Martin Winchester had just started his doctoral degree in history at the University of Minnesota when he decided that he really wanted to teach middle or high school. He looked into the year-long teacher certification program at the university, but he was worried about the cost. After talking with a Teach for America recruiter on campus, Winchester—who was 24, single, and ready to relocate—sent in an application. That summer, he moved to rural Texas and started a new life as a middle school teacher.
It's not an uncommon story, particularly during current teacher shortages. With many communities, both rural and urban, in dire need of teachers, such recruitment programs as Teach for America are flourishing. By 2004, Teach for America aims to have nearly 4,000 corps members teaching in 23 areas across the United States, more than doubling its current size. Since 1999, at least 40 states have offered alternatives to the traditional route into teaching (American Federation of Teachers, 2000). What do these alternative models look like, and how are they preparing tomorrow's teachers for the classroom?
Teach for America
One of the most well-known—and controversial—models is Teach for America (TFA; www.teachforamerica.org). Created in 1990 by Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, Teach for America recruits, trains, and places recent college graduates in schools in low-income, U.S. communities. As the Peace Corps does, the program requires participants to make a two-year commitment to the schools in which they are placed. The philosophy behind the program is simple: Young, inexperienced, but bright college graduates can find out what teaching is like and help children in poverty; and schools get much-needed teachers who are well-educated, motivated, and positive role models.
Teach for America has been criticized primarily on two counts: The program does not train new teachers adequately, particularly for such demanding conditions; and a two-year commitment is not long enough to make substantial changes in already vulnerable schools. Underlying these critiques is the more basic question: Why do we send the least experienced teachers, most of whom have no education background, to the schools that need the best teachers to turn them around?
Kyle Waide, director of public relations for Teach for America and a former Teach for America teacher, responds that typical recruits may not have an education background, but they do have strong records of achievement and leadership, a deeply felt commitment to low-income communities, and what he calls an "entrepreneurial spirit"—meaning that they seek out solutions and are goal-driven. The training itself, though not extensive, emphasizes the need for ongoing professional development and teacher collaboration. The new teachers are first required to conduct independent classroom observations and to reflect on what they see. They bring those reflections to a five-week summer institute, where they learn the foundations of teaching—from techniques for creating effective assessments to strategies for working in low-income communities.
After the short training session, these new teachers are not simply "dropped" into a school without any support, Waide says. Corps members are always clustered in schools with other new Teach for America teachers and alumni, as well as with principals and faculty members who value and support their presence in the schools. In addition, new teachers participate in regional and interregional meetings and receive information in newsletters and on the Teach for America Web site. Because some states require that all unlicensed teachers work toward licensure, Teach for America has developed partnerships with local universities and encourages new teachers to continue their education training. Teach for America teachers also observe and meet with high-performing teachers in the area so that they can witness firsthand how others are helping students from similar communities. All these strategies are designed to foster a culture of professionalism and collaboration.
In response to the criticism that Teach for America teachers stay with the program for only two years, Wendy Kopp (2000) asserts, "Almost all of [the teachers] have chosen to continue working far beyond their two years of service to expand opportunities for children in low-income communities." Sixty percent of TFA alumni are still in education, stresses Waide. At least 40 alumni are principals and vice principals, and more are training for school leadership roles. But beyond those figures, most alumni (70 percent) remain committed to helping young people in poverty. For example, one young man followed his Teach for America stint in New York City with an advanced degree from Harvard Business School. He then started a community-owned credit union in Washington Heights, the low-income area where he had taught for two years. "TFA is really a movement for social change," Waide says. "We cannot create change unless we are involved in all aspects of it, from all angles—policymaking, business, medicine—not just teaching."
Spin-Off Benefits for High-Needs Schools
Perhaps because Teach for America teachers have a strong social commitment, coupled with leadership skills and initiative, some have gone on to create their own spin-off schools and programs, such as Martin Winchester's Heroes Academy in Pharr, Texas. Winchester recently founded this magnet middle school designed to give low-income, primarily Mexican-American, students the skills and expectations to go to college. He now talks to other Teach for America teachers who are interested in starting their own programs and schools, not because he feels that he is particularly gifted, but because "If I can do this, anyone can."
The KIPP schools, which Winchester visited when he was developing plans for his middle school, is another example of a spin-off program. Founded in 1994 by former TFA teachers Michael Feinberg and David Levin, KIPP stands for "Knowledge Is Power Program." The schools—first in Houston, Texas, and the Bronx, New York, but now in other U.S. cities—focus on providing students in poverty with a high-quality, academically challenging education. The KIPP regimen is tough—nine and one-half hour days, Saturday classes, and at least two hours of homework each night. But such hard work appears to be paying off: The achievement scores of KIPP students are improving.
A spin-off of the KIPP schools is KEY Academy (Knowledge Empowers You). A KEY school will open this fall in Anacostia, a mainly low-income, African American community in Washington, D.C. Like KIPP, the school focuses on academics and character education and includes a mandatory summer program, classes that go from 7:30 am to 5 pm during the regular school year, and Saturday classes—a rigorous schedule, particularly for the first group of students, who will be in 5th grade. But according to the school's founder and principal, Susan Schaeffler, a former Teach for America teacher, this is the right age for students to review subjects that they may not have mastered in elementary school and to begin acquiring positive academic and life skills.
A Massachusetts Program
But just as Teach for America has borne much criticism from the education community, so too have other programs that have adopted its training model. For example, the Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers program recruits teachers to work in high-needs Massachusetts schools in exchange for $20,000 signing bonuses. The institute is modeled after Teach for America, with a seven-week summer training course that includes 100 hours of student teaching and coursework on classroom management, pedagogy, and education theory. Candidates who successfully complete the course receive state licensure. In addition to training candidates, the program places new teachers into high-needs schools. In its first two years, the program received more than 1,700 applicants from 40 states and 6 countries; among these applicants were recent college graduates, lawyers, retired military personnel, and other professionals (Massachusetts Department of Education, 2001).
One-fifth of the new teachers, however, have left the classroom after one year, and many who have stayed are struggling with their first teaching assignments (Viadero, 2001). Fewer than half the teachers have stayed in the urban districts where they were hired, many leaving for more affluent school districts. Critics blame these problems on poor teacher preparation and inadequate support (Archer, 2000). Although schools are supposed to have strong mentoring programs for the new teachers, some teachers said that they did not receive sufficient support from mentors and administrators (Viadero, 2001).
Because of the program's reputation, some Massachusetts schools are not hiring teachers who come out of the institute. But as the teacher shortages remain a problem, and as the signing bonuses continue to lure candidates, the institute is not merely surviving but expanding its sites throughout the commonwealth for the 2001–2002 school year.
Recruiting Leaders
Another new recruitment program—dubbed the "Teach for America for Principals"—is New Leaders for New Schools (NLNS; www.nlns.org). Cofounder Jonathan Schnur, who was a policy advisor on K–12 education in the Clinton administration, says its ultimate goal is helping children in poverty. When working on President Clinton's Domestic Policy Council and leading the U.S. Department of Education's team on charter schools, Schnur came to realize that "at the heart of any high-quality school is the principal." Dismissing concerns about the "charismatic principal syndrome"—that is, schools that depend too much on their innovative principals lose too much when the principals leave—Schnur believes in the necessity of inspiring leadership. "How can we justify saying, 'Because we can't count on great principals being there forever, let's create a school system that accepts mediocrity?'" Instead, says Schnur, the key is to find a systematic way of recruiting and training more effective leaders.
Only in its first year, New Leaders for New Schools aggressively recruits people—from expert teachers to leaders from both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors—to train to become urban principals. The structure and philosophy are similar to Teach for America, though the training and recruitment strategies are more intensive. The program identifies and recruits individuals, who, if accepted, receive a fully funded fellowship and stipend. The training consists of a two-month summer institute, followed by a year-long internship in an urban school, led by a mentor principal. After the internship, graduates are placed in urban public schools and receive ongoing support and professional development for two years.
Because the first group of recruits will start training this summer, it is too soon to tell how successful the program will be. Schnur and his colleagues have focused on creating partnerships with local universities in the host cities to provide formal certification for every graduating fellow. Partnerships among New Leaders, the host schools, universities, and even the funding sources are extremely important, according to Schnur. "It's hard to build everything at once," Schnur says. "It takes time to develop genuine partnerships and to get everyone to believe in the same mission. But it's crucial," he adds. "The key is to stay focused on the mission."
Traditional Alternatives
If advocates for these fast-track recruitment programs have anything in common, it is a passion for their work and a commitment to their mission. But Mildred Hudson, chief executive officer of Recruiting New Teachers (www.rnt.org), a nonprofit organization to improve teacher recruitment policies and practices, says that zeal is not enough. "That's not to say that those programs shouldn't exist, or that we shouldn't be grateful for some fine work that the young teachers are doing," Hudson says. "But we are obligated to support and train teachers adequately." She worries that bringing people with no teaching experience into the classroom is a recipe for disaster. Some teachers will succeed; others will fail. "But you can't experiment with children," Hudson insists.
Dissatisfied with the overall quality of accelerated programs, Hudson says that few provide adequate models for training new teachers, and she is particularly critical of those that do not require teacher certification before entering the classroom. Good training, traditional or alternative, takes time. She points to DePaul University's Urban Teacher Corps in Chicago, Illinois, as an example of a program that works. According to Barbara Radner, head of the DePaul University Center for Urban Education, the most important feature of the program is that it does not put teachers into the classroom right away. Intern teachers spend their first year in a school, but they are not given their own classes until their second year, when they become fully certified.
This gradual placement of new teachers into the classroom is essential "to avoid doing damage to children," Radner says. "First-year teachers don't know what they are doing yet. They don't know classroom management. They have no idea of how to assess kids' learning needs." Without guidance and time to learn these crucial skills, new teachers may "misteach" their students. Indeed, principals often put pressure on Radner to allow particularly successful new teachers take over classes in their first year, before they are certified, but she refuses. Even the best new teachers need time to learn classroom strategies, she insists.
Does her program resemble any other training models? "Well, the plumbing profession has a long period of apprenticeship for new plumbers," Radner laughs. But even mentoring, though necessary, is not enough for first-year teachers, and not simply because of their inexperience. If another teacher in the school mentors a new teacher, often that new teacher simply accepts the prevailing culture. Radner hopes that teachers coming out of the program will have the skills, experience, and innovation to change the dominant school culture rather than conform to it.
Another highly regarded alternative pathway into teaching is the DELTA Secondary Teacher Education Program in Arlington, Virginia. Although off-campus from the George Washington University School of Education, the program is affiliated with the university and is led by the same instructors. The program offers a master's degree in secondary education and teacher licensure to transitioning professionals from diverse careers. Time, again, is a key factor in the program—recruits are never rushed through—but flexibility is also essential. Because most students are employed throughout most of their training, the program is self-paced and generally takes from 16 months for teaching licensure to two to three years for a master's degree. Along with completing coursework, participants are required to conduct fieldwork at school sites, including 60 hours of observation, before starting their teaching internship, which lasts a semester and requires their full-time participation.
Coordinator Sandi Hammonds emphasizes that it is not a cookie-cutter program. Giving prospective teachers the flexibility to work at their own pace draws busy professionals whose schedules require ingenuity to balance. "We have military and federal workers, returned Peace Corps volunteers, Web designers," says Hammonds. "If the students have anything in common, it's that they all remember one teacher who influenced them."
A Place for Alternatives?
Susan Moore Johnson (2000) compared her daughter's recent Teach for America experience with her more traditional training of more than 30 years ago. Johnson had studied in a conventional teacher education program and was fully licensed before teaching; her daughter, in contrast, spent five weeks in summer training and started teaching on an emergency credential. But today's education workforce requires more, not fewer, pathways into teaching. This is particularly true, argues Johnson, for such young people as her daughter who may want to explore teaching before making the time and cost commitment to go to graduate school.
Many alternative models, with their emphasis on social as much as pedagogical responsibility, offer such a supplemental pathway. It is not surprising that this difference in emphasis influences the style of implementation: Alternative models aim to get teachers into the classroom as soon as possible and do not discourage teachers from leaving the classroom to pursue other avenues for social change. Traditional programs take more time to develop skillful, confident teachers who will succeed and stay in the classroom. Both, at least according to such educators as Johnson, have a valid and increasingly necessary role.
But whether trained traditionally in a university setting or initially in a fast-track alternative, new teachers need meaningful preparation, ongoing support and collaboration, and a variety of incentives to keep them in the field. Above all, as DePaul University's Barbara Radner asserts, "Those who recruit new teachers need to remember that they are not just responsible for the next generation of teachers, but also for the future of our schools."
