Loving to Hate Teach For America.

I’m not sure why people love to hate Teach for America so much. I mean, I sort of get it. It’s problematic that you have all of these young, white, mostly privileged kids poring into poor urban and rural schools for two years. They’re not well-trained. They might not be committed. It’s inherently kind of ickily classist.

And a recent rant by an NYC Teaching Fellows alum kind of sums all that up. These are just Lehman Brothers-bound rich kids slumming it for a couple of years to get “job experience” and the kids are the ones who suffer, she writes.

The first three drop down tags at the top of the TFA website read, “What We Do,” “The Core Experience,” “After the Corps.” Teaching is not a career for this organization, it is an “experience.” You can write about it in your annual Christmas letter and show up your cousins who went straight to law school instead of differing for two years to work in the inner city. You now have some “cred” when talking about why No Child Left Behind sucks. Oh, and, of course, you can put it on your resume.

Except I’m not at all sure that’s true. Firstly, children get new teachers every year anyway. Anna in Education would have us believe there’s some value in have some constancy in the schools for poor kids whose lives are anything but, and that’s fair. But did you ever go visit your old teacher? I didn’t. The nostalgia for last year’s class lasts about a week, I would guess. And if there’s a teacher that touched your life so profoundly, those effects probably don’t go away just because that teacher is no longer in the old classroom you don’t go by any more. And I think it’s a hard case to make that kids feel rejected or suffer a sense of abandonment when teachers move on. If they notice at all, it probably pales in comparison to the fact that they have classrooms packed into a renovated janitor’s closet.

Also, she says that turnover is built in to the TFA system, as if that’s not true of every job, particularly ones that recruit recent college grads. Anecdotally, I’ve known more people who leave Teaching Fellows after a short tenure than TFA, because Teaching Fellows got kind of mixed reviews on the support system they provided teachers. More than that, if the founder, Wendy Kopp, is to be believed, 60 percent of its alum stay in education. That’s not a fact that they advertise, she said, because they actually want to recruit students who don’t believe they’re going to be teachers. They want to emphasize the people who move on because they want to get students who otherwise wouldn’t consider a career in education. It’s no secret that the top students from the top schools aren’t rushing to get certified, and that makes sense.

The tactic isn’t new, either. Teaching shortages have long forced schools, especially the kinds that TFA staffs, to look in unconventional sources. There are new non-profits popping up all the time to lure and train career changers, and in 2001 schools were recruiting from overseas, and that included efforts to mitigate chronic shortages in New Orleans. And those shortages go back a really long time.

Anna also laments the fact that TFA teacher’s aren’t required to get a master’s degree. But not every state requires a master’s, and there’s not much evidence that it predicts teacher quality, anyway. The organization creates financial incentives in some states for students to go to graduate school, and why create a disincentive by requiring something that can cost a lot of money when the state board of education hasn’t required it?

So of course, Teach for America has its problems. And of course it’s no good to lose the kind of skills and institutional memory that long-term teachers have. But a fresh face who believes they can change the world isn’t the worst kind of person to put in a flailing school. My fondest memories of school involved teachers that were young and brand new. My worse teacher ever was a year away from retirement, and I hated every minute of her classroom and didn’t learn a thing. More than that, these are schools that without TFA would simply do without. They would combine classrooms or beg teachers ready to retire to stay one more drawn out year.

However imperfectly, Teach for America is doing what no one else has figured out how to do; recruit really well-qualified young people to consider one of the hardest, least-respected, most poorly-paid careers out there. Why all the hate?

quadmoniker

Monica is a reporter who lives in Washington D.C.

Latest posts by quadmoniker (see all)

  • My beef with TFA has been about 2 things: 1- As mentioned above, I don’t like the idea of tossing some of these college grads into urban and rural schools. Sure, our schools need bright teachers, but too often these folks have this save the poor ghetto child mentality which can hurt rather than help. 2- TFA has turned down several people I know (including self) who were both qualified and familiar with the communities they were trying to serve. I find that reeeeeallllyyyy odd.

  • Well said, QM. I have a slightly different perspective of TFA. They recruited heavily at my HBCU and I have friends from every college who joined. Some hate it, some love it, but I think overall, it’s a pretty good program.

    I mean, just the sheer energy recent college grads bring to the classroom is invaluable.

  • WestIndianArchie

    I’ve known a two folks who’ve done it, member of my extended fam taught in MS, and an ex-girlfriend who teaches in Phoenix.

    They said that the minority and education majors – the folks who had some sort of commitment to either education or the communities – aren’t the preferred candidates.

  • douglafem

    They said that the minority and education majors – the folks who had some sort of commitment to either education or the communities – aren’t the preferred candidates.

    why is that? that seems a little counterproductive to me.

  • verdeluz

    I can’t say I don’t understand the other side of the argument. As the post you linked to pointed out, experience is an immensely helpful tool for a teacher. When you start teaching, it takes a while to get your bearings, and high hopes and good intentions do nothing to change that (they do fuel bitterness and disillusionment later on, though). I think I did alright my first year, but there was tons of room for improvement. There still is. It’s overwhelming at times. I wonder if it’s not just as easy for fly-by-night teachers to just shrug their shoulders, mentally check out, and look ahead to whatever comes next.

    At the same time, I have to agree with your point about actually having a teacher in the classroom. Doubling the number of students in a classroom halves the effectiveness of the best of teachers. If the person that’s there to share the load is inexperienced and not dedicated to long-term service.. oh well, I guess. (The argument Anna makes about TFA, etc. teachers moving on after a year or two is prett weak when seen in the light of teacher burnout rates in general- a fair number of those who *plan* to make it their career end up bailing within a couple of years.) Maybe some reform is in order. The uber-selectiveness of these people has always been weird to me. But generally, I’m with you- I don’t think these programs can be all bad.

  • quadmoniker

    WestIndianArchie: I have to say, I have a hard time believing they came right out and said minority candidates aren’t the preferred candidates. I have no doubt that minorities are shamefully underrepresented, but coming out and saying that would be a serious violation of some civil rights laws.

    About the education major thing, they do say that, because they say education majors are committed to being educators anyway. As an organization, they say they want to capture the people who don’t necessarily thing they are going to do it. I completely agree that young teachers probably know less than experienced onces. But I don’t know that the turnover rate is as high as the poster thinks it is, or as verdeluz pointed out, that the turnover rate is probably high anyway.

    I should say here, by way of disclaimer, that I applied to, and was accepted for, TFA in New York City. I turned it down because I didn’t want to do it. And I am from a poor southern rural community, and could probably have just as easily been placed in one of those sites. I know both TFA and teaching fellows teachers, and both programs seem to have their pluses and minuses. If we paid teachers what they should get paid, we probably wouldn’t need either.

  • quadmoniker

    I meant to say I agreed with verdeluz’s point that the turnover rate is probably high anyway. it came out confusing.

  • Dionne

    I’ve known three people who went through the Teach for America program and all are still teachers. People even told me I should apply, but I never did. I believe in the program because these recent graduates bring energy and a new perspective to the classroom. Yes, some of these teachers don’t necessarily identify with children from urban areas but it’s also about a dual learning model where the students learn from the teachers and vice-versa.

  • Jaedee

    I am in TFA, and I believe the program is what you make of it. I teach special ed in Compton along with another TFAer. We make up the special ed department. The district could not get any other teachers to teach our students. We have the students with severe behavior problems on top of learning disabilities. They are amazing students with potential that has been overlooked due to their label as special ed. Am I going to teach after my two years? Yes I am and so is my colleague. Don’t hate on us!

  • MGIB

    I am a TFA alumni and I left TFA to become a school counselor. The day I left, the entire school threw me a huge party and my kids cried. It was really intense.

    In college I was an International Studies major with plans of being a world traveler. TFA inspired me to work with kids instead. It’s not a perfect program, but it recruits non-educators and gets them involved in a helping profession. Many of my former students still email me, so I feel like I made an impact. Overall, I think it was life changing for me.

    To “quadmoniker” I have to clarify something: TFA actively RECRUITS minority candidates; I am unsure whether or not they recruit people that major in minority studies. TFA teachers have to have a certain number of college hours in certain courses to be viable candidates for alternative certification.

    TFA is selective based on academics and personality–they recruit people that won’t be arrogant and rock the public school boat. You really have to be committed to teaching in your school.

  • Icaru7994

    http://www.teachforamerica.org/admissions/our_commitment_to_diversity.htm

    TFA is actually very committed to recruiting candidates whose backgrounds (ethnicity, socioeconomic, etc) are similar to the communities in which they will be working. Is TFA still mostly white and non-poor? For sure – but it is certainly at least twice as diverse as the top schools TFA corps members are recruited from…

    Education majors are not preferred because of TFA’s mission to create a movement of lifelong advocates for children working outside of education (where they are positioned to actually change the system) with a deep understanding of the state of the US public education system. TFA is more than a teacher prep program… That being said, I knew several education majors who were accepted to TFA – so it’s not a hard and fast rule.

  • Jesse Alred

     
    I am a veteran teacher in Houston seeking a dialogue with Teach for America teachers nationally regarding policy positions taken by former Teach for American staffers who have become leaders in school district administrations and on school boards. I first became aware of a pattern when an ex-TFA staffer, now a school board member for Houston ISD, recommended improving student performance by firing teachers whose students did poorly on standardized tests. Then the same board member led opposition to allowing us to select, by majority vote, a single union to represent us.

    Having won school board elections in several cities, and securing the Washington D.C Superintendent’s job for Michelle Rhee, Wendy Kopp’s friends are pursuing an approach to school reform based on a false premise: that teachers are the cause of sub-par academic performance in urban schools, They disregard major factors like the degree of parent commitment, students habits and economic inequality. 

    The corporate-TFA nexus began when Union Carbide initially guided Wendy Kopp’s efforts to create Teach for America. “I assembled a board of directors composed mostly of the corporate chiefs whom I had met through the head of union carbide,” she acknowledged later.
    A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize its responsibility at the time it embraced Ms. Kopp. TFA recently started Teach for India. Are Teach for India enrollees, who presumably love their country and its people, aware of the the Union Carbide/TFA relationship?

    When TFA encountered a financial crisis, Ms. Kopp  nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project sought to replace public schools with for-profit corporate schools funded by our tax money. Think Haliburton in your neighborhood. Ms. Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of KIPP’s national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions.

    In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This gave pivotal cover for Bush, since as Governor he had no genuine educational achievements, and he needed the education issue to campaign as a moderate and reach out to the female vote. KIPP charter schools provide a quality education, but they start with families committed to education. They claim to be improving public schools by offering competition in the education market-place, but they take the best and leave the rest.

    D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s school reform recipe includes three ingredients: close schools rather than improve them; fire teachers rather than inspire them; and sprinkle on a lot of media-thrilling hype. Appearing on the cover of Time, she stood sternly with a broom in hand, which she was using to sweep trash, the trash being a metaphor for  my urban teacher colleagues. MS RHEE, MY COLLEAGUES WHO WORK IN SOME OF THE TOUGHEST SCHOOLS IN THE NATION ARE NOT TRASH.  They are American heroes, Ms. Rhee!  

    TFA teachers are highly effective educators. My mentor, when I started teaching, was a TFA teacher, ironically, Ms. Rhee’s interim Director of Human Resources, and he saved me in that first, difficult year. But when TFA’s leadership argue that schools, and not inequality and bad habits, are the cause of the achievement gap, they are not only intellectually dishonest, they feed  the corporate influence which has blocked social changes we need to bolster our middle class, they aid the people who say the public sector can do nothing right, and thus should never regulate businesses or provide national health insurance or protect a worker’s right to organize.

    Our society has failed schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It’s not the other way around. Economic inequality and insecurity produces ineffective public schools. It’s not the other way around. Ms. Kopp claims TFA carries the civil rights torch for today, but Martin Luther King was the voice of unions on strike, not the other way around. His last book, Where do we go from here?, argued for some measure of wealth distribution, because opportunity would never be enough in a survival of the fittest society to allow most of the under-privileged to enter the middle class.

    TFA teachers, please remember, its your hard work in the classrooms that gives TFA executives moral credibility and a political platform,

  • jessealred

    Wendy Kopp–like her friends, our nation’s corporate leaders–preaches but does not practice accountability when she claims Teach For America and its branches, the KIPP and YES charter schools, have done jack to close the achievement gap.

    Education professors argue whether 40% or 20% of TFA teachers remain in school past the requisite two-year stint, but neither advocates or enemies of TFA have presented ANY evidence of them improving the academic results of significant numbers of working-class, minority students.

    The only argument they have comes from the outstanding perfomance of kids at KIPP and YES, and these students attend charter schools after their families have applied to schools with longer school days, extended school years, and loads of homework.

    Teach For America provides a positive service, and its charter schools provide a top-quality education for kids whose ambitious familees are already committed to education.

    The notion that these folks are the solution not only to school reform but to social reform also must derive from an equal mixture of egotism, careerism, the rich-person’s sense of entitlement, stupidity and the desire to please government-hating corporate donors.

  • Steve

    My basic beef is…I’ve known about a dozen minority applicants with high GPAs from urban communities TFA serves who got denied…

    yet I’ve known a dozen people who got accepted who were from suburban communities and very unfamiliar with the realities and dynamics of urban environments, half of whom quit within 3-4 months.

    While this isn’t an empirical study, of course, I’ve generally gotten this same observation from talking to many other people. It just seems to make me wonder exactly what TFA is looking for in their acceptances and placements.

  • jessealred

    quadmoniker:

    Read Ms. Kopp’s praises (and credit claiming) for KIPP and YES. Read and listen to her praises on the television interviews and in papers. Read her book. What Teach for America believes I cannot say, but Wendy Kopp does believe she is transforming education. I did not make the connections, she did. I just absorbed what she said and wrote.

    These groups are linked in a myriad of organizations, including Democrats for Education Reform. They may be Democrats on the lifestyle issues, like pro-abortion, but they are not in the traditional sense of hoping the govenrment will balance out the power of corporations. In Houston, where I am, we have a school board member who proposed to fire teachers whose students performed poorly on standardized tests. Then she opposed allowing teachers to vote on a single union to represent us. This board member was a TFA teacher and then worked as its local direcit and is married to the founder of YES PREP. Her career was advanced when she headed up the Arnold Family Foundation, the creation of a former Enron oil trader. She worked as a lawyer for a Mississippi based law firm that represented corporations in lawsuits for causing environmental damage and industrial accidents.

    There is just something unAmerican about this glorification of the marketplace and this Ivy League class war against middle-class teachers.

  • jessealred

    In my comment above I did not mean unAmerican, I meant anti-American, the elitism seems anti-American.

  • Anonymous

    I can only describe TFA in two words: foolishly arrogant. I completed one year with TFA. Why only one year when TFA requires members to commit to two? Because TFA changes the rules of their game to suit the agenda of TFA. In my case I was terribly placed in an area of teaching that was well outside my content area. I was trained to be an English teacher by TFA but that’s not where they placed me. As a result, the charter school system with a 25% turnover rate did not take my contract the second year. TFA’s policy (a word of warning to all prospective members) is they don’t necessarily place you elsewhere and can (and do) drop members from the program. Because they do not like to lose at what they do, they are not very nice about it either.

    TFA’s current problem, among hundreds of others, is that real teachers, the ones who went through accredited institutions and have credentials the day they walk into the classroom, are being laid off, so placement of ersatz teachers like TFA’s becomes harder for that organization. Beyond this though, is the irrefutable fact that TFA has existed for 20 years and even though in some cases their results have been as good as that of accredited teachers, it has been no better and in many cases, far worse.

    The major problem facing TFA is that their rhetoric is twenty years old, held cult-like by die-hard members on TFA’s payroll, and like a chain-letter or pyramid scam, TFA’s existence depends on fanatical belief in order to raise the private funding needed to support the organization. The federal government is wisely expanding alternate certification program funding to other organizations making it competitive. In short, TFA’s dogma, arrogance, and apparent lack of organizational intelligence to adapt has fostered the beginning of the demise of TFA as a viable organization.

    It is unfortunate that government officials at all levels appear to be moving toward the incredibly unregulated world of privatized education. Charter Schools, (many of whom don’t have qualified principals: they call them directors) are loose cannons. They too play by their own rules. They are a natural marriage for organizations like Teach For America, and that is the unfortunate development in American education. If it weren’t for the play it by ear, almost unregulated charter school systems, organizations like TFA would have folded their tents long ago. It should be noted however, that American voters are to blame. Americans need to understand that privatization of education and teaching with unqualified teachers is not the long or short term solution to American education. We need to fix the existing system. That is done, not by flailing moderately paid teachers, but by making administrators, many of whom earn salaries four times as high as the teachers in their charge, prove competence and do their jobs.

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