Re: [xmca] Teach for America

["Au, Wayne" <wau@Exchange.FULLERTON.EDU>]

Hi Leif,
There is a whole lot to say about Teach for America (TFA) and from my perspective, almost all of it bad. To start with the good: I think it draws a lot of young, smart, and energetic college graduates into teaching. So my critiques of TFA should be separated from my views of the actual young people joining their ranks. Also, I think the original impetus of TFA was seen as good by many folks because there are some places in the U.S. where public education is horrible and teachers are totally needed.

However, TFA has also been comically dubbed, "Teach for A While" because the vast majority of their recruits/graduates leave teaching after their initial two-year stint. So in a most basic way, TFA takes college graduates, gives them 5-6 weeks of training, puts them in the highest need, most vulnerable classrooms possible, and then they leave as soon as they can - thus putting the least experienced, least qualified teachers with some of the neediest students and contributing to the overall instability of school communities already wracked by instability.

Indeed, many of TFA recruits see it mainly as resume building in preparation for getting their "real" jobs later. This is not to say that all TFA graduates leave the classroom. I have a good friend who started teaching via TFA and then completed a real credential and is still teaching high school in Oakland, CA, some 10 years later. But the majority do leave.

But there's more:
TFA is built on the model that anyone can teach without any substantial training/education or preparation. It is built on the commonsense (at least commonsense in the U.S.) that because we have all been students, then we pretty much automatically know how to teach. This is the kind of line you get from TFA's founder, as well as from within the business community.

TFA thus is also regularly used to attack both teacher prep programs and teacher unions. In New Orleans, for instance, after Hurricane Katrina, the school district forcefully broke the teachers' union, and lo and behold, who did they bring in to fill the majority of new vacancies? TFA recruits. My friends who do work down there tell me it has been an absolute travesty.

So, even though TFA vocally says they do not side on any political issue, if you look at their founder and their funders, there is actually a pretty clear anti-union and anti-teacher preparation agenda lurking. In reality it is an extension of neo-liberal education reforms in the U.S. (I do, however, have my critiques of the teachers' unions here, but I'll take our bad unions over no unions at all.)

As such, it is in fact being pushed by folks in the Obama administration - it certainly falls into line with other "reforms" like mayoral control, attacks on teachers' union contracts, charters, merit pay, national standards, and high-stakes testing/accountability that Duncan has been advancing. I don't remember seeing it officially mentioned in the Race to the Top initiative, but they have been pushing it as an example of "good" reform.

Does it work? Depends on what you mean. As far as I know there's no credible evidence that it does work to raise educational achievement by any measure, and there is certainly nothing to show it improves the quality of education for kids.

But that is my wholly biased opinion on TFA, and I'm sure others will have other takes on it. I will direct you to the Spring 2010 issue of Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org). It hasn't come out yet, but there will be a cluster of articles on TFA in there - including some really good in-depth research and analysis. There is a small fee to get a subscription or purchase an individual issue (Rethinking Schools is a non-profit, U.S.-based social justice education magazine), but the pieces on TFA for this forthcoming issue are really strong. There will also be a dynamite analysis of the upcoming ESEA reauthorization in that issue too.

There are also a couple of books worth checking out. One that comes to mind is "Taught By America"  - a reflective narrative of someone who went through the program.

Sorry for the long-winded answer, but there's a lot (more?) to be said about TFA.

Sincerely,
Wayne


--
Wayne Au
Assistant Professor
Department of Secondary Education
CSU Fullerton
P.O. Box 6868
Fullerton, CA 92834
Office: 657.278.5481
Editorial Board Member: Rethinking Schools (www.rethinkingschools.org)
http://ed.fullerton.edu/SecEd/Faculty/Full_Time_Faculty/Au.html
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