I’m not sure why people love to hate Teach for America so much. I mean, I sort of get it. It’s problematic that you have all of these young, white, mostly privileged kids poring into poor urban and rural schools for two years. They’re not well-trained. They might not be committed. It’s inherently kind of ickily classist.
And a recent rant by an NYC Teaching Fellows alum kind of sums all that up. These are just Lehman Brothers-bound rich kids slumming it for a couple of years to get “job experience” and the kids are the ones who suffer, she writes.
The first three drop down tags at the top of the TFA website read, “What We Do,” “The Core Experience,” “After the Corps.” Teaching is not a career for this organization, it is an “experience.” You can write about it in your annual Christmas letter and show up your cousins who went straight to law school instead of differing for two years to work in the inner city. You now have some “cred” when talking about why No Child Left Behind sucks. Oh, and, of course, you can put it on your resume.
Except I’m not at all sure that’s true. Firstly, children get new teachers every year anyway. Anna in Education would have us believe there’s some value in have some constancy in the schools for poor kids whose lives are anything but, and that’s fair. But did you ever go visit your old teacher? I didn’t. The nostalgia for last year’s class lasts about a week, I would guess. And if there’s a teacher that touched your life so profoundly, those effects probably don’t go away just because that teacher is no longer in the old classroom you don’t go by any more. And I think it’s a hard case to make that kids feel rejected or suffer a sense of abandonment when teachers move on. If they notice at all, it probably pales in comparison to the fact that they have classrooms packed into a renovated janitor’s closet.
Also, she says that turnover is built in to the TFA system, as if that’s not true of every job, particularly ones that recruit recent college grads. Anecdotally, I’ve known more people who leave Teaching Fellows after a short tenure than TFA, because Teaching Fellows got kind of mixed reviews on the support system they provided teachers. More than that, if the founder, Wendy Kopp, is to be believed, 60 percent of its alum stay in education. That’s not a fact that they advertise, she said, because they actually want to recruit students who don’t believe they’re going to be teachers. They want to emphasize the people who move on because they want to get students who otherwise wouldn’t consider a career in education. It’s no secret that the top students from the top schools aren’t rushing to get certified, and that makes sense.
The tactic isn’t new, either. Teaching shortages have long forced schools, especially the kinds that TFA staffs, to look in unconventional sources. There are new non-profits popping up all the time to lure and train career changers, and in 2001 schools were recruiting from overseas, and that included efforts to mitigate chronic shortages in New Orleans. And those shortages go back a really long time.
Anna also laments the fact that TFA teacher’s aren’t required to get a master’s degree. But not every state requires a master’s, and there’s not much evidence that it predicts teacher quality, anyway. The organization creates financial incentives in some states for students to go to graduate school, and why create a disincentive by requiring something that can cost a lot of money when the state board of education hasn’t required it?
So of course, Teach for America has its problems. And of course it’s no good to lose the kind of skills and institutional memory that long-term teachers have. But a fresh face who believes they can change the world isn’t the worst kind of person to put in a flailing school. My fondest memories of school involved teachers that were young and brand new. My worse teacher ever was a year away from retirement, and I hated every minute of her classroom and didn’t learn a thing. More than that, these are schools that without TFA would simply do without. They would combine classrooms or beg teachers ready to retire to stay one more drawn out year.
However imperfectly, Teach for America is doing what no one else has figured out how to do; recruit really well-qualified young people to consider one of the hardest, least-respected, most poorly-paid careers out there. Why all the hate?
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