Letters:Teach for America

A New York Times Letter to the Editor writes:

Using Teach for America as a model for increasing student achievement in low-income schools is like calling for the Peace Corps to be a model for sustained development in poor nations.

Yes, there are Peace Corps volunteers and T.F.A. teachers who spend their two years of service making a difference in the lives they touch, but when their service is finished, the vast majority leave and go on to build careers in more lucrative professions.

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Why Teach For America

The District 299 The Chicago Schools Blog writes:

The “new” TFA is much much larger and features corporate-style recruiting efforts and a hyper-aggressive PR operation.Folks from the early years probably couldn’t get accepted to TFA if they applied today, and it’s not clear that many of them would want to.

More important, TFA now wants to be judged both as a short-term intervention and as a broad-based reform movement whose scope includes everything from KIPP to Michelle Rhee to scores of alums in elected office.

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The Effectiveness of “Teach for America” and Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement: A Case of Harmful Public Policy

Ildiko Laczko-Kerr, Arizona Department of Education andDavid C. Berliner
Arizona State University write:

Four separate evaluations found that TFA’s training program did not prepare candidates to succeed with students, despite the noticeable intelligence and enthusiasm of many of the recruits. Most criticism of a corps member’s teaching behavior (classroom management was the greatest area of concern, followed by insufficient knowledge of the fundamentals of teaching and learning) was qualified by the cooperating teachers’ perceptions of limitations of the program in providing the corps member with adequate practice or theory to be successful

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Research on Teach for America

National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education provides this information:

Research on Teach For America At least five studies have been completed that include data on Teach for America, three of which have been published in peer-reviewed journals. As a group, the studies find the students of uncertified TFA teachers do significantly less well in reading than those of new, certified teachers, with the negative effects most pronounced in elementary grades.

In math, three of the studies also report significantly lower scores for beginning TFA teachers’ students than for prepared teachers. When TFA teachers obtain training and certification, their students generally do as well as those of other teachers and sometimes better in mathematics. However, most TFA teachers leave after 2 or 3 years (more than 80% are gone after three years), so the benefits of their training are lost. Looking across the studies, TFA comparisons are favorable only when the comparison group is even less prepared than the TFA recruits.

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“I guess I shouldn’t have expected so much from an organization that operates as the world’s most glorified temp agency.”

An Ex-TFA member writes:

Thank you for your letter officially revoking my status as a Teach For America alumnus. I guess I had it coming, as I have been freeloading for too long off of plush access to the alumni job database, the retro-’90s free email system, and the outrageously priced fundraisers for wealthy New York corporate types.

I consider your letter to be another salvo in TFA’s ongoing public-relations war against its doubters and detractors, the number of whom grow, I would imagine, with every passing year. Instead of attempting to find out why some of us did not “finish our commitments” and use that information to its betterment, the organization has now decided to pretend as if we don’t exist. This is further evidence that TFA has been thrown far off course from its original mission and now focuses exclusively on selfaggrandizement and accumulation of feel-good corporate donations.

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Teach for America ineffective

Max Fisher The Student Newspaper of the College of William and Mary College writes:

The number of scientific studies on TFA’s effectiveness is enormous: not only because it involves education, an issue of significant interest, but because TFA’s founder, Wendy Kopp, is an incredibly skilled public relations maven, having turned her self-declared “triumph” into both a book deal and a speaking tour.

The findings of those studies appear somewhat conflicted: some report TFA teachers are effective, others ineffective. School principals generally say that TFA teachers are “as good or better” than their certified faculty. But a Stanford University study of student achievement tests shows TFA teachers as less effective then their peers, perhaps indicating that TFA teachers are more skilled at impressing principals than educating students.

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Reading, Writing, and Revenue

Author Chuck Sudetic of Mother Jones writes:

On a weeknight in early February, the front line in the battle to privatize America’s public schools reached the top floor of a five-story walk-up in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Marie Jeanty, an immigrant from Haiti, had just come home from her job at a Manhattan hotel. She was preparing dinner for her 11-year-old son, Marc Antoine, when the bell rang. Jeanty opened the door, and a smartly dressed man introduced himself as a representative of Edison Schools Inc., the nation’s largest company in the business of managing public schools.

The salesman explained that Edison needed Jeanty’s support. The parents at Marc Antoine’s middle school, M.S. 246, one of New York’s worst-performing schools, were going to vote the following month on whether to turn over its operation to Edison. The salesman wanted Jeanty to vote yes. He handed her a glossy brochure filled with color pictures of happy students in Edison schools around the country. Jeanty understood that if Edison won the vote, Marc Antoine would get a new home computer to use free of charge.

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Who will speak for the children; how ‘Teach for America’ hurts urban schools and students

Linda Darling-Hammond; Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 76, 1994 writes:

With its inadequate training of recruits — many of whom will teach in urban schools — and its disregard for the knowledge base on teaching and learning, `Teach for America’ continues a long tradition of devaluing urban students and deprofessionalizing teaching…

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Does Teacher Preparation Matter? Evidence about Teacher Certification, Teach for America, and Teacher Effectiveness

Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah J. Holtzman, Su Jin Gatlin, and Julian Vasquez Heilig of Stanford University write:

There is no instance where uncertified Teach for America teachers perform as well as standard certified teachers. On 5 of 6 tests, uncertified TFA teachers showed a significant negative effect on student achievement gains relative to standard certified teachers. (The sixth coefficient is also negative but non-significant.) Alternatively certified TFA teachers (of whom there were very few in our data base) showed negative coefficients on 5 of 6 tests, but only one of these was significant.

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Teach for America divides educators

Mary Helen Miller of the Bowdoin Orient writes

“The problem is also teacher retention, to which TFA does nothing to remedy, and it actually exacerbates it,” she said. “TFA is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.”

With regard to teacher retention, Gallaudet is also concerned that the two-year commitment that TFA requires of its corps members is too short.

“People blow in and out of these children’s lives,” she said.

Santoro Gomez explained that studies have shown that teachers who do not receive sufficient teacher education tend to teach their students in the same way they were taught. In TFA’s case, she said that many of the teachers come from elite and privileged backgrounds, and learning in school comes relatively easy to them. Unlike TFA’s summer institution, she said teacher certification programs give instruction on teaching beyond a teacher’s own experience.

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