I'd only heard of Teach for America, but didn't know anything about them. But as soon as I heard the WV legislature was writing a bill just for them, I knew it had to be bad.
West Virginia has a teaching shortage. As many as 700 teaching jobs are vacant. Why is this? For starters, West Virginia's teacher salaries are the 15th lowestin the nation. That doesn't sound so bad, until you compare it to our neighboring states: Maryland, for example, which is literally across the river from our West Virginia town, starts teachers at $43,000. Pennsylvania, forming our northern border, starts at $41,000. According to a recent survey, West Virginia is one of the "worst" states for teachers. The survey took into account factors such as salary, administrative support, and classroom size. To make things even less attractive to prospective teachers, WV counties pay for some of the education budget with a special levy that voters decide on every few years. When that levy fails, budgets are cut - drastically. Two years ago our county's levy failed, and immediately teachers started fleeing to the other side of the river. Thankfully it was reinstated last year. But it's an additional instability that teachers in other states may not face.
The West Virginia House of Delegates has approved a bill that would allow certain non-teachers to take over classrooms to make up for this shortage instead of addressing the problems that cause teachers look elsewhere for jobs. Their idea is to use Teach for America recruits instead of working to attract degreed, experienced teachers. TFA recruits are freshly graduated from college; but not with an education degree. I'm sure the Teach for America applicants are smart and well-meaning. They are told that they're doing a noble thing, abandoning, at least for 2 years, a future promising bonuses and a nice house in the suburbs to work with students who have grown up in the kind of poverty they may have never known in their own lives. However, they are not teachers. They haven't studied pedagogy, educational psychology, learned how to make lesson plans, deal with difficult students, etc. Compared to a real teacher who spends at least 4 years in college studying these topics as well as his or her teaching concentration, TFA recruits get 5 weeks of training. This 5 weeks of training includes "teaching" students during summer school. And who goes to summer school? That's right, kids, the neediest of them all, the ones who are already having problems, are being used to train a 22-year old how to teach. As content experts in their chosen fields, TFAers may have read every book in the library, solved the most complicated calculus problem in the world: but do they know how to teach someone else how to do that? TFA recruits are typically high-performing graduates of top schools, which is wonderful for them. But, how on earth are they supposed to relate to a kid from Southern West Virginia who's never been out of the county, whose only relationship with the rest of the world is through TV? How will they be received by the real teachers? Really? You're going to bring some young whippersnapper into a school where teachers have worked their entire careers? TFA's standard line is that they're offering something “better” than traditionally-trained teachers can provide. A bit elitist, no?
There is also the problem of continuity. TFAers pledge 2 year commitments to the schools; that's already not very long, but then many of them quit before the commitment is served. In fact, 5% quit before the 5 week training period is even over; depending on the school district, between 8-16% leave before the commitment is over.
It must be easy for an organization to say to a school board or a legislature, hey your schools are failing, let's blame it on the teachers and the learning environment, and hey we're going to provide you with these bright young things that just graduated from college! And guess what. When they burn out in two years, we'll get you some brand new ones!
Schools pay a recruiting fee to Teachers for America for each "teacher", on top of regular salary and benefits that any real teacher would receive. In Cleveland, this fee was $9,000. Why not just increase teacher salaries by whatever West Virginia was going to pay TFA? At least we know they'll be around for more than 2 years.
This move will only weaken the teachers' union with the threat of hiring non-teachers to fill teacher positions.And what's next on our knuckle-dragging legislative agenda, West Virginia? Right! A Right To Work bill!
Which leads me to my next concern.
I worry when schools have sponsors. OK, disclosure, our medical practice has purchased ads in school yearbooks, and donated to fundraisers for uniforms, and I suppose that makes our private company a sponsor of the schools. Of course, we never expect anything in return. I have to worry though when I see that Walmart is sponsoring Teach for America to the tune of $16.6 million in one year alone.. Aren't they union busters? Paying wages so low that their workers are the largest block of public assistance beneficiaries in the country? Why isn't Walmart spending money on its own employees, instead of an organization that trains someone to play a teacher? And if I were an organization that that says it wants to "help kids growing up in poverty beat the culture of low expectations that's not exactly the kind of association I'd want to have.
OK so maybe TFAs recruits aren't teaching poor kids to grow up to be robots trained to shut up and put in their 20 hours a day at Walmart and they'd better be happy about it. HOWEVER. Maybe TFA IS grooming their recruits to progress into more, shall we say, influential areas. Such as lobbying. Policy makers. Elected officials. That would be the mission of the Leadership for Educational Equity,, "the nonprofit organization that was launched in 2007 to inspire, train and support Teach For America alumni and corps members to pursue public leadership."
Now do you really want someone who 1) doesn't have an education degree 2) has maybe 2 years teaching experience 3) believes they are better at teaching than an experienced, trained public school teacher, making public education policy? Can you say: ALEC?
Wed Feb 25, 2015 at 10:56 PM PT: The bill is now in the Senate (SB 5). I was not surprised, but none the less, extremely disappointed, that my local State Senator Charles Trump, was one of the sponsors.