Teach for America Makes Its Case

Why SED is partnering with the controversial national program

By Patrick L. Kennedy

They were academic aces and student leaders at elite colleges last year. Now, 53 Teach for America recruits are leading elementary and high school classrooms in Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, and Revere. The inaugural members of TFA’s new greater Boston chapter are teaching by day, taking School of Education courses at night. And while few saw themselves as teachers before joining, at the end of two years many will stay on to complete a master’s degree and choose education as their profession.

Short term, long effect
Teach for America’s mission is to close the academic achievement gap between low-income students and their wealthier counterparts. The program recruits accomplished seniors at topflight colleges — type A achievers seemingly bound for finance, medicine, or law — and invites them to commit to teach in low-income urban and rural schools for two years.

Critics see a flaw in that approach: disruptive turnover is built in. Most TFA recruits go in thinking of education as an experience, a stopover rather than a career.

“They’re not coming into it for the long haul,” says Philip Tate, an assistant professor of curriculum and teaching at SED, who allows that many mainstream teachers leave the field within two or three years, and that the profession has trouble attracting “high-status people who paid a lot for their education.” But teaching is not about status or leadership, he argues. “It’s about commitment and sacrifice and long-term service, which is not what TFA teachers understand it to be.”

Then again, many get hooked. Based on a 2007 survey, TFA says that two-thirds of its alumni are employed in education, half as teachers and half as administrators. The organization acknowledges that only about 4,100 of roughly 14,000 alumni responded to the survey, but their impact is profound: 380 are school principals (23 in greater Boston) or superintendents, and more than 20 serve as elected officials, mostly on local school councils.

Even if TFA veterans don’t stay in the field, they leave with a vivid awareness of the plight of impoverished students. That means thousands of lawyers, doctors, executives, and policy makers now know what teachers know.

“Just imagine if every politician were a classroom teacher for even one year,” says Cole Farnum (CAS’06), who taught for TFA in Texas. “Just imagine how that could change the face of what decisions are made on behalf of children.”

Many of the new Boston chapter members seem to be on track to stay. After two years, they earn what’s known as their initial license to teach; they already hold preliminary licenses, having passed state tests over the summer. A third year in the classroom may then seem natural, especially for the 80 percent who will continue at SED and complete a master’s.

Emily Berman (SMG’09, CAS’09) is one of these. She says her plan is to “learn from the bottom how it is in the schools, and then apply that knowledge as an administrator.” As an undergrad, she was a double major, a teaching assistant, and a student club cofounder. She’s also 100 percent committed to closing the achievement gap. “If there were a higher percentage than 100,” she says, “I would say that.”

The readiness question
But are TFA corps members adequately prepared?

“Recruits are expected to go into the classroom after a piddling five-week training,” a Boston schoolteacher and SED alum posted on the Boston Globe’s Web site. “Teaching is a difficult job that requires a lot of training and experience, and while enthusiasm certainly helps, in the end, it doesn’t get the job done.”

The intensive five-week summer institute, says TFA spokeswoman Kerci Marcello Stroud, is “something we’ve been doing for 19 years. We refine it and reevaluate it every single summer, and it keeps getting stronger.” Furthermore, corps members get two years of ongoing professional development and support from full-time TFA program directors.

Different studies draw different conclusions about this system. A 2002 study at Arizona State found that TFA and other alternative certification programs were “harmful” to children. But the authors acknowledged that such research is “intertwined with the ideology of the researchers.” TFA officials often cite a 2008 Urban Institute study that found their corps members in North Carolina were more effective than traditional teachers at raising student achievement. But that study’s lead author — as is footnoted on the title page — is the mother of a TFA employee.

A crucial ingredient in corps members’ support is the course work at regional university partners. “TFA realizes they can’t do everything in five weeks,” says Amy Slate, director of educational initiatives at SED. “That’s why they’ve come to us. In the Boston metro area, we are the best at what we do, which is train teachers.”

Some perspective
The TFA debate won’t be resolved soon, and the budget crisis doesn’t help. The Boston Public Schools laid off 25 permanent teachers and at least that many provisional teachers last spring. But there were 150 to 200 openings from retirements, and it rankled the Boston Teachers Union that even 20 of those slots would be filled by TFA recruits rather than existing provisional teachers in the system.

Such conflicts stem from philosophical as well as practical concerns. Tate fears TFA alumni tend to emerge from the experience espousing what, in education circles, equates to “right-wing, free-market thinking: tear the system down and build a capitalist system with charter schools, no training, that kind of thing.”

The TFA’s Stroud disputes that notion. For example, “We’re actually agnostic about public versus charter,” she says.

The Wall Street Journal has praised TFA for circumventing “the vast education bureaucracy.” But Hardin Coleman, dean of SED, says that’s the newspaper’s projection.

“As TFA has been used in the media and by some parts of the educational reform movement,” Coleman says, “they can be painted with that brush. But when you actually talk with them, and as we’ve engaged with them in this collaboration at BU, a very different picture emerges.”

Emily Berman doesn’t sound like a Jay Severin fan. She’s not motivated by a desire to chip away at union labor and the social contract. She’s motivated by the desire to see poor kids do better in school.

“With my upbringing, I knew I could be anything I wanted to be,” she says. “Business, law, science, I had options. But there are 13 million children out there who, because of their zip code, don’t have those options. It’s so fundamentally unfair.”

“I see Teach for America as another way to support our core mission,” Coleman says, “which is to prepare people to practice. If a math major from Williams College or Brown University had moved into Boston and gotten a job in the Boston public schools, and then was told, ‘You need to take these courses for certification,’ and came to BU and then decided to get a master’s, we’d be delighted. From our perspective, TFA is merely recruiting that group for us.”

“TFA has a preachy tone sometimes,” Coleman adds with a laugh. “But we’re glad they’re a part of our community.”

Patrick L. Kennedy can be reached at plk@bu.edu.

This article first appeared in the fall 2009 issue of @SED, the BU School of Education alumni magazine.

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