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...One landmark effort to tackle this issue is Teach For America (TFA). The initiative famously launched by 22-year-old Wendy Kopp and a small cadre of allies in 1990 has brought thousands of talented young people into teaching. In this forum, Education Next asks Julie Mikuta and Arthur Wise whether Teach For America is a valuable strategy for recruiting the best and brightest into education and energizing school improvement, or a distraction and a device for sending ill-prepared neophytes to serve some of the nation's neediest students.
EDUCATION NEXT: Has Teach For America (TFA) improved the caliber of candidates entering the teaching workforce or has it undermined teacher professionalism?
ARTHUR WISE: Founder Wendy Kopp's call to public service has resonated with a generation of graduates of the nation's leading universities. She has designed and implemented a program that 1) attracts additional talented young adults to serve some of our lowest-performing schoolchildren, 2) places them in hard-to-staff schools with two-year commitments, 3) prepares them for this daunting task with a five-week summer institute, and 4) plays some role in their induction. TFAers are a potentially valuable resource to our schools.
Whether TFA has in fact "improved the caliber of candidates," however, depends on the criterion used to make the judgment. TFA was designed to help solve the "teacher shortage" in "under-resourced" urban and rural schools and should be measured against this objective.
Most well-off suburban school districts, and even urban schools serving privileged students, generally manage to attract and retain the teachers they need. With few exceptions (e.g., STEM [science, engineering, and mathematics] fields and special education), these districts hire only career-oriented, fully certified teachers, do not face annual challenges in finding replacements, and do not turn to TFA.
High-needs urban and rural schools, on the other hand, offer their teachers extremely challenging students, unusually poor working conditions, and compensation unresponsive to market conditions even within the teaching profession. At-risk children in these schools are taught year after year by a passing parade of neophytes with varying degrees of preparation. The absence of accomplished veterans to guide beginners exacerbates the challenge: Students enter school behind their peers. Their teachers have not yet learned to be effective. Although TFA corps members do perform a short-term public service by filling vacancies in hard-to-staff schools, they deflect attention from the lack of trained and experienced teachers who should be filling those seats. The problem of underresourced and underserved public schools serving the underperforming students is a continuing national tragedy, thus far unsolved by local, state, or national initiatives.
Professions normally have common programs of preparation and extended terms of practice. TFA does not fit the professional model of teaching; other professions do not assign novices primary responsibility.
JULIE MIKUTA: One way to measure whether TFA has improved the caliber of teaching candidates is to take a close look at TFA's own applicant pool. Traditionally, education majors have had some of the lowest SAT and GRE (Graduate Record Examination) scores, while the most-accomplished college students opted for careers in medicine, law, finance, or technology. TFA's reputation for quality and selectivity has reversed this equation by creating a mindset on college campuses that teaching in a high-needs school is a highly desirable postcollege job. Roughly 10 percent of graduating seniors at Duke University and the University of Chicago applied to TFA last fall, as well as 11 percent of those at Spelman College, an historically black liberal arts college. The average grade-point average of the 2,900 TFA accepted corps members was 3.6; their average SAT score was above 1300. Nearly all held leadership positions on campus. As Negar Azimi pointed out in the New York Times (September 30, 2007), "Doing good has rarely been this hip--or this competitive."
In general, the traits that TFA considers--including academic performance, verbal ability, and strong records of early leadership--line up with the traits found to correlate with teachers' success. However, it has proved frustratingly difficult to compare teachers' actual effectiveness in the classroom, because as a field, we too often rely on proxies like certification and tenure instead of on data that quantify teachers' impact on student achievement.
To address this challenge, TFA relentlessly collects, analyzes, and uses data about the performance of the students in the...
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