Slate's Bizbox
books: Reading between the lines.

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

By Sara Mosle
Posted Monday, May 19, 2008, at 7:23 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Yes, NCLB accurately pinpoints failing schools, but it doesn't assure that anyone will actually take responsibility for fixing them. As one TFAer ruefully observed in 2005, Locke had enjoyed three new administrations in almost as many years, each charged with turning the school around, but the only thing to have changed was the personnel. Two years later, at the book's end, a fourth administration is in place to little apparent effect: Earlier this month, Locke attracted national attention when a 600-student riot erupted at the school.

In the face of official neglect, TFA encourages its members to concentrate on what they can control: raising achievement in their individual classrooms. And in Foote's account, corps members at Locke mostly do succeed, against all odds. Aiding them in this effort is TFA's considerable support network. A staff member from the program's L.A. office is assigned to each recruit and regularly visits classrooms to provide concrete feedback and strategies for improvement. TFA also requires one day of training per month for L.A.'s recruits. Such "teacher development" is not all touchy-feely supportiveness; on the contrary, as Foote recounts, corps members can chafe at the constant oversight. (All this is a big change from my day. After the summer training program in 1990, I basically never heard from TFA again.) What little cohesion exists at Locke is largely among TFAers and their like-minded colleagues.

Also, in part encouraged by NCLB mandates, all TFAers at Locke must be enrolled in a credentialing program as a condition of their full-time employment. (Most receive a master's degree before their two-year commitment is up.) By 2010, TFA expects it will be spending $20,000 per corps member to recruit, train, and support its teachers. In other words, TFA isn't achieving its successes on the cheap. It takes a significant investment in teachers—even those from Ivy League schools—to boost achievement in woefully underperforming schools.

The biggest complaint about TFA has been that its members only sign up for two years, doing little to solve teacher turnover in bad schools. Yet here Foote's fine-grained account of Locke supplies the larger context and a corrective. TFA represents only a small fraction of the school's faculty, three-quarters of which have been there less than five years. The choice at Locke and similar inner-city schools isn't between a TFA recruit and a certified teacher. It's between a TFA recruit, who has frequently aced California's particularly tough content-specific exams (in hard-to-staff courses such as math or science) and is thus "highly qualified" under NCLB rules, and an uncertified teacher who has no such knowledge or background. Indeed, even with TFA's presence at Locke, the school can't fill all of its positions. As a result, the principal must rely heavily on "permanent substitutes," who need "only to have graduated from college with a 2.7 GPA and to have passed the CBEST," a general-knowledge test "considered easier than the high school exit exam." Many of those who stay at Locke, year after year, do so because no other school wants them.

The second biggest criticism of TFAers is that their motives are callow: They're burnishing résumés before proceeding with grander, more remunerative careers in law or business. Yet few 21-year-olds have an accurate sense of where they'll be in five or 15 years. Most will move and change jobs, even careers, multiple times—whether they join TFA or not. Nationally, 14 percent of all teachers (not just TFAers) leave the classroom after their first year, nearly half by the fifth. Given these statistics, a credentialing system, still promoted by many ed schools and based on the assumption that people will teach for 20 or 30 years, is a relic of a bygone era when company loyalty was the norm, and women and minorities had few career options. To be sure, teachers need better training and ongoing support, particularly once they're in the classroom. That is precisely the reality that TFA has responded to. But if education hopes to attract the best teachers, it must find new ways, as TFA has, to compete for talent in an ever-changing, more mobile workforce.

In fact, TFA's greatest (and often overlooked) achievement is that its recruit force has turned out to be anything but fickle. Many corps members, including most at Locke, remain in teaching past the two-year mark—quickly rising to leadership positions. Hundreds are now principals of their own schools or are overseeing thousands from district-level positions. A substantial number have risen to national prominence. The founders of KIPP, the widely praised chain of inner-city charter schools, are TFA alums, as are a significant number who work for KIPP. The new reform-minded head of the Washington, D.C., schools is a former TFAer—the first (but surely not the last) to become superintendent of an entire urban system. Many more remain in education more broadly—working for educational nonprofits, school boards, or legislators—or have gone into banking or law, where they now hold the purse strings of corporate philanthropy.

This has always been the most radical and far-reaching part of Kopp's vision: not just to place teachers in schools for a few years but to incubate a national corps of educational leaders in all walks and levels of society who, by virtue of their shared experiences, might then be in a position to create genuine, systematic reform. Leftists always talk about "the power structure" when discussing the poor, but it took a blond-headed, pro-business Princeton grad from Dallas to put in place a movement that stands a chance of actually changing that structure.

VIEW AS SINGLE PAGE
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
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.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

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

(To reply, click here)

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

(To reply, click here)

(5/20)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Assessing Sarah Palin
Topic A | Political experts weigh in on McCain's running mate.
Meyerson: Pure Identity PoliticsCapehart: A Hail Mary Pass
PLUS » Froomkin: The Anti-Bush