There is currently a diary on the rec list that savages the Teach for America program while offering scant evidence to support the claims made. While Teach for America is by no means perfect, a more reasoned approach is necessary for understanding its particular strengths and the potential threat it poses to teachers unions, if not education.
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First off, I am not associated with Teach for America in any capacity, though I do work in higher education and was a member of Americorps after I graduated college.
Teach for America takes recent college grads from elite insitutions (think Harvard, Standford, Vanderbilt) and places them in underserved school districts. The federal government pays the salaries of the Teach for America Fellows (it is a federal program), allowing cash strapped municipalities to extend their budgets. For example
The Baltimore City school board approved a contract with Teach for America on Tuesday night that will allow up to 200 teachers into the city's public schools during the coming school year.
The cost to city schools of $450,000 includes recruitment, selection and training of new teachers, who commit to their posts for two years. Schools chief Andrés Alonso said the contract only covers one year because of the current economic climate.
The fee paid by Baltimore may seem exorbitant, until one considers that the city gains 200 teachers at a cost of $2,250 per teacher. Teach for America pays their salaries and health care, plus any bonuses they accrue for achieving excellence in the school. Assuming a starting salary of $35,000 for a teacher in Baltimore, it would cost the city $7 million to place the same number of new teachers in their schools. We all know that this is money that Baltimore does not have El Sobrante let me know in the comments that
TFA does NOT pay the salaries or provide bargain teachers to districts. It helps with training and placement, and professional development and support of Corps Members. Salaries are paid by the districts as the would to any other first/second year teacher.
Still, the financial flexabilty that TFA provides is of obvious value in places like Baltimore with a limited local tax base that face a lack of political will to properly fund their school system at the state level. It would be great to live in a society where the school system in Baltimore receives the same level of funding as the suburban Montgomery County Maryland school system, but that's not reality.
And while these teachers may be inexperienced, they arrive in the classroom less jaded and with fewer preconceptions than their peers. They truly understand how transformative access to an elite education can be to their students. They are naive in precisely the way that might allow them to connect with their students. In most inner city schools, to quote the rapper Nas, teachers "are paid just to show up and leave/no one succeeds."
Teach for America exposes its fellows to to the harsh realities of urban America. This is important politically and socially. Where else will a number of mostly white, mostly privileged people from elite institutions, the so-called future leaders of our nation, experience the privation that is a matter of course in the hood. According to the teach for America website
Teach For America alumni say that the corps experience had a profound impact on their lives, both personally and professionally. Our alumni gain an understanding of how educational inequity can be solved, laying the foundation for a lifetime of advocacy and civic leadership. After their corps experience, they continue to build a network of colleagues, friends, students, and community members, who become an ongoing source of personal and professional inspiration.
A Stanford grad, working in middle management, willing to take a chance on a kid from the inner city because of his experiences at Teach for America promotes the social good, in my opinion. Should there be another way to break down these barriers? Yes, but again, this is reality...
Which is not to say that Teach for America is the panacea for our nation's educational woes.
Mike Rose, an education professor at UCLA who criticizes the glowing media coverage that teach for america regularly garners, examines
the Council of Chief State School Officers’ National Teacher of the Year program. Only a handful of these top-flight teachers got their bachelor’s degrees from institutions typically defined as elite. A number hail from state universities. And a considerable number come from small local colleges with teacher education programs. Expertise in teaching is more than a function of one’s undergraduate pedigree.
While this is undoubtedly true, part of this stems from the incredible cost associated with attending an Ivy League school. The costs incurred push you away from a career in education (and into one in banking). Which is not to say that all Teach for America Fellows are solid teachers. And even if they are, they do take a spot away from a certified teacher. But in my experience good teachers line up for jobs in places like Westchester County, NY (home to Scarsdale and Larchmont) and Montgomery County, Md (home to Potomac and Bethesda) rather than looking in the Bronx or Baltimore. Often times in inner-city school districts one school fires a teacher for incompetence only to see that same teacher reappear at a different school in the same district. Teacher unions are complicit in this, which only harms the education of the children in the underserved district. I am pro-union but the role of teachers unions in protecting bad teachers, much like police unions protecting bad cops, angers me.
Teach for America was used by the Bush administration to weaken the power of teachers unions across the country under No Child Left Behind, but Bush's abuse of the program does not make the program itself suspect.