When Teach For America (TFA) corps member Laura Goldblatt ’06 arrived to Greenville, Miss., ready to begin her first year teaching high school English, she wasn’t expecting to find a school without a principal, and an administration that didn’t seem to care.
“Kids would walk up to teachers and punch them in the face,” she said. “It was like popping popcorn. Nobody would care. Kids were allowed to do anything, and the way the central office dealt with it was by punishing teachers. Instead of saying, wow, it’s really not okay for a student to get up and punch a teacher in the face, they would say, you’re suspended for not being able to control your class.”
While seven alumni currently serving in TFA described their experience alternatively as “astounding,” “amazing” and “exhausting,” they all agreed about one thing about TFA, a public-service organization which recruits high-achieving college seniors and places them in public schools in over 1,000 schools in 26 regions across the country: there was nothing that could have prepared them for that first year in the classroom.
“There is no way a first year teacher is going to walk into the classroom one hundred percent prepared,” said Hannah Gay ’06, currently teaching eighth grade language arts in Crownpoint, N.M. “The first year of teaching is an absolute roller coaster.”
This year, 74 Wesleyan students applied to TFA, and 15 have committed, an increase from eight or fewer in previous years. The program is an attractive post-graduation option for many seniors from Ivy League. According to a 2007 article published in The New York Times Magazine, 10 percent of seniors at Yale and Harvard applied to the program.
“After six weeks of training over the summer, TFA puts you in the most difficult schools with the lowest performing children, and they say, make miracles,” said American Studies Major Sarah Rosenberg ’06, a high school English teacher in rural North Carolina. “That’s the biggest struggle, to have this huge expectation both from TFA and also from yourself and from your students, who need you, and they can’t wait for you to get better…Most TFA corps members have been pretty good at everything they’ve done at school and in extracurriculars, so to be insufficient when the stakes are so high is just hard. It’s only at the end of my second year that I feel I’m really beginning to get it.”
Of the 18,000 college students who applied during the 2006-2007 application cycle, 3,750 were accepted, giving TFA a selectivity rate of approximately 20 percent. Next year’s seniors will likely continue to be actively recruited by the organization, as TFA plans to use its current operating budget of 120 million to expand from its current 5,000 corps members in 2006 to 8,000 by 2011. Current Chief Marketing Officer Gillian Smith, a former Coca Cola and Burger King marketing executive, was hired in 2007 to work on a marketing campaign that includes hiring students to work as on-campus recruiters, as well as targeting seniors with personal e-mails and phone calls.
“It’s not necessarily what TFA does that makes us better teachers,” said Portia Hemphill ’07, a Government and African American studies major who teaches pre-K (early childhood education)at the Center for New Horizons in Chicago. “It’s who TFA selects…it’s people who actually care for the children. You see that care and that desire to be extremely efficient and that drive to be the best is what makes TFA teachers effective compared to other teachers“ in pre-K, at least.”
TFA currently recruits on 260 college campuses ” sometimes, so aggressively, that it led Vassar to ban the organization from campus in 2007. While the program actively recruits high-achievers, some alumni felt that the program’s recruiting strategy didn’t necessarily attract the most committed teachers.
“They need more information in the recruiting phrase,” Goldblatt said. “I got the sense when I was recruited there was some hesitancy about telling certain stories or saying, I don’t know the answer to that…There’s lots of people in the corps who were really impressive people on paper, but when it came to ’are you ready to do this, are you ready to come back when something really terrible happened the day before,’ they weren’t. They did great things in college, but no one really told them what would potentially happen in the classroom and what would happen every day in their school.”
Alumni expressed also concern that TFA’s determination to double in size meant that the organization’s focus had shifted to potential corps members, rather than those who were currently teaching.
“I think they need to scale back recruitment and do much more in terms of support,” Goldblatt said. “My first year teaching, this was a big complaint, especially as things crumbled at my school. I really felt like, ’stop spending all this money recruiting, and send someone else down here.’”
“I think TFA is so concerned with growing and expanding and changing they’re not as reflective as they should be,” Rosenberg said. “They’re so focused on getting more teachers out there that they sometimes just change things. And sometimes the change isn’t always for the better. Every year the focus is different for corps members. It’s like, analyze the data until the cows come home… they see the data and say this is how we want to change, let’s do it, instead of thinking about the consequences.”
The TFA growth plan also involves launching three initiatives, including a Math and Science initiative aimed to double its number of math and science teachers, and an Early Childhood Education (ECE) initiative. Hemphill, currently in Chicago, was one of the first teachers to be placed in a preschool as part of the ECE initiative, and said the program’s first year was “less than stellar, to put it mildly.”
“It’s nothing that anybody would expect form a program as a reputable from TFA at all,” she said, explaining that instead of teaching pre-schoolers during her summer training session prior to going to Chicago, she received most of her training teaching first graders.
“Pre-K is its own animal,” she said, “the difference between pre-K and first grade is a big jump. I was pretty much learning how to be a teacher as I was teaching…I didn’t know enough in the beginning to have me prepared for this type of position, so I really had to pretend that I knew what I was talking about, in order for my associates to take me seriously…We’re just thrown into a lot of things that we had to manage, and no one can really give us any direction.”
TFA also plans to expand the number of corps members who go on to work in education or public policy after their teaching commitment is over. In 2010, the program hopes to have 800 school leaders, 12 social entrepreneurs, and 100 elected officials among its alumni, up from 191 school leaders and five elected officials in 2006. According to its website, more than 60 percent of TFA alumni continue to work in education after their two-year teaching commitment is over. Several charter school networks in the Connecticut and New York area “ Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and Knowledge is Power (KIP) Academy ” are all largely founded and staffed by TFA alumni.
“[Those charter schools] wouldn’t have existed otherwise,” said Kevin Lohela ’06, a Philosophy and Government major currently teaching fourth grade at P.S. 196 in the Bronx, N.Y. “This is bringing into the fold a lot of really passionate people to help with the issues that are an embarrassment and a tragedy in our country.”