Aaron Regunberg: The Downside To Teach For America
Friday, September 23, 2011
Earlier this week Teach For America held an information session at Brown University, where I am a student. Both the Brown Education Department and the City of Providence have trumped their recent work to partner with TFA, so I decided I should at least check them out. But after hearing their pitch and talking to TFA recruiters myself, I have become more convinced than ever that the answers offered by this organization are not going to help public education and will—if anything—add to the problems our schools face.
But from that relatively nuanced sketch of what they themselves admit to be an incredibly complex and interconnected set of problems, they made a jump I couldn’t rationally follow—that getting inexperienced kids from prestigious colleges into these low-income schools will make the system better.
Two Huge Assumptions
Such a leap makes two huge assumptions, which I will deal with one at a time. First, it takes for granted that the biggest obstacle keeping low-income students from getting the education they deserve is the poor quality of their teachers. And second, it accepts as truth that students from elite colleges will somehow make better teachers, regardless of their lack of experience and knowledge in the field of education.
The first assumption was particularly jarring to me in the context of the information session’s promising opening. How could these people earnestly describe the structural violence of poverty and the complex challenges under-resourced schools face, but then return to TFA’s foundational position of, “No, actually the only thing that matters in a school is the individual teacher, and the teachers in low-income communities suck”?
But it’s even harder for me to understand how one gets from this point to their next assumption. At least their first point has some basis in real problems—it is, undoubtedly, harder to get teachers to serve in challenging urban environments. In addition, I think it’s definitely fair to say that many in the majority-white and middle class teaching profession do not have the best understanding of the communities they serve, and therefore are not as effective at working and communicating with low-income parents and children of color.
But it would seem to me that the answer to these problems is to re-professionalize teaching by increasing teachers’ training and compensation, as well as providing the professional development and support they may need to build better relationships with their students and their students’ families. The answer is NOT to replace real teachers with kids from even more privileged backgrounds who do not intend to stay in these low-income schools and who have far less instruction in the art of teaching. I mean, TFA members get just five weeks of training before being put in the classroom! And even during those five weeks, their instruction focuses exclusively on classroom management skills; they learn virtually nothing about education theory, as if this large and important body of intellectual work has no applicable value (which, to me, is the same as saying that a five-week crash course on courtroom tricks can turn someone with no knowledge of case law or jurisprudence into a great lawyer).
Actual Data Tells Another Story
Of course, this would all be fine if TFA teachers were actually making our schools better places, as TFA supporters claim. At the info session, certainly, the recruiters mentioned a number of specific TFA grads that allegedly were able to improve their students’ test scores in miraculous ways. But the actual data tells another story, as I discovered upon reading a recent study out of the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona University and the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado, which reviewed all of the studies done on the effects of Teach For America from its founding through 2010. It is, as far as I can tell, the most comprehensive work currently available on this topic. Unfortunately, it has a number of troubling conclusions.
First, it found that—despite a number of non-peer reviewed studies by TFA claiming otherwise—TFA teachers initially do about the same or worse than first-year teachers who are traditionally certified, and only after two or three years do they seem comparable to more experienced teachers. But at that point, most TFAers are moving on; a review of the research on TFA attrition rates found that 50% of TFA teachers leave the profession after their contracted two years, and 80% leave after three. In other words, since they aren’t staying long enough for their students to benefit from their gained experience, TFA isn’t ultimately leading to higher teacher quality.
But that’s not all the data revealed. While TFA’s public relations teams claim that they are filling a real gap by providing teachers to the most difficult, hard-to-staff districts, the research shows that TFA has begun placing its teachers not in schools lacking qualified candidates, but in slots previously held by veteran teachers who were laid off to make room. Meaning that somewhere there may be a classroom full of students who have been forced to trade their qualified, experienced teacher for some random Brown kid just out of college who has never before stepped foot in a public school (I am, of course, making generalizations; there are many TFA teachers who don’t fit this description at all, but there are many more who do). Worst of all, we’ve had to pay good money to make this trade. The study found that TFA often charges districts significant finders fees for each recruit, while an even heavier cost comes from the professional development and mentoring that school departments are forced to invest in teachers who will be gone in a few years.
It’s Part Of The Problen
Of course, Teach For America isn’t hurting public education much in the grand scheme of things; way more powerful forces are at work on that front. But it’s my opinion that if an organization is spending millions of dollars, some of them public (TFA recently received a $50,000,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education), on a PR campaign to convince policy makers that its model is part of the solution, then it damn well better be part of the solution.
If not, then it’s part of the problem, and it’s hard for me to understand how so many people are getting duped. It’s not the college kids who are applying to become TFA teachers that confuse me. You might be shocked to hear this, but it’s been my experience that some of the kids at Brown and schools like Brown have pretty high opinions of themselves—it makes sense that many of them mistakenly believe that their elite status gives them a unique ability to solve the problems of public education. What’s crazy, to me, is that anyone else agrees with them.
If you valued this article, please LIKE GoLocalProv.com on Facebook by clicking H ERE.
