A new member of the Teach For America (TFA) corps, Amy Ruiz ’07 felt ready to tackle the problems she’d studied in her sociology seminars when she started teaching sixth grade last fall in Newark, New Jersey. Still, she was shaken when less than one month into the school year, the one other TFA teacher working alongside her at Rafael Hernandez School decided to quit.
“For some people, the choice to leave TFA is because they realize it isn’t a good fit for them,” said Ruiz, a Psychology and Sociology major who now teaches social studies and language arts. “But once she left, I didn’t have someone to speak to about my experience.”
Ruiz wasn’t alone in knowing a teacher who dropped out. Four out of the seven alumni interviewed said that they knew several people in their region who quit before completing their two-year commitment.
“Any white teacher at my school [students] think is a TFA teacher, regardless of whether they are,” said Laura Goldblatt ’06, an English teacher at Greenville-Weston High School in the Mississippi Delta. “They keep asking, ’Oh, so you’re from TFA? So when are you going to leave? When are you going to quit?’ Which is not the question you want to hear when you’re trying to get your lesson plans together from day to day.”
Is TFA effective?
TFA, a program that hires college graduates to teach in low-performing public schools, does not keep statistics on drop-out rates on its website. In “Why Teach For America,” an article published September 2007 in The New York Times Magazine, the number is placed between 10 and 15 percent. While the TFA website does state that 63 percent of its alumni continue working in education (not necessarily as teachers), the program continues to face close scrutiny over how effective its corps members really are.
“The TFA teachers I see in my area are the first to come and the last to leave,” said Sarah Rosenberg ’06, an American Studies major currently teaching English at Weldon High School in North Carolina. “They pick up clubs and sports when no one else would do it… I think there’s a lot to be said for experience, but [TFA teachers] are fresh. They care so much, and they push so hard, and I think that’s really evident across the board.”
Rosenberg teaches in a region used as the basis for a recent study by the Urban Institute (a D.C.-based think tank), which, after examining data produced from North Carolina high schools, found that TFA corps members can be nearly three times as effective as their more experienced colleagues. The findings are prominently displayed on the TFA website, as is a 2004 study by the Mathematica Policy Research that found students with TFA teachers came out with comparable or slightly higher test scores than those taught by veterans.
Other studies, however, show that teachers need more than two years to make a significant impact on student achievement. A 2005 study of Houston public schools by Stanford University, strongly criticized by TFA as flawed, found that uncertified TFA teachers were consistently outperformed by veterans. As a result, TFA has faced criticism for possibly exacerbating the problems it sets out to fix. By only asking for a two-year commitment, critics say, TFA is contributing to the high turnover rate and inexperienced teaching found in struggling public schools.
According to Goldblatt, teaching in the rural South made it especially clear that two years was just not enough. Because teachers are traditionally so integrated into the community, she said, students are used to having teachers who also taught their older siblings, sometimes even their parents.
“There’s a deep need for that stability in these kids, knowing that at your school there’s a teacher you got to know really well, and is still going to be there when you go to college, and who you know you can call if you’re failing your classes,” said Goldblatt. “…We [TFA] don’t do enough to say that stability matters for these kids.”
“Teacher Bootcamp”
Before TFA teachers begin teaching in the region where they were placed, the recent college graduates head to Summer Training Institute, or, as it is popularly known, “teacher bootcamp.”
For six weeks, corps members live together dormitory-style while teaching summer school several hours a day. Most alumni agreed that their intense summer training did a great job preparing them for classroom management and lesson planning, but many still felt nervous when the time came for them to step into the classroom alone.
“Six weeks is not long enough to train a good teacher,” Rosenberg said. “We were thrown in the fire.”
“I think no matter what, nothing’s going to prepare you for that first day of school,” added Kevin Lohela ’06, a fourth-grade teacher in the Bronx who was recently awarded the Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching award from TFA for the New York City region. “It’s not so much about how much Institute is going to prepare you, but how much they’re going to support you once when you’re in the classroom.”
The training does not stop with the end of Institute. Throughout the school year, corps members are observed by a program director every few weeks in order to continue receiving feedback about their teaching style, in contrast to many public school teachers who are observed by state officials only once or twice a year. There are also requisite professional development workshops on everything from learning theory to literacy development.
Other alumni felt that their training could have used improvement in other ways.
“I’m an African American woman and a lot of times I felt alone during Institute, which made it even worse,” Hemphill said. “Diversity training, that was the thing that took the back seat each week. If you’re putting a majority white group into a majority black/Latino community, that should’ve been a highest priority.”
Ruiz agreed that, depending on who was leading the DCA workshops, TFA’s diversity training was either good or “tricky.”
“At Wesleyan, you’re able to have conversations about diversity, about white guilt, about certain biases and cultural assumptions,” she said. “For the DCA sessions, there were people who didn’t really get it, who weren’t able to have those kinds of conversations.”
Because on average 70 percent of those who join TFA are white, the program privileges recruiting students of color on college campuses, while Summer Institute’s diversity workshops are partly intended to prepare teachers for transitioning into communities where they are likely going to be the minority.
“I don’t think they did a great job preparing people, especially people who hadn’t been to Wesleyan, to be frank, to be in a situation where they are the privileged ones to a large extent,” Rosenberg said. “And I think that’s hard for people to handle. It’s like, how do I handle it when my kids talk about my clothes all the time, because they can tell they weren’t bought at Wal-Mart…I know lots of white teachers who came into the classroom and the kids would ask them questions about being white, and it would kind of disarm teachers.”
The Achievement Gap
TFA is planning to increase both the diversity of its corps as well as its overall number of teachers, in order to continue working towards its ultimate goal of closing the achievement gap between the middle and working class. Many alumni had read statistics about widespread low literacy levels in high-need public schools, but it was still a shock to actually see it for themselves.
“I mentioned Uncle Sam in the classroom and students didn’t know who that was,” Goldblatt said. “They didn’t know George Bush was still president, because they’d been hearing all this stuff about Obama and so they assumed that he was president. You have a kid come in and he doesn’t know his alphabet and he’s 19 years old. It’s really unbelievable.”
The isolation of some rural communities also limited what students were exposed to. At Rosenberg’s school in North Carolina, she said, most of her students had never been farther than 45 minutes outside their hometown.
“Their life experience is so finite,” she said. “We did the memoir ’Night,’ by Elie Wiesel…I’m Jewish, I’ve mentioned this to my kids before, and we were discussing it, and then they said, ’You know Miss Rosenberg, I kind of like you, I’m gonna be sorry when you go to hell.’ They were being completely sincere. They were being sweet. They never met a Jewish person before.”
Unlike other alumni, Hemphill said she wasn’t surprised by the fact that many teachers’ students were performing below grade level.
“I grew up in the sort of neighborhood that TFA serves, so that part wouldn’t even be the most eye-opening part,” she said. “The fact that most of my coworkers are still here says a lot about my cohort. The drive and the stamina that they have is amazing with all of the obstacles that they’ve had to face.”
As TFA continues planning to double its corps size by 2011, it is likely that these are obstacles that many University alumni will continue to confront, while others continue to question what kind of an impact the program is really having on student achievement and failing public schools. For alumni currently serving in the corps, questions about what one study proves about TFA versus another study seem less important than a more urgent question: what’s the lesson unit for next week look like?
“I’m not trying to save the world,” said Hannah Gay ’06, a language arts teacher in New Mexico. “I’m just trying to teach my kids.”
In their own words: alumni on TFA
Kevin Lohela ’06
“I think Teach For America is a perfect way to put into real practice the sociopolitical and ethical ideals I cultivated at Wesleyan. Inequity, power relations, hegemony, the injustice of the contemporary paradigm…all that ’Wesleyan stuff’ has come into much clearer focus during my experience over the past two years.”
Portia Hemphill ’07
“[Summer Training Institute] was definitely one of the worst experiences of my entire life. I got maybe on average two-and-a-half hours sleep Sunday through Friday. And that’s not just my story, that’s a lot of people’s stories. You’d go down the hall and people would be crying.”
Amy Ruiz ’07
“The biggest challenge has been trying to set reasonable expectations…When you get out of training, you see that there are things that are out of your control once you step into the school building. You may have the best plan, but if a fire bell goes off in your school and there’s a fire drill, your plan will be delayed.”
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