One young future teacher explains: "...while I plan to devote myself to teaching in the same communities TFA targets, I will never Teach For America."
By now most regulars here are aware of some of the concerns about Teach For America, the organization that makes graduates of prestigious colleges and universities into classroom teachers with eight weeks of training and places them in the toughest public schools in the nation for a two year commitment. Recently teacherken and others on this site have done a valuable public service in presenting a dissenting view of this highly popularized, well financed and slickly promoted education reform program. It's not easy to get the word out. Teach For America is the darling of philanthropic billionaires, Wall Street financial institutions, and the Obama Administration. It receives more than a hundred million in funding per year that it uses largely for self promotion, and is the beneficiary of glowing praise from education reform propaganda like the recent "Waiting For Superman" movie.
So what is wrong with Teach For America? Perhaps the best equipped to answer that question is one of its potential targets.
The following essay is written by a young woman who intends to become an elementary school teacher next year after graduating from one of the nation's leading liberal arts colleges. She is attaining her state teaching credential. She has been student teaching for two years, has taught and administered an after school education program for kindergarten through sixth grade in the inner city, as well as been a summer school teacher for low income middle school students for the last three years.
I thank her for sharing her uniquely qualified perspective on Teach For America and permitting me to post it here:
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When I tell people—strangers, professors, friends—of my plan to become an elementary school teacher, the number one response I receive is a version of “Oh, so you’re applying to Teach For America?” Because I’m a private-school educated junior at a top liberal arts college, it’s assumed that I dream of entering teaching through this lucrative gateway. When I’m feeling more succinct or polite, I simply respond that I’m getting credentialed already, so I have no need for TFA. But when I’m comfortable letting my true colors shine, I enter into a diatribe about the number of reasons I strongly disagree with the program, and about how, while I plan to devote myself to teaching in the same communities TFA targets, I will never Teach For America.
Teach For America has become a household name due largely to its role as a sort of media darling. Alongside charter schools, it has been propped up as part of the “revolution” that will fix all education wrongs. How anyone logically comes to this conclusion is beyond me. Most research out there shows that TFA teachers do anywhere from marginally worse to very marginally better than traditional teachers in their first years of teaching, and most teachers aren’t doing that well, especially in their first years. As one article sardonically commented, “Teach for America goes up against the worst teachers in the country—they’re both awful!” What sort of solution is this? Even when giving TFA the benefit of the doubt, it, like the charter school movement that similarly fails to produce significantly different results, will not fix education because it does not improve anything. Instead, it becomes a red herring that takes attention away from real solutions. It gives billionaires and politicians an easy way of looking like “education reformers” while doing nothing to combat the very real, and very complex, problems.
While many throw accolades around about the nobility of TFA, I’d go as far as to say that Teach For America is a threat to, not partner of or even passive participant in, public education. There are many out there who agree with me, and who make the point much more eloquently than I can, especially the Spring 2010 article entitled Looking Past the Spin: Teach For America” in Rethinking Schools. The money behind TFA especially paints the picture: the Walton Family Foundation is the single largest contributor to TFA. While this leads into a related but separate discussion over the role of unions and private interests in education, I believe the Walton’s full-fledged support of TFA is due more to the organization’s anti-union role than to any righteous intent, and that TFA’s cozying up to such money should be taken as a warning of the organization’s intent. Additionally, as a more recent Rethinking Schools article questioned, “Should the American people put their faith in a white billionaire boys club to lead the revolution on behalf of poor people of color?”
But more than anything, TFA is an insult to the profession of teaching. I believe most people, even those with good intentions, are drawn to TFA for largely the wrong reasons. From years spent in elite private schools and around Ivy-League chums, I’ve come to see that what drives “my kind” is, more than altruism or even money, the constant desire for accolades and reverence. We are used to being told we are amazing, to winning trophy after trophy, to getting that acceptance to the best college at any cost. A job like teaching—much like other similar public-service careers including nursing, law-enforcement, and military—is not seen as “worthy” by society of our “hard-earned” degrees and “talent”. It will not give us or our parents bragging rights. It will not further prove what we have spent our entire lives believing: that we are the best.
While many credit TFA with making teaching “more noble”, I believe it legitimizes this negative view of the profession. Rather than compelling students to become teachers, it compels them to become corps members. It encourages competition for the sake of competition, then highly publicizes its selectivity. In doing so, it gives its selects the title to prove that they are better: better than their peers, better than the rejects, better than teachers.
I am not implying that most TFA recruits (some of whom I personally know and respect) are self-centered egotists. Indeed, surely not all “corps members” are or desire to be future Goldman Sachs CEOs. Many (though less than they’d lead you to believe) will go on to be very successful teachers. But for those really dedicated to teaching, I strongly urge traditional routes to teaching. Before committing to a life in the classroom, one should actually spend time with kids. Volunteer, baby-sit, student teach. If one can’t make the time for, or have no interest in, these simple activities, one probably won’t love teaching anyway, and I find it almost criminal that TFA puts adults without any dedication to children in charge of students. It is unfair for students to be used as experiments as to whether or not their TFA teachers are good with kids. Likewise, both commendation and critique of TFA often focuses on its 8-week training “institute”. After countless hours spent in both traditional and non-traditional training, I can’t imagine that this is enough. Indeed, the implication that all there is to know about teaching can be learned in eight weeks makes a mockery of the complexities of the profession. The traditional training system used today is certainly highly flawed, but the answer is to make it more professional, not less. Teachers-in-training should seek out and receive as much education, guidance, and practice possible before using students as guinea pigs. Motivated and skilled teachers-to-be will become better, while those not cut out for the job will be weeded out before the stakes are too high. TFA instead promotes a sort of trial-by-fire method, but when a teacher fails, he brings his students down with him.
Additionally, the language used by TFA further erodes the profession and the entire concept of what it means to teach. TFA promotes the view that teaching, especially in “high needs” communities, is a “sacrifice”. It is a way to give of oneself, often for only two years, and “change the world”. But teaching is not a sacrifice; it is a privilege. From my time spent in classrooms and, most importantly, around students, in neighborhoods like the ones TFA targets, I’ve experienced the joy that comes from working with these students. The work is taxing, but you take from it so much more than you put in.
But, at the end of the day, what TFA forgets, and I’ve largely neglected, is that teaching is not about the teachers, but about the students. Even if the students are lucky enough to have wonderful TFA-trained teachers, these figures will likely float out of their lives once their commitment is up. Indeed, perhaps because TFA lacks any hard data showing true student success, they place all their attention on the benefits to their corps members and not to the students in their classrooms. There are no student testimonials on their website, and students are only background figures in the homepage pictures. While TFA has been around over 20 years and its corps members have taught thousands, if not millions, of students, I have yet to see an article that addresses a single student’s experience. I don’t doubt that they’re out there, or that many students were positively affected by TFA, but I believe the lack of focus on this perspective speaks loudly about TFA’s primary interests. And if TFA isn’t teaching for the students, whom does it teach for?