that the gap in educational outcomes that persists along socio-economic lines is our nation’s greatest domestic challenge. We believe that educational inequity must be our generation’s civil rights issue.” If anything, that statement is a decisive and powerful naming of an issue that too often goes unmentioned. Growing up in a diverse yet de facto segregated public school system (think of the book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?), I was familiar from an early age with the racial and socio-economic “achievement gap.” Only later, in college, have I analyzed the ways in which I have benefited from skewed access to quality education and the cultural norms that reinforce my motivation to learn. By all rights, I should be one of those outstanding future leaders with zealous passion for stamping out inequality in our schools.

Several critiques have already been mounted against Teach for America, regarding the under-preparedness of their teachers, the lack of retention, or the marketing of Teach for America as an unbeatable resume builder. “The program doesn’t encourage people to make a career-long commitment to teaching,” said Professor Maryann Dickar of the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University. “It assumes that you can come in for two years and make a difference, but it takes time to develop as a teacher, even if you come with a lot of potential.” Six weeks of training, no matter how intensive, is hardly enough to qualify even the smartest and most engaging college graduate to teach in a difficult classroom. You learn to control a classroom by working in a classroom, and a weak start will hamper your credibility throughout the year. Dickar also has said that schools waste resources and lower overall teacher morale by training a young crop of teachers who will leave the system after just a few years. Worse yet, a constant influx of fresh talent from TFA reduces schools’ incentive to address fundamental problems with teacher turnover and instability.

All of those factors are reasonable critiques, but none fully illustrates the bigger picture: that Teach for America program is a stopgap social welfare program masquerading as a systemic transformation. The TFA pitch certainly is appealing: You, an individual fresh-faced button-covered college student, can help turn around the most pervasive injustice in the country today. The problem with that notion is that the responsibility is placed on each individual teacher. TFA does a wonderful job of recruiting and selecting extremely talented and hardworking people to go into classrooms that could certainly benefit from more creativity and energy. But by focusing on individual autonomy in the classroom and praising the accomplishments of each teacher as individual initiators of change, TFA inflates the effect that teachers can have in school systems plagued by low parental involvement, incompetent administrators, and a cycle of poverty that instills hopelessness and disaffection from an early age. TFA seems to contradict its own message about systemic injustice by implying that each teacher can single-handedly lift their students’ test scores and motivation levels.

The whole program strikes my as a little reminiscent of the “thousand points of light,” the senior Bush’s glorification of volunteerism, the deeper implication being that social problems were not the government’s responsibility but rather an opportunity for ordinary citizens to care for each other without any outside interference. I can acknowledge that TFA sees its prospects for long-term change in the potential for its graduates to go on to succeed either in teaching or in other fields with a heightened consciousness of education inequality. TFA graduates could become successful business leaders who fund charter schools or policymakers who champion greater class and race integration. The program and its participants have tremendous potential, yet TFA has been around for fifteen years and in that time the achievement gap has widened exponentially.

To me, this is a simple case of the rhetoric not matching the reality. TFA posits itself as tackling this enormous issue and making a long term difference, when, really, the change it effects is more like the story of the girl throwing starfish back into the sea one by one. A truly dedicated and savvy teacher can make a difference to a few students, but there is a tipping point where reliance on talented do-gooders excuses larger institutions from implementing crucial reforms that might really improve the long-term prospects for poor children in the US. I would rather see that goal achieved than have an ever-increasing stable of well-intentioned but ineffectual overachievers attempting a Sisyphysian task.

"Energetically recruiting America’s brightest to join the teaching pool"
By Mat Schutzer

Depending on whom you ask, between 500 and 700 students from my alma mater, Columbia High School in New Jersey, walked out of school earlier this month to protest the current principal’s administration. Among their complaints was the terribly large achievement gap between black and white students. At Columbia High School, the higher level classes are taught by the best teachers, while students in the lower level classes are left with instructors from the bottom of the teaching pool. Neither the achievement gap nor the distribution of teaching skills is unique to Columbia. It is one of many schools, from elementary through high school, which are part of a national trend of educational failings and teacher shortages.

Consider this: fourth graders in the lowest-income school districts are reading and doing math three grade levels below their counterparts in higher income districts, according to a study by the National Center of Education Statistics. American school districts will require over two million teachers within the next decade, according to the National Education Association. Teach for America can and is changing those numbers.

Graduates of the nation’s most prestigious schools are actively and persistently recruited into the nation’s most prestigious careers and graduate schools. For way too long, this did not include teaching. America’s teachers come from two sources: interested education majors and then those for whom teaching is a fallback profession. Teach for America exists to correct the deficiencies that come from this trend. Teach for America is joining the ranks of graduate schools and top businesses by energetically recruiting America’s brightest to join the teaching pool. The exhaustive application and screening process ensures that only applicants who will be effective teachers and who have adequate knowledge in their subject areas will be stepping foot in the classroom.

After undergoing the rigorous screening process, Teach for America corps members undergo an intensive summer training seminar in teaching, a so-called teaching “boot camp.” They receive both theoretical and practical experience, writing and executing lesson plans for summer school students. Upon placement and hiring in a school district, corps members are required to fulfill the same certification and continuing education requirements as every other teacher in the district. Furthermore, unlike many teachers, corps members are not education majors, meaning they have devoted the last four years of their college education to gathering knowledge in other subjects, possibly the very subjects they need to know in order to effectively teach. Though not everyone who knows calculus can teach it (the TFA application process weeds those out), you can’t teach calculus unless you know it. The program is effective. Students in classes taught by Teach for America corps members perform better in math and equivalently in reading when compared to experienced teachers recruited the traditional way, according to an independent study by Mathematical Policy Research.

The income achievement gap is indeed a huge chasm in American education. And though TFA makes no claims to offering a federal policy solution for this incredibly huge and complex problem, the program is more than a short-term band-aid. While Teach for America members are only required to pledge two years to teaching in their appointed school district, very few leave the issue of educational equity behind once their time is up. Some corps members remain in their schools, or in their regions, working for Teach for America. Others go on to graduate school in education or public policy school or law school, where they can learn to create change in the field of higher education outside of the classroom. Others enter different fields entirely, and use their careers as tools to help low-income students by participating in, for example, career mentoring programs. For all corps members, the end of their two years may be the end of classroom teaching, but it is never the end of their commitment to ending the income achievement gap. Certainly our nation needs to focus on building and sustaining a happy, successful teaching corps at all of our nation’s public schools, but if the TFA program also creates powerful advocates for teachers and students who can make their voices heard more loudly through business, law, or government, isn’t that important too?

The critics are correct: Teach for America cannot possibly overcome the many social factors that contribute to the income achievement gap in American education. However, the critics are ultimately wrong: that’s not what Teach for America is trying to do. It is not a complete solution to the many problems plaguing our education system. Teach for America is “build[ing] the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting some of our nation’s most promising future leaders in the effort,” according to the organization’s website. They are raising awareness of a terrible inequity in our society while at the same time redirecting the bounty of talented young American recent college grads into solving one piece of the problem. And where’s the harm in that?

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Comments
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1. This is a well-rounded look at a timely issue. I’m especially interested in the question of retention that Ms. Schiller mentions – how do we keep and retain talented recent college graduates to do the good work of the world?

   Retention is something I’m particularly proud of in my own organization, Green Corps.

   Green Corps has a similar strategy to TFA: we recruit the top student leaders in a competitive process (25 fellowships/positions available out of 800-1000 applications each year), and put our fellows through a rigorous training and placement process.

   Of course, we do this on political environmental campaigns (passing global warming legislation, protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, etc).

   We’re building a pipeline for young leaders to become top-notch organizers and full-time activists. But it’s no good if we don’t have people in it for the long haul.

   At Green Corps, we have 85% of our 200+ graduates (dating back to 1993) currently working in the environmental and social change field.

   I think our keys to success is the quality of our training program and the close oversight, mentoring and community that you build with your Green Corps class and alumni network. TFA might be able to improve if they beef up their oversight of corps members, look how to build more community, and invest people in the long-term vision of transforming education in the U.S. Green Corps succeeds on that level through a lot of time invested in the top talent coming right from college and maintaining close contact with them after they graduate through alumni trainings, networking and events.

   Overall, I think it is clear that we need both more TFA and more Green Corps style programs. It has become a cliché to mention that we (the left/progressive/enviros/whatevers) are historically short-sided in how we approach politics. Cliché but still true. Kudos to young people thinking of how to change the world, but mad props to individuals and organizations that are figuring out how to train and retain these people for the long haul.

   – Jesse Littlewood
   Recruitment Director
   Green Corps
   jesse@greencorps.org
   www.greencorps.org— Jesse Littlewood - Apr 13, 01:12 PM - #
   
   

2. First it’d help to clarify the facts on which studies seem to disagree: How many TFA alums stay in the teaching field? How many go on to other education-related fields? How do classroom outcomes differ for TFA vs. non-TFA teachers in longitudinal studies?

   But regardless of the success of TFA in working with individual students and training leaders, Amy and Mat are right to identify TFA as an inadequate solution on the macro level. The efforts of individual TFAers should complement, not substitute for, advocacy for better policy to address educational disparities. TFA is in danger of being seized and manipulated by neoliberals opposed to investing in better recruitment, training, and treatment for long-term public school teachers, who probably have more chance to really impact upon the kids in their communities.

   Perhaps TFA could reframe its publicity better, so as not to suggest that its individual members will solve a major problem singlehandedly, but rather will learn about a serious problem and incorporate awareness of it into their professional lives. TFA could emphasize the way in which micro level teaching and macro level advocacy can reinforce each other throughout the lifetime of TFA alums, rather than give an implicit sense that the former can substitute for the latter.

   — Ava Morgenstern - Apr 13, 03:42 PM - #
   
   

3. The answer to Ms. Littlewoods question of how to retain this fresh talent… pay them what they deserve.

   — Elise Boos - Apr 16, 09:04 PM - #