Superhero Status Not Required (But Talent Is)
Naomi Schaefer Riley at the Wall Street Journal brings us the latest on Teacher for America (TFA) in her interview with TFA founder Wendy Kopp.
Teach for America has two goals. One is to place talented (though usually not credentialed) teachers in some of the lowest performing schools in the country. The second is to create a large pool of TFA alums who’ll be advocates for public school reform. It looks at though it’s achieving both objectives:
The results are clear. A 2008 Urban Institute study found that “On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience.” A new study from the University of North Carolina found that middle school math students taught by TFA teachers received the equivalent of an extra half-year of learning.
An important part of TFA’s success is the high expectations it holds for both its teachers and its students. You won’t find what George W. Bush referred to as “the soft bigotry of low expectations” here:
TFA’s fundamental premise is that a child’s home life and socioeconomic status need not doom him or her to educational failure. “There is a perception in our communities that we have low educational outcomes in low-income communities because kids aren’t motivated or families don’t care. We’ve discovered that is not the case,” says Ms. Kopp.
The second goal– the what-comes-after-two-years-in-TFA– is also being met:
Two-thirds of TFA alumni are working full time in education, including 450 principals and school superintendents. Another 500 work in government and policy. Then there are the alumni who are now business leaders supporting TFA.
Despite its demonstrated success, TFA faces some obstacles. Funding is one of them:
Ms. Kopp says that her funding has grown about 30% per year for the past decade “because of the commitment of the private sector.” While many philanthropists have cut back giving in recent years, TFA has not suffered. (Their biggest funders include Eli Broad, Doris and Don Fisher, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.) Public funding makes up about 30% of her budget. TFA received a federal appropriation of $21 million last year, and it has asked for $50 million in fiscal year 2011 to take advantage of what Ms. Kopp calls the “incredible” recruiting environment.
Given that the Peace Corps gets $350 million, Ms. Kopp suggests “this seems like a no-brainer . . . particularly given that TFA has proven results and is so heavily aligned with the federal agenda around education.” But so far, TFA has a big zero next to it in President Obama’s budget. Almost no Republicans have signed on to support it because of budget deficit concerns.
The other problem is placement:
Oddly, the other obstacle is finding districts that will take the teachers. Why wouldn’t any superintendent trip over himself to hire young people with these qualifications?
The answer lies in the opposition to TFA by teachers unions and education schools. Though Ms. Kopp attributes any hard feelings to “some misunderstanding about the way Teach for America works,” it is clear what the union interests are. If TFA corps members can do a better job in two years than many longtime veterans, what do public-school systems need with job protections like tenure? And if they can do it without education school courses, why do we need those institutions?
Some reform-minded districts are waking up to this reality. New Orleans will have 435 TFA instructors this fall. Detroit’s new superintendent has invited 100 of them this year. The number in the Mississippi Delta region went from 280 first-year teachers in 2009 to nearly 500 first- and second-year teachers this fall. In some schools there, TFA members make up the majority of the faculty.
One problem that Teach for America does not have is a lack of recruits:
A few months ago, Teach for America (TFA) received an applicant pool that Morgan Stanley recruiters would drool over. Their 46,000 applicants included 12% of all Ivy League seniors, 7% of the graduating class of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and 6% from U.C. Berkeley. A quarter of all black seniors at Ivy League schools and a fifth of Latinos applied to be teachers in the 2010 corps. It is, I’m told by some recent grads, one of the coolest things you can do after college.
Teach for America is a very data-driven organization. And all that data reveals some very good news for teachers, including those prospective teachers who are not Ivy Leaguers. To be an excellent teacher you don’t have to be a super hero or a magician. You just need to be talented and accountable. In Kopp’s words:
“I remember so clearly the movie ‘Stand and Deliver.’” The 1988 film, she says, “made a national hero of a teacher in South Central Los Angeles who had coached a group of kids to pass the AP calculus exam.” She recalls the reaction from audiences: “This was a one-of-a-kind superhero who accomplished these results with his charisma. There was no notion that we could in some kind of system-wide way replicate that level of success.”
And as Riley notes:
Well, as Ms. Kopp says, successful teaching is “nothing magic. It’s nothing elusive. It’s about talent and leadership and accountability.”
