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Teach for America Grows UpWhat TFA can teach the NCLB era.

By Sara Mosle
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008, at 7:23 AM ET
Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America by Donna Foote

In the field of social entrepreneurship, there is hardly a more legendary success story: In 1989, Wendy Kopp, then a senior at Princeton University, submitted an undergraduate thesis in which she proposed a national teacher corps whose members would commit to spend two years in the nation's most hard-pressed schools. Within a year, her fledgling enterprise, Teach for America, was up and running, attracting 500 recruits (me among them) who gathered in June of 1990 for six weeks of boot-camp training prior to taking jobs at inner-city and rural schools across the country.

However, after its initial success and publicity, as Donna Foote reports in Relentless Pursuit, TFA fell on hard times. Seed money (which is easier to raise than ongoing capital) dried up. Although the program received high marks from principals and school districts, it came under harsh criticism from an education-school establishment concerned about high turnover and lack of training among recruits. Corporate underwriters got spooked. For several years, it was unclear whether the organization would survive.

Needless to say, TFA has more than survived. This spring an extraordinary 24,700 of the nation's most sought-after college graduates applied for a record 3,700 TFA spots—800 more positions than last year. In other ways, big and small, the program has grown and matured and is far more sophisticated and rigorous than the one I joined nearly two decades ago. During the intervening years, the larger educational landscape has also changed, with the passage of the imposing federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind—which has, like TFA, placed a premium on results, rather than mere good intentions.

With reauthorization of NCLB looming, Foote's account couldn't be better-timed. Her inside view of TFA's self-reinvention—as well as anatomizing the organization's growing pains, she follows the struggles of several TFA recruits at Locke High school, one of the worst performing and most violent in Los Angeles—demonstrates what relentless reflection on, and revision of, a mission and its methods can accomplish. The lessons on display are especially important for an era in which a ruthless focus on student outcomes risks overlooking a key ingredient of that enterprise: inputs for teachers, who need all the help they can get as they face an educational culture of new pressures and expectations, along with age-old challenges.

In particular, Foote outlines how, starting in the mid-1990s, TFA bore down on a single, overarching goal: significantly boosting achievement (defined as a one-and-a-half- to two-year jump in grade level or 80 percent mastery of a subject) in corps members' classes. The organization began to gather data on recruits' experiences and to run this information through sales-force software and other programs of its devising; the aim was to identify the personal characteristics and classroom practices that seemed to contribute most to raising literacy and numeracy. In the process, Foote writes, TFA "took on many of the characteristics of a successful, results-driven corporation," even as it retained "the soul of a nonprofit."

For example, by analyzing corps members' personality traits, TFA discovered that those with an "internal versus external locus-of-control orientation" are less likely to drop out of teaching early and are generally more successful in the classroom. To translate into plain English, such a teacher typically takes "full personal responsibility for student achievement, refusing to blame outside factors, such as truancy or lack of parental support, for underperformance." It's worth noting that it doesn't really matter whether such teachers are, in fact, solely responsible for their students' progress. Teachers with such a mindset still get better results, TFA has found, presumably because they try harder to work around external problems and don't give in as easily to complacency or despair.

When one TFAer at Locke quits his first fall, defying expectations—he'd actually scored high in his recruitment interview for "perseverance"—Foote describes the cascade of second-guessing that ensues as TFA strives to understand what went wrong. It's a kind of follow-through that is absent from NCLB and often nonexistent on ed-school campuses, where responsibility for a graduate's fortunes ends with the bestowal of a diploma. This willingness to take corps members' professional satisfaction seriously reflects an awareness that teacher performance, unsurprisingly, hinges on it. And this scrutiny is what distinguishes TFA from so many other efforts at school reform: The program is constantly tracking, examining, and, when necessary, modifying its procedures and approaches.

Thus, while TFA partakes of NCLB's standards-driven ethos, it has done so with distinctive attention to the people responsible for actually implementing reforms: teachers. For TFA, as for NCLB, accountability is a mantra, yet it functions not as a threat hanging over the head of its recruits—which is how benchmarks loom in too many schools—but as a tool to help teachers achieve shared goals. Indeed, TFA is apparently the only supervisory presence—from the principal of Locke to the Los Angeles Unified School District—actually providing any consistent oversight or direction at Locke, even as the school faces the threat of a state takeover. Midyear, not a single administrator at Locke has visited one TFAer's classroom after his first weeks of school. When state officials observe another first-year corps member's class, they focus on the cleanliness of her room without ever mentioning the content of her lesson or methods.

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Sara Mosle joined Teach for America in 1990 and taught for three years at two different public schools in New York City. She is finishing a book about the London School explosion, which killed hundreds of schoolchildren in the East Texas oil field in 1937.
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Comments from the Fray

At a school where I (briefly) taught, the "model" teachers held up by the principals all seemed to come from a single demographic--the 55 year old widow whose life consisted of several cats and "her kids." She had no family to speak of, no social (nor any other) life outside of school. She arrived at 6 AM and left after 6 PM. She was a veteran who had learned to get what she could from the bureaucracy, but most importantly she never even tried to "change the system" or challenge authority. In other words, a kind of "saintly" suffering for the good of the children....

The problem is that you can't staff a large organization like this. And even if you could, note that one of the key characteristics is that there is no challenge of authority or questioning of the management (which the vet learned to give up long ago). Instead she blames herself for everything. What management wants is someone who puts in excess hours and 'stays put' and 'shuts up.' Or, translated into modern edu-speak, a "team player."

--fozzy

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A Princeton grad won't stick around because he didn't go to Princeton so he could be an under-appreciated, underpaid and undervalued teacher. That's why the TFA teachers who have stayed in education have risen to administration or even started "chains" of schools (more consumerist lingo--as if schools were fast-food restaurants or department stores--evokes images of "profits": we are now turning knowledge into a product; school=Starbucks.) Teachers get no respect and even less pay, but thank God we have the privileged richies from Harvard and Yale to swoop down from on high to fix everything so they have something noble and prestigious to put on their resumes when they apply to law school or to become investment bankers. I just find it depressing that this is touted as one of our best hopes for educational reform.

Well, if there's one thing this article teaches us, it's that maybe if we really did treat teachers as respected and educated professionals who could expect to at least, some day, be able to pay off their student loans as well as for the continuing education and multiple degrees required by most states, results might happen in the classroom.

--anotherportlander

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