Each year, TFA selected and sent out newly minted young teachers. Each year, it reached agreements with school districts and states to hire them. As of 2012, in its twenty-first year, TFA counted about thirty thousand alumni. Typically, TFA trains its corps members for five weeks before school opens, and the district agrees to pay $2,000–$5,000 as a fee to the organization for each TFA teacher, plus a full salary to the teacher. Some districts underwrite the cost of courses that TFA members must take to win state certification as they teach.
If this were the beginning and the end of the TFA story, it would be rightly hailed as a wonderful social innovation, a much-needed help for distressed districts that are unable to find enough qualified teachers for high-poverty schools with shortages of teachers of science and mathematics. For sure, having a hardworking and well-educated young graduate of a fine university is far better than having no teacher at all or having a coach teach science, even though he has no degree in science.
But then the story changes from the original idea to a different narrative: the story of TFA’s grand ambition. TFA is not content to send out young people to do useful work in the schools. Flush with media acclaim and corporate largesse, TFA sells its brand as the best means of changing American education and ending educational inequity. It maintains that its teachers are singularly equipped to save children’s lives, because TFA teachers have high expectations, clear goals, and a sense of purpose. It portrays itself as a prominent actor in the new civil rights movement, a force to abolish inequality and establish social justice. It is as though the Peace Corps claimed that its young volunteers are more successful than seasoned diplomats, know how to bring about world peace, and should be making foreign policy.
On the face of it, such claims should have been laughable. No first-year teacher, especially one with only five weeks of training, is fully prepared for the challenges of a classroom filled with boisterous students in the nation’s poorest communities. How can these young people expect to close the achievement gap and establish equality across the land when they agree to remain for only two years? Even though some stay for three or four years and a few decide to become career teachers or move into administrative roles, this makes no sense.
It seems even more improbable to say that TFA is leading the new civil rights movement when Wendy Kopp often says that we don’t have to fix poverty, we have to fix schools. What civil rights leader would say that? What civil rights leader would assert that we can “fix” the schools instead of improving jobs, health care, and housing?
In her book A Chance to Make History, Kopp writes that when she started, “many assumed that fixing education would require fixing poverty first.” She is now convinced, however, that TFA teachers, “even in their first and second years of teaching, are proving it is possible for economically disadvantaged children to compete academically with their higher-income peers.” This actually isn’t true, but no matter. She asserts there is “hard evidence that we can ensure all of our children in urban and rural communities have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.” She maintains that “over the last twenty years we in the United States have discovered that we don’t have to wait to fix poverty to dramatically improve educational outcomes for underprivileged students.” When she appeared at Harvard in 2012, Harvard Magazine summed up her presentation: “Two decades ago, many educators thought urban schools could improve only if progress was made against poverty. Wendy Kopp thought there was another way to make a difference.”1
But Kopp was wrong. The educators who thought we could improve schools by making progress against poverty were right. We must work both to improve schools and to reduce poverty, not to prioritize one over the other or say that schools come first, poverty later. Children are more likely to do well in school if they arrive in school healthy and ready to learn. TFA teachers are no substitute for jobs, nutrition, good housing, and health care. Poverty rises or falls in response to the economy, not in response to smart young people who teach for two or three years in poor communities or work in the state department of education, even as state commissioner.
In A Chance to Make History, Kopp acknowledges that there are no “silver bullets,” that Teach for America does not have all the answers, and that the work of education is hard and complex. Yet she does not retreat from her claim that TFA recruits are as good as or better than veteran teachers and that the education leaders trained by TFA are transforming American education in fundamental and positive ways. The Teach for America Web site says that the problem of low academic performance in high-poverty neighborhoods is “a solvable problem”: “We can provide an excellent education for kids in low-income communities. Although 16 million American children face the extra challenges of poverty, an increasing body of evidence shows they can achieve at the highest levels.”2 Nothing is said on the Web site about addressing or reducing poverty, leaving the implication that “the problem” (low test scores of students who are poor) is “solvable” by TFA.
We live in an age of public relations and perception. And the TFA brand is a winner. The organization from the start was a fund-raising colossus. Its board of directors contains some of America’s most powerful figures from Wall Street and the corporate sector. At the same time that it raises millions from its sponsors and allies, TFA appeals to the public to contribute its nickels and dimes. Giving to TFA is pitched as equivalent to giving to the Girl Scouts, as a noble act of charity.
When the U.S. Department of Education ran a competition in 2010 for the most innovative programs in education, with four top prizes of $50 million, TFA was one of the winners (the KIPP charter chain, headed by Wendy Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, also won $50 million). In 2011, a group of foundations led by the Broad Foundation made a gift of $100 million to TFA. In the same year, the Walton Family Foundation—one of the nation’s most conservative foundations—pitched in $49.5 million, the largest single education grant made that year by a foundation committed to privatization. TFA also received federal funding through AmeriCorps grants and an annual congressional earmark of about $20 million. In the five years from 2006 to 2010, TFA raised an astonishing $907 million in foundation grants, corporate gifts, and government funding.3
Wendy Kopp says that “one day, all children in our nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.”4 This will happen, she says, for two reasons.
First, she claims that TFA’s recruits, fresh out of college and with only five weeks of training, get better results than new teachers who spent a year or more in teacher education programs, and that “a significant body of rigorous research” shows that they are “on average, equally or more effective than veteran teachers.”5
Second, she claims that TFA alumni will take their places in the halls of power and become advocates for education. She wrote: “In the long run, we build a force of leaders who, with the insight and added conviction that comes from teaching in a low-income community, influence civic consciousness from inside education and other professions. Our alumni are a powerful leadership force working to effect the fundamental, systemic changes necessary to ensure educational opportunity for all.”6
Do TFA members get their students to produce higher test scores than other teachers, both new ones and veterans, as Kopp and TFA often claim?
Careful reviews of research have concluded that TFA corps members get about the same test score results as other new and uncertified teachers. Some studies show that TFA teachers get small but significant gains in math but not in reading. One of the most positive studies found that the students taught by TFA teachers increased their math scores from the 14th percentile to the 17th percentile, which was significant but very far from closing the achievement gap between low-income students and their high-income peers.7
Julian Vasquez Heilig and Su Jin Jez reviewed the research about Teach for America and concluded that when compared to other new and uncredentialed teachers in the same schools, “novice TFA teachers perform equivalently, and expe
rienced TFA teachers perform comparably in raising reading scores and a bit better in raising math scores.” When compared to beginning teachers who are credentialed, said Heilig and Sun, “the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics.” Furthermore,
the relatively few TFA teachers who stay long enough to become fully credentialed (typically after two years) appear to do about as well as other similarly experienced credentialed teachers in teaching reading; they do as well as, and sometimes better than, that comparison group in teaching mathematics. However, since more than 50% of TFA teachers leave after two years, and more than 80% leave after three years, it is impossible to know whether these more positive findings for experienced recruits result from additional training and experience or from attrition of TFA teachers who may be less effective.
The reviewers found that the high attrition of TFA teachers presented a problem for schools and districts: “From a school-wide perspective, the high turnover of TFA teachers is costly. Recruiting and training replacements for teachers who leave involves financial costs, and the higher achievement gains associated with experienced teachers and lower turnover may be lost as well.”8
TFA contends that the high turnover rate of its recruits doesn’t matter because its long-term goal is to increase the number of influential people who care about education and who become transformative education leaders. To some extent, it has succeeded. Of the thirty thousand or so TFA alumni, many are successful in politics, Wall Street, the media, business, and other walks of life. Since they were carefully culled from top universities, this is not surprising. But it is debatable whether those who have achieved eminence in education are advancing the cause of public education.
Many of the most prominent alumni have taken leading roles in the corporate reform movement. They have created charter schools, they lead charter school chains, and they actively advance the cause of privatization. The best-known graduate of TFA is Michelle Rhee, who is a prominent opponent of teachers’ unions and teachers’ tenure and an outspoken advocate of high-stakes testing and privatization. John White, the state superintendent of education in Louisiana, is another graduate of TFA. His dual credentials as a graduate of TFA and the Broad Superintendents Academy propelled him to his leadership role in Louisiana at the age of thirty-five, a feat that would be almost unimaginable for someone who had risen through the traditional route of teaching and administration. White was not just any state superintendent. He served governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who launched a radical effort to privatize education by diverting money dedicated by the state constitution to the support of public elementary and secondary schools, not only to charters and vouchers, but to for-profit online businesses and private vendors of every kind.
Many of the TFA alumni who became leading figures in education are strong proponents of test-based accountability. In Tennessee, the TFA alumnus Kevin Huffman was appointed by a conservative Republican governor to push through an agenda of evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students and expanding school choice; like Rhee and White, he supports vouchers and for-profit virtual schools. In Colorado, the TFA alumnus Michael Johnston was elected to the state legislature and wrote legislation to make student test scores count for 50 percent of every teacher’s and principal’s evaluation, despite the absence of any evidence for doing so. When you consider that many TFA alumni are graduates of our nation’s finest liberal arts colleges, you must wonder about their devotion to these narrow testing instruments that are used for ranking students, teachers, and schools. Perhaps because they were students who always excelled at test taking, they believe that these measures are truly meritocratic and should be applied universally.
To be sure, not every graduate of TFA supports the privatization agenda. Some of TFA’s most articulate critics are former corps members, like Gary Rubinstein, who did his TFA stint in Houston in the early 1990s. There were 750 members of his cohort. At the time, he writes, there were massive shortages of teachers:
We knew that we weren’t going to be great teachers. It was unrealistic to believe otherwise. But we also knew that the jobs we were taking were jobs that nobody else wanted. Principals who were hiring these “Teachers For America” or other paraphrasings of this unknown organization, were completely desperate. If not for us, our students, most likely, would be taught by a different substitute each day. Even if we were bad permanent teachers, we WERE permanent teachers and for kids who had little in life they can call permanent, it was something. The motto for TFA back then could have been “Hey, we’re better than nothing.”
Rubinstein eventually became a career teacher of mathematics in a New York City public high school. He has written searing criticism of the TFA alumni who are now taking control of states and districts:
These leaders are some of the most destructive forces in public education. They seem to love nothing more than labeling schools as “failing,” shutting them down, and blaming the supposed failure on the veteran teachers. The buildings of the closed schools are taken over by charter networks, often with leaders who were TFA alums and who get salaries of $200,000 or more to run a few schools.
Rather than be honest about both their successes and their failures, they deny any failures, and charge forward with an agenda that has not worked and will never work. Their “proof” consists of a few high-performing charters. These charters are unwilling to release the data that proves that they succeed by booting the “worst” kids—the ones that bring down their test scores.9
Today TFA is at the center of the corporate reform movement, supplying young teachers to staff the growing number of non-union, privately managed charter schools across the nation. These inexperienced young men and women will work incredibly hard, as much as seventy or eighty hours a week, trying to perform a job for which they are ill-prepared, with no expectation of a pension or benefits, then move on. TFA is not just a beneficiary of the privatization movement but one of the central drivers of the movement.
Those who have the power and resources to change the nature of the teaching profession—the U.S. Department of Education and the major foundations—are mistakenly pouring resources into TFA instead of devoting their attention to improving the teaching profession. TFA is no substitute for thoughtful, long-term federal and state policies to transform the recruitment, preparation, and retention of career teachers.
The teaching profession needs to be strengthened and improved. The standards for entry into teaching should be far higher than they are today. Five weeks of training is insufficient. Many teachers are now getting their degrees online from “universities” of dubious quality. The biggest producers of master’s degrees in education are online universities.10 This is wrong. Teachers should have a year of study, research, and practice teaching before they are allowed to teach. They should be masters of their subject, even better, two subjects. They should have a strong liberal arts education, as young recruits into TFA do. But a strong liberal arts education is not enough. In addition to knowing their subject, they should learn how to teach, how to manage the classroom, how to deal with disruptive behavior, how to educate students with special needs, and how to engage parents to help their children. There is much more they should learn—about the history, philosophy, and politics of education, about cognitive psychology, and about the sociology of education—and there is much more that they will learn on the job. They should pass tests to demonstrate their mastery of what they intend to teach. Once in the classroom, they should have mentors who help them improve their teaching. Teaching is complex, and it should be a career, not a springboard to bigger and better things.
Where is TFA in this scene? By its exaggerated claims, TFA reinforces the public perception that teachers need very little training. This was the dominant sentiment that characterized public views of teachers in the nineteenth century, when it was believed that “anyone can teach,” and teaching was a stopgap before moving on to something better. One of the great achi
evements of education reformers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was to insist—and to persuade state legislatures—that education is a profession and that professionals need professional education, not just a few weeks of training or none at all. TFA uses its powerful platform in the national media to insist that those they select need no professional preparation. This idea turns the clock back on the teaching profession to the early nineteenth century.
There is a synergy here. As the reform movement insists that bad teachers are destroying children’s lives, TFA puts itself forward as the source of “great” teachers, “transformative” teachers, and “effective” teachers who are “changing the trajectory” of children’s lives. As we have seen, the research does not support these claims. TFA teachers are no better or worse than other new teachers. Wendy Kopp points to New Orleans and Washington, D.C., as the sites where TFA has made a significant difference.
But the examples don’t hold up to scrutiny. About 80 percent or more of the students in New Orleans are in charter schools, which are staffed with large numbers of hardworking, dedicated TFA teachers. The proportion of students passing state tests has increased since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina leveled large parts of the city, but comparisons before and after the hurricane are meaningless because the students are not the same; many of the district’s students never returned. By the state’s own measures, New Orleans is a very low-performing district in a low-performing state. The state gave a grade of D or F to two-thirds of the charters in New Orleans. Only nine percent received an A and 14 percent earned a B.11 There are vast disparities among the charters: some are high performing, but most are low performing. Even if the news from this unusual district were far better, it could hardly be a model for the nation. Some reformers might think it wise to wipe out public education, turn the schools over to private management, eliminate the teachers’ unions, and rely on energetic and inexperienced youngsters who work hard and leave every two or three years. But such a model is unsustainable for a single large district, let alone an entire nation. Even if it were possible, there is no reason to believe that a system of privately managed schools with a corps of nonprofessional teachers would produce a high-quality education for most or all students. No high-performing nation in the world has such a system.
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Page 17