After turning in her thesis, Kopp revised it into a thirty-page proposal for grant funding and began applying her Business Today skills to the task of bringing Teach for America, as she later named it, to life. She remembered that Ross Perot had been a leader in Dallas education reform (chiefly in the area of merit pay), and she made sure he got a copy. Union Carbide, the chemicals manufacturer, donated office space in Manhattan, and Mobil offered Teach for America its first grant, for $26,000. With that money Kopp was able to support herself in New York after graduation, where she shared an apartment in an Upper West Side brownstone with two other young women. She paid $500 per month in rent but was rarely home; along with her growing staff, she routinely stayed at the office until two or three a.m. Her first hire was Whitney Tilson, a friend of her brother’s who had graduated from the exclusive Northfield Mount Hermon boarding school and then Harvard. Tilson’s parents had been Peace Corps volunteers. Daniel Oscar, a Princeton alum who had taught in China, also came on board. The group’s relentlessness, fueled by Kopp’s charisma and Business Today connections, paid off. Perot eventually donated a $500,000 challenge grant, which helped TFA raise an additional $1.5 million. The organization’s early backers included Merck, Chrysler, Morgan Stanley, Hertz, and the Carnegie and Kellogg foundations.
In November 1989, 160 college students were trained at Princeton as recruiters and dispatched to search a hundred campuses for potential Teach for America members. Many seniors first heard about TFA from flyers like this one, which had the intriguing title “Something to Think About,” and promised recruits a feel-good interlude of sorts:
Do you have the least bit of indecision about your plans after graduation? Would you consider devoting two years to teach for America, in either elementary or high school grades, to make her a continuously competitive nation, one capable of continued sustenance of her democratic institutions, with equal opportunity for all? Math and science majors—remember that America has been steadily sliding in her technical and scientific capability. People of color, recall that perhaps the single greatest key to achieving full equality lies in achieving high levels of education. Liberal arts majors, remember that America is headed toward dangerously low levels of literacy, at precisely the time that they need to be high. Yalies, remember the great privilege we’ve been given, and please consider, before embarking on your ambitious careers, to devote two years toward bolstering the general strength and well being of our nation.
At Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, Alex Pearl’s roommate saw a similar flyer and told him about it. Pearl was a campus activist who had served on a student committee that supported university cafeteria and maintenance workers when they were demanding higher wages. He had volunteered as a Big Brother to a local public school student and traveled to El Salvador to protest the Reagan administration’s support for that nation’s right-wing authoritarian government. But he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do after graduation. So along with 2,500 other seniors from across the country, he applied to join TFA’s inaugural class. Pearl wrote an essay, taught a five-minute sample lesson, and was interviewed for an hour. He and nearly five hundred others were selected. They would begin teaching in the fall of 1990, after an eight-week training institute, including one week of teaching in Los Angeles summer schools.
It was during “Institute” that the tensions between TFA’s straight-laced founders and activist recruits like Alex Pearl first exploded. The corps members were living in the dorms at the University of Southern California. After sessions listening to anecdotal lectures from teachers and education experts, a party atmosphere took hold in the evenings. Within a few days, TFA’s few dozen nonwhite recruits mounted a protest: They felt the group discussions about low-income teaching were uninformed by real-world experience. How could this group of mostly young white upper-class college graduates hope to truly understand poor black and brown children and their neighborhoods? The implied question—should teachers be selected from within their students’ communities?—was age-old in American education, but it had not been the focus of Kopp’s research. She was terrified and holed up in her room to escape the onslaught of negativity.
It would only continue. Deborah Appleman, a Carleton College education professor who sat in on the Institute’s training sessions, wasn’t impressed. On August 8, 1990, she wrote a Christian Science Monitor op-ed titled “Teach for America: Is Idealism Enough?” Appleman called the idea of an eight-week teaching crash course “ludicrous,” noting that TFA was doing little to train recruits in how to plan lessons or tailor their instruction to reach bilingual or special-education students. Alex Pearl agreed. Within a few hours of stepping into his third-grade classroom at Anderson Elementary School in Compton, he realized he was woefully unprepared to teach. He had no concrete strategy to manage a classroom or impart knowledge to students. If it hadn’t been for the veteran black teacher in the classroom next door, Cleopatra Duncan, who shared her lesson plans with Pearl and taught him how to control a classroom—by expressing a firm sort of love—he might have quit.
Of the first class of TFA recruits, 80 percent fulfilled their two-year commitment, and 42 percent stayed in teaching beyond that (including, as we shall see, Alex Pearl). It was a higher attrition rate than the national average, but lower than the turnover in many of the chaotic low-income schools where TFA recruits were hired. Michael Shapiro, a journalist who wrote an early book on TFA, noted that although the program’s training was inadequate, so were many traditional teacher certification programs. Like TFA in its early years, college education departments were often too theoretical and unspecific about pedagogy and lesson planning. And as with TFA, the student teaching stints required by traditional certification programs were too short. “What Teach for America had accomplished in its first summer of teacher training was to condense into eight weeks the same shortcomings that traditional education schools stretched out over four years,” Shapiro wrote.
Despite such early criticism, over the next decade TFA became one of the most coveted postgraduation placements for young Americans. Philanthropic support continued to grow, and the program attracted overwhelming media attention. Teach for America teachers became some of the most scrutinized workers in the nation, with researchers tracking their career trajectories, their attitudes about politics and society, and their students’ test scores. The debate TFA opened up about teacher preparation and quality teaching, while often rancorous, has been deeper and more evidence based than any the nation has had since the inception of common schooling in the nineteenth century. In part, this is because so many TFA alumni have written frankly about their experiences and have had the connections to amplify their critiques and defenses of the program through magazine articles, books, and op-eds.
Jonathan Schorr was one early critic from within the TFA family. After sixteen years of private schooling, including college at Yale, Schorr sailed through his TFA summer institute student teaching, in which he was responsible for a group of only four students. He entered his classroom at Pasadena High School with naïve enthusiasm. But as the newest teacher, Schorr was assigned the toughest students, and he found himself trying, and often failing, to reach a group of kids who included teen parents and students with severe disabilities, behavior problems, and legal troubles. “Giving the least experienced teachers the toughest classes to teach is a stupid plan, even for the most eager of teachers,” Schorr concluded in a widely cited 1993 Phi Delta Kappan article. “Though I would not have admitted it at the time, I—perhaps like most TFAers—harbored dreams of liberating my students from public school mediocrity and offering them as good an education as I had received. But I was not ready.” He recommended that, as in the Cardozo Project and the National Teacher Corps, all first-year teachers teach only half a day and spend the rest of their work time observing classroom veterans and reflecting on their practice. Kopp dismissed this suggestion. She felt the most ambitious college graduates, the type of people she wanted to participate in TFA, wo
uld want to be in charge of a classroom right from the start.
TFA’s most persistent adversary was Linda Darling-Hammond, a respected researcher then at Columbia University’s Teachers College. In a 1994 essay she excoriated TFA for being “a frankly missionary program” that elevated the résumé building of its recruits over the educational needs of poor children. She pushed back against the reflexive disdain for education majors. Indeed, studies of teachers’ impact on student achievement found that certain types of education classes, especially methods courses in specific disciplines, like the teaching of math or the teaching of science, were helpful. Lots of education programs were subpar, Darling-Hammond admitted. But some, such as the graduate-level teacher preparation programs at Teachers College, Harvard, Vanderbilt, and the University of Michigan, were competitive and highly respected. Even at the undergrad level, 10 percent of entering teacher-ed students nationwide had SAT scores in the top fifth of the distribution. All this suggested that public education already had a small but significant group of highly intelligent, mission-driven teachers. With all the attention paid to TFA, those professionals could feel invisible, as if all traditionally trained educators were lazy and ineffectual, their schools waiting passively for the booster shot of enthusiasm provided by Wendy Kopp and her small army of saviors.
All too often the public discussion of school reform has pitted TFA recruits against veteran teachers, in a competition for legitimacy that relies on gross generalizations about what this or that kind of teacher is like. “We need an entirely new teaching workforce,” Dave Levin, an early TFA corps member who co-founded the KIPP charter school network, said in the late 1990s. “There are some great teachers out there, but they’ve been mixed among a bad element for too long.” Years later Joel Klein, the chancellor of the New York City public schools under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, said, “Generally, the TFA teachers are much less excuse-bound and more entrepreneurial and creative.” The organization’s critics have been equally harsh. “TFA members do not work in service of public education,” wrote Catherine Michna, an apostate TFA alumna who in 2013 announced that as a professor of education, she refuses to write recommendation letters for students who want to enter the corps. “They work in service of a corporate reform agenda that rids communities of veteran teachers, privatizes public schools, and forces a corporatized, data-driven culture upon unique low-income communities with unique dynamics and unique challenges.” If Teach for America and its allies have sometimes promoted a moral panic about career educators, this relatively small organization has also provoked a virulent moral panic among its critics.
In my experience as an education reporter, Teach for America recruits are neither the saviors nor the banes of public education. Rather, like other novice educators I’ve observed and interviewed, they run the gamut from talented and passionate to lackluster and burned out. What corps members share is the experience of being introduced to teaching through a truncated training process that stresses strict discipline and quantifiable results.
Samantha Arpino is a petite native Brooklynite with an eyebrow ring, a nose ring, and long, dark curls. She graduated in 2013 from the State University at Albany, majoring in women’s studies and communications. Alongside her sorority sisters she helped organize her college’s SlutWalk, part of an international protest movement against rape. She marched with a megaphone wearing a crop top, with the words NOT “ASKING FOR IT” painted on her belly.
A few months later Arpino was teaching summer school kindergarten in the South Bronx, at the Hyde Leadership Charter School. For the five weeks of Teach for America’s summer training institute—its twenty-third, now held in eleven cities, preparing more than six thousand corps members—Arpino lived with six hundred other recruits in college dorms in Queens. Each day she and seventy others were bused to Hyde, arriving by seven a.m. They supervised the kids’ breakfast, then spent the morning teaching under the watchful eyes of mentors—generally young TFA alumni with just two or three years of classroom experience. The mentors flooded the newbies with advice: Speak louder. Move around the room. Stick to your lesson plan. In the afternoons Arpino and the other corps members attended workshops on topics such as how to teach students who are learning English (use a lot of hand gestures, they were told). Then they went back to the dorm and planned the next day’s lessons.
The schedule was grueling. At one afternoon workshop, several corps members nodded off in the back of the room. But looking at Arpino as she taught, you’d have never known she was tired. She knelt on the floor in a floral-print dress, in front of five cross-legged black and Latino first graders, all clad in the Hyde uniform of khaki pants and navy polo shirts. Arpino speaks with the nasal, drawn-out vowels of a working-class New Yorker; she was the first in her family to attend college, and she is determined that her students will be the first in their families, too. The goal of the day’s lesson was to help children understand that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. To do that, Arpino read the kids Beanie and the Missing Bear, a story constructed to help young children understand basic literary concepts: setting (a house), character (Beanie and her sister), and timeline (Beanie loses her teddy bear and finds it again). Every time Arpino introduced a new idea, she repeated herself several times in a singsong voice, answering her own question. “I’m thinking,” she said, tapping her temple with her index finger, “that this happens in the middle of the story. In what part of the story does this happen? The middle, the middle, the middle.”
It was almost lunchtime, and the kids were yawning and fidgety. Arpino stopped every few minutes to enforce rules on how to sit. “I’m waiting for all my scholars to sit in criss-cross-applesauce!” she demanded. “With their hands folded and back straight. We have to grow our brains for first grade! Because why? Why do we grow our brains?”
“For second grade!” said Melvin.
“Yeah, but what’s the big goal?” she asked.
“College!” cried a little girl named Chanel.
“Yes, college,” Arpino repeated. “And then we can change the world.”
Later on I visited the fourth-grade math class of Tarik Walmsley, a lanky University of Washington graduate who was homeschooled at his students’ age. Walmsley’s lesson was on the idea that multiplication and division are inverse operations: that 8 × 2 = 16 and 16 ÷ 2 = 8. He passed out small plastic blocks and had the kids arrange them in various groupings: four groups of four blocks each, two groups of eight blocks each. Student behavior had been a challenge, Walmsley told me. One girl sometimes got up from her seat to dance across the classroom. A boy with a special-ed diagnosis could answer problems on paper but had trouble speaking up in front of his classmates. On a quiz, he wrote Walmsley a note: “Teacher, you think I’m stupid, but I’m not.”
On the wall was a chart showing a ladder, each level representing one behavioral demerit. Step 1 is a warning. At Step 3, a child is sent to the “icebox,” an isolated chair at the back of the classroom. By Step 5, a parent is notified, and the child is removed from the classroom. Each student’s name was written on a wooden clothespin, and as he or she accrued demerits, the pin moved up the ladder. Like Arpino with her kindergarteners, Walmsley spent an extraordinary amount of time policing how his fourth graders sat. Were their eyes “tracking” the teacher? Were pencils resting in the pencil groove of the desk? He didn’t hesitate to give demerits for small infractions. “Remember how I was talking about chocolate milk? How milk and chocolate are our products?” he asked the students, referencing the previous day’s multiplication lesson. When a boy named Anthony answered, “Yes!” he earned a demerit for speaking out of turn. By the end of the period, Anthony’s clothespin had moved up the ladder, and Anthony was sitting in the icebox, scowling.
After class Walmsley said, “Being stern is not what I grew up with. But it feels useful and fair.” He acknowledged he was still learning how to teach. His TFA mentor had said he was performing like only a “typical” teacher; his students were
not yet demonstrating the “dramatic” or “path-breaking” levels of achievement TFA expects, and which the program literature told recruits would eventually close the national achievement gap between affluent and poor children.
While TFA was once criticized for producing teachers with little idea of how to manage a classroom or create a lesson plan, today TFA offers its corps members a prescriptive set of directions on how to teach, and even how to think about teaching. It is called Teaching as Leadership. Teach for America is often lauded as an alternative to hidebound graduate schools of education, but the central idea of Teaching as Leadership is borrowed from two theorists, Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, whose ideas are popular at some traditional teachers colleges, too. McTighe and Wiggins call their concept “backward design,” and TFA calls it “backward planning.” According to the Teaching as Leadership sourcebook, the first step in backward planning, whether one is teaching public school or running a company, is for the visionary leader to come up with “a big measurable goal.” For a CEO, that goal might be to sell one million gadgets. For teachers, TFA recommends goals like “All my first graders will advance two reading levels within one school year,” or “I will put my sixth-grade students on a path to get accepted into competitive high schools in our city.” Citing “Pygmalion in the Classroom,” the 1968 study showing that children earn higher test scores when their teachers have high expectations, the Teaching as Leadership book tells recruits not to worry if the goal seems too ambitious—even “crazy”—for a classroom full of students who are far behind grade level. Thinking big is the point. And it warns teachers against perhaps worthwhile but unquantifiable goals like “I will turn my English students into lifelong readers” or “I will develop my history students’ sense of citizenship.”
The Teacher Wars Page 23