Where Teach for America goes wrong

Sam Singer writes in the The Michigan Daily:

The suggestion that a 22-year-old with a sports jacket and a two-month crash course in classroom management could ever be worthy of a room full of children seemed to me to cheapen the value of a meaningful education. At a time when we should be bringing esteem back to a career in education; when we should be raising professional and financial benchmarks for our teachers, TFA is shuttling legions of rookies into some of the bleakest school districts in the country.

But, like other critics, I bit my tongue. After all, TFA’s surge to prominence has called attention to – and in many areas helped to bridge – the outrageous achievement gaps that continue to plague our public schools. Plus, it’s not up to Teach for America to address our education crisis. TFA is a social-service project, its methods of limited concern to anyone outside the program and its participating school districts.

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Teach for America fails accounting – fed probe

The Associated Press writes:

WASHINGTON – A popular teacher recruitment program failed to follow federal accounting rules, making it tough to tell if federal grants were properly spent, officials said.

An investigation by the Education Department’s inspector general found that Teach for America did not properly document how it spent federal grant money it received during 2003-2005, the period of the audit.

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This Final Audit Report, entitled Teach for America, Inc.,

Wendy Kopp Chief Executive Officer Teach for America, Inc.

315 West 36th Street, 6th Floor New York, NY 10018

Dear Ms. Kopp:

This Final Audit Report, entitled Teach for America, Inc., Review of the U.S. Department of Education Discretionary Grant Awards, presents the results of our audit. Our objective was to determine whether Teach for America, Inc.’s (TFA’s) discretionary grant expenditures were allowable and spent in accordance with Federal laws and regulations for the period, October 1, 2003, through September 30, 2005.

TFA did not fully comply with applicable laws and regulations regarding its discretionary grant expenditures. We found that $774,944 (about 50 percent) of the total $1,534,290 in expenditures sampled was unsupported. TFA could not provide adequate supporting documentation because it lacked sound fiscal accountability controls. As a result, we could not determine whether $774,944 was spent for the intended grant purposes.

Read the audit

Teach for America Audited

NANCY ZUCKERBROD , Associated Press writes:

WASHINGTON – A popular teacher recruitment program failed to abide by federal accounting rules, making it difficult to determine if federal grants were properly spent, according to an investigation by the Education Department’s inspector general.

Teach for America did not properly document how it spent federal grant money it received during 2003-2005, the period of the audit, according to the inspector general’s report.

The nonprofit, which recruits and trains top students to teach in low-income schools, spent about $6 million in grants during the review period. Auditors looked at $1.5 million of that to see how the money was spent and documented. Teach for America couldn’t adequately document about half of that, or nearly $800,000, according to the report.

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