Over 99.8 percent, a near-total, of America's teachers are not part of Teach For America. If we are serious about repairing our education downslide-- and I believe President Obama is-- we cannot look to TFA as our crucial beacon. Teach For America is a triumph of private sector innovation that should continue to be heartily supported and responsibly expanded, but its embedded exceptionalism innately limits it from modeling nationwide reform.This type of logic has several errors. First, the TFA-phenomenon is not just exclusive to TFA. TFA has also spawned New Teacher Project (TNTP) programs currently operating in 18 cities. These must be counted in any honest assessment of TFA's impact, because they are essentially individual districts that have decided to run their own TFA-like programs.
Second, TFA has only been in existence since the early 1990s. There are teachers in the classroom who've been teaching for 40 years. So no, TFA teachers do not represent a large portion of all teachers. A proper metric would be to look at the percentage of all new teachers entering through TFA, and on that measure, it has a larger market share. Approximately 170,000 teachers left the profession altogether in 2002. They were replaced, in part, by 3,300 TFA and TNTP teachers. This is only two percent of new teachers, but ten times higher than Brown's .16 figure for all teachers.
Third, Brown ignores growth and demand. TFA and TNTP roughly tripled their numbers between 2002 and 2008, a time when the size of the teaching workforce stayed relatively constant. We don't have great data on the number of new teachers every year, but TFA and TNTP could have supplied up to five or six percent by now. And this year, applications for the programs are up 42 and 44 percent, respectively. College graduates from our nation's elite postsecondary institutions are clamoring to get into teaching through these programs, to the point that their acceptance rates are now down to 15 percent. That's a big deal, and suggests there's room for expansion.
Fourth, as evidence mounts that these programs work, there will be an even greater push for expansion. In a large sample of North Carolina teachers, researchers found that the effect of having a TFA teacher was greater than the effects due to experience. It concluded that, "programs like TFA that focus on recruiting and selecting academically talented recent college graduates and placing them in schools serving disadvantaged students can help reduce the achievement gap, even if teachers stay in teaching only a few years." Such findings matter, and they'll only propel the growth of TFA and TFA-style programs faster. We should be careful not to underestimate its growing impact.
8 comments:
-2% of new teachers, but a higher attrition rate
-The study you cite, and a number of others, study TFA -- not TNTP -- teachers
-Since when is 98 teachers a "large sample"?
-TFA, in its current form, can only grow so large
Excellent information. I would also add that part of the effect of Teach For America is the growing number of alums that become principles, high ranking district officials, and even elected officials. Personally, I would have not considered education an option if not for learning about the Teach For America program. Now as an alum, my career path is dedicated to closing the achievement and promoting effective education reforms.
Chad,
Thanks for articulating the proper issue - not TFA but whether it is scalable.
I leave it to others to point out the preponderance of evidence that questions not TFA, but its scalability.
Logic, though, is against your post. The burden of proof of the proposition that TFA is scalable is on TFA and its advocates.
Though I'm not questioning TFAers in the classroom, I question whether advocates of TFA-type programs have even tried to produce objective evidence for their case. For whatever reasons (and the attitudes of veteran teachers may have contributed to this, "reformers" have concnetrated on attacking "the status quo" rather than evidence of replicablity.
My take is this. Education needs more caring and competent adults of all types - and who have all types of personalities. As long as TFA tries to limit itself to people with a certain type of personality, philosophy, and educational theory, it will not be scalable. Neither will it be sustainable until they take sustainability seriously. Finally, no system is sustaiinable unless it allows an honest flow of information up the chain of command. No system that fails to protect its human capital and fails to open itself up to dissent is going to be sustainable in a field like education.
-higher attrition isn't as important if these programs keep gaining market share of new teachers. TFA doubled from 2002 to 2007, and has plans to expand through at least 2010. Not to mention corps members have very high rates of completing their two-year commitment.
-there are other studies of TNTP effectiveness (see Louisiana)
-that's 98 TFA teachers compared to 6,826 traditional teachers and 2,411 novice traditional teachers. That's certainly large enough to discern differences.
-"higher attrition" isn't a knock on TFA teachers, it's simply a statistical fact -- if 2% of new teachers are from TFA this year <2% of fifth-year teachers will be from TFA four years later
-The point is that you're lumping TFA and TNTP together, but researchers aren't in these studies. And while they're somewhat similar, they certainly have some different goals and some different outcomes
-I don't care about the size of the comparison group. The fact of the matter is that the TFA group in that study was composed entirely of HS teachers in NC -- 98 of them from 23 different districts observed 150 times over the course of seven years. In other words, the sample was an average of .93 teachers per district per year. It seems reasonable to assume that TFA teachers push their kids to higher test scores in NC high schools, but we can't possibly generalize to all teachers in the country from that sample. Besides, just because the authors said something at the end of their article doesn't mean it was a correct interpretation of their findings.
At any rate, the point is that there's simply no way that TFA in its current form is scalable. Maybe it will triple in size or something, but it simply cannot grow to, say, 25x its current size without changing the way it does business.
Jon: I agree with you, I think the largest effect of TFA will be a ripple effect from all the alums doing other things in the field.
Corey,
Thanks for doing a better job than I did on evidence, and I agree that the ripple effect will be bigger.
But the question is whether the ripple effect will be constructive or not. If TFAers bring their experience and an open mind to subsequent careers, then the effect will be constructive. If they bring an ideology that precludes open discussion, the potential for harm is great. I'm anticipating that a lot of people will follow paths in between.
Unfortunately, too many people spend just enough time in the classroom to learn where the restrooms are, to learn what the problems are, and to build up animosity toward "the status quo" without taking the time to learn the other sides of issues or the history of how we got here. That's life. But the atmosphere where advocates ingore social science methods and learn to continually attack their opponents is not an encouraging environment for nurturing leadership.
What you've left out of the equation is the impact TFA teachers might have on their schools by modeling enthusiasm, data-driven instruction, ongoing oversight and evaluation, reflectiveness, etc. It's not the number of actual teachers who go through TFA, but the number of schools that might be touched by having TFA teachers onsite. We might also stretch this to all alternative certification programs in general that attract smart people into the classroom and give them the support and direction they need to survive and thrive. That model is clearly scalable, especially given the growing concern about the waste of resources and energy spent on teacher education schools.
Before commenting on the effectiveness of TFA I'd read "What does certification tell us about teacher effectiveness? Evidence from New York City" by Thomas J. Kanea,Ã, Jonah E. Rockoffb, Douglas O. Staigerc.
While this article is mentioned by the one you linked to, I don't see any criticism or differentiation from the NC study and they find somewhat different results.
What appears clear to me is that it does not matter how a teacher enters the classroom-- they're essentially equally likely to be fantastic or terrible based on either of the conceived paradigms for hiring right now-- either through GPA and selectiveness of the university like TFA/TNTP or through traditional teacher preparation college programs.
While I think that TFA is great at staffing hard to staff schools with capable teachers who come from different perspectives and may not otherwise consider teaching, I think that the wealth of evidence right now suggests that conflating either TFA or TNTP with "high quality" teachers is the wrong way to go. I'm concerned that we'll not try other new, exciting, and creative ideas to increase the actual quality of teachers in the classroom (as measured by student outcome) in favor of these alternative certification programs which are extremely effective recruiting tools and recruit "high quality" by input standards.
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