Does Teach for America Hold the Answers to Education Reform?

Teachers' unions have historically supported a simpler form of evaluation -- administrators would sit in the classroom a small number of times each year and evaluate teachers based on what they observed. It's an archaic system that does little to separate the good from the bad. However, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, recently announced support for a more rigorous evaluation method which could take student test scores and overall performance into account.

But how exactly do you judge a teacher? Any student will likely be able to point out the teachers that help them learn best. But how can school administrators and policymakers translate such intangible teaching ability into clear evaluative markers?

Despite criticism from some educational experts (including Linda Darling-Hammond, former candidate for Obama's Secretary of Education), one organization has had success in such areas.

Great Teachers, All Backgrounds

Teach for America (TFA), founded in 1989, is a nonprofit that constantly strives to place engaged and innovative young teachers in classrooms serving low-income students across the nation. It is a two-year program that recruits a huge number of students from the most competitive universities. In fact, approximately 11 percent of Ivy League seniors apply to TFA each year. For several years TFA has been the number one employer at Duke, my university, and its dominance is growing as tempting jobs in finance and other lucrative fields have dried up due to the recession.

A recent article in The Atlantic Monthly looked into the methods by which TFA has evaluated its participants over the last twenty years. By comparing initial applicant evaluations with later successes, Teach for America has been able to predict characteristics that lead to success. The best teachers score highly in perseverance, contentment with their own lives, and past measures of achievement, whether related to academics or other forms of leadership. Interestingly, a master's degree in education had no impact on success.

This is the core of TFA's entire structure. Recruits are primarily students with little to no education training as undergraduates. Most didn't even have an interest in the field of education prior to joining TFA. Accepted applicants go through an intense five-week training program and are thrown into a teaching situation immediately afterward. This strategy defies long-held traditions of teacher training in the U.S.

Challenges of Wide Recruitment

TFA is an influential force on campus, but many wonder how effective a two-year commitment can be, especially when so many TFA applicants pursue new fields and opportunities after they finish their service.

A recent Campus Progress field report highlighted the negative experiences of three TFA dropouts. The former participants criticized the support and training that Teach for America provides and questioned how realistic the program's ambitious goals are. One teacher quit after experiencing a meltdown after school, blaming the rigorous and stressful meetings TFA required as well as a training program that was "not put well together." Another recent study, from Stanford University, found that graduates of TFA, when compared to TFA dropouts, actually showed less civic involvement (voting, giving to charity, etc.) after their service ended.

Michael Koler, a Duke graduate currently teaching fifth-grade English in Indiana, had a disappointment of a different sort. "My biggest shock upon arrival was finding out that my fifth graders were on second and third grade reading levels," he said. Despite the challenges he's faced, Michael continues to try to motivate his students with methods such as a rewards system, involving a child's parents, or simply searching for books that aren't boring for kids. Though his two-year commitment is up at the end of this year, he says that he'll stay on with his current students through the sixth grade. "I'm curious to see if I can get my entire class to state proficiency in a two-year span," he says.

Alex Quigley, a six-year TFA corps member who continued to work in TFA administration after he stopped teaching, is now the principal of the Maureen Joy Charter School in Durham, North Carolina. His administrative roles have given him a clear idea of what still needs to be fixed in education and how TFA fits into the picture. When I asked him about his frustrations with education policy, he quoted a statement from Senator Michael Bennet (D-Colo.): "To me, the burden of proof is not on the people who want to change the system, the burden of proof is on people who want to keep it the same."

Quigley says that there are radical steps this country needs to be taking to close achievement gaps and that a huge part of it will be figuring out how to "effectively select, evaluate and rank teacher performance." That's where Teach for America's analysis of teacher effectiveness comes into play. "[Teach for America] was critical to my understanding of great teaching and [that] is something I draw on everyday," he says.

To a certain extent, the numbers back up the story. According that same Harvard study cited by the Campus Progress piece, approximately 61 percent of TFA teachers remain in the teaching profession longer than their two-year commitment, with 44 percent staying at their initially assigned school. Though they are notably lower than the general teaching population (the national two-year retention rate for teachers is approximately 90 percent), TFA numbers are still impressive given the fact that only a small percentage of recruits were interested in education at all before TFA. (Victor Wakefield, the TFA recruiting director at Duke, says that only about 10 percent of corps members had previously expressed interest in teaching.)

What the Future Holds

Washington D.C. school chancellor and TFA alum Michelle Rhee's strong advocacy for merit-based pay and getting rid of ineffective teachers has shaken up the education system in our nation's capitol. Her impact on U.S. education policy is increasingly evident as national lawmakers consider her strategy: a strong teacher evaluation system that rewards good teachers with better pay while eliminating ineffective teachers. The New Teacher Project (TNTP), a non-profit she began in 1997 that seeks to recruit bright, new teachers and help them succeed in classrooms, is a clear expansion of the same ideas behind TFA. Indeed, many of the current leaders of TNTP are former TFA corps members.

TFA's unorthodox method of recruiting teachers who focused on subjects unrelated to child education during college has also stirred up new ideas about how best to train teachers. Arizona State University has partnered up with TFA to overhaul its undergraduate child education program to include more classes in subjects that students will be teaching and less classes on the theory of education.

Even Linda Darling-Hammond, once a hard-nosed critic of TFA, has recently acknowledged that the organization succeeds in bringing in new talent into the teaching profession.

Critics of the program often hold to long-standing traditions where teachers work to earn tenure and then work under outdated evaluation processes until retirement. There is too much riding on the successes of America's teachers for the country to remain stagnant in the field of education. Fresh eyes and fresh ideas to may help close not only the achievement gaps within our country, but ever-increasing achievement gaps with the rest of the world.

Teach for America will not do this on its own, but it's a start.