There's no disputing it: Teach for America (TFA) holds a seat at the education policy table. The media, corporations, state and national policymakers, and venture philanthropists like Bill Gates present the program not only as a viable approach for teaching poor children and achieving education equity, but also as a promising model for all teacher training programs (Alter, 2011; Gerdes, 2007; Will, 2011).
And its clout seems to be growing. The program projects that it will have 16,000 "diverse leaders" in its ranks by 2015 and that its 44,000 alumni will be a force for "educational equity."
Nor is money lacking. Funds have arrived in the form of a $50 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education, a $100 million grant from the Walton Family Foundation, and an endowment of $100 million pledged by Eli and Edith Broad and four other philanthropists.
So the question understandably arises, How effective is Teach for America's teacher preparation model? This is particularly important because these teachers go on to teach some of the neediest students in the United States.
To look into this question, I spent the past seven years interviewing hundreds of current and former Teach for America corps members. I also extensively reviewed member training materials to acquire an updated understanding of the organization's priorities. This is what I found.
The Business of Teaching
Teach for America combines a social service agenda with a business culture. The program is designed to attract high-ranking recent college graduates who agree to teach for two years in economically distressed rural and urban public schools before going on to other careers. Many combine their first year in the classroom with evening education coursework to pursue certification. Some remain in education, and some even continue to teach at their original placement schools.
Teach for America trains its recruits, or corps members, during a five-week summer institute. The corps members' days are long, sometimes 18 hours. The teachers-to-be are transported in the early morning to teach in district summer schools and then participate in a full slate of workshops and lesson preparation on their return.
Some view the institute schedule as daunting. One recruit wondered whether "five weeks of training with only 20 hours of classroom time" is adequate preparation. Another worried about balancing full-time work "as an inexperienced teacher in a very challenging environment with the added burden of certification training."
In addition to committing to teach for two years, corps members also commit to represent and advocate for Teach for America in their school districts, in the community, and if possible, in the press. Leadership, therefore, is a crucial feature of the program.
The Drawbacks of the Program
Scant Training in Teaching Tasks
The majority of participants enter Teach for America with limited or nonexistent clinical or methods coursework from their college careers; they're supposed to learn how to teach at the institute.
However, the Teach for America training model downplays the need for traditional teacher preparation. The main tenet of the model is, If you can lead, you can advocate for school reform. The organization advocates developing innovation, leadership, and entrepreneurial and problem-solving skills in its corps of teachers. As Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, noted in an interview with Malcolm Gladwell (2011), "TFA is not a teaching organization, but rather a leadership development organization."
One recruit pointed out skills he believed would prepare him to teach effectively. The program, he noted, didn't provide this instruction:
During TFA's summer training, there was no training on child development or child psychology, no overview of different methods of pedagogy, very little training about behavior management in class … and very little actual training on how to teach students at any level in the context of a classroom (meaning, what do you do when you're in front of students?).Instead, TFA training focused on how to do detailed, excessive lesson plans based on "I do, we do, you do" that no one was ever going to use, as well as extensive details on how to set up classroom tracking systems so we could presumably "prove" we were effective teachers.For the bulk of the summer, it felt like we were experimenting on these poor summer school students, basically learning to teach on them. I'm guessing this would never fly in an upper-middle-class suburban school.
Although corps members do attend workshops and instructional sessions that address the rudiments of content knowledge, pedagogy, and classroom management, the emphasis is primarily on "teaching as leadership."
For example, one rubric used to evaluate the teachers in training focuses on five areas: Set big goals, plan purposefully, execute effectively, continuously increase effectiveness, and work relentlessly. One related model teacher action is to "create rigorous, objective-driven lesson plans so that students who complete class activities successfully will have mastered the objectives and made progress toward the big goals."
This teacher action implies both intensity and accountability—and appears to precede learning how to execute a teaching task. Another teacher action seems to override common sense by calling for recruits to "follow content and pacing of lesson plans faithfully,regardless of circumstances." Corps members either come into the program with these qualities of "relentless" pursuit—or they need to develop them quickly.
A Narrow Focus on Achievement
The organization's philosophy—that "education leaders" post high expectations for students and produce gains in student achievement—appears to drive the training. One corps member who taught 3rd graders in Atlanta, Georgia, noted how explicitly the goals were articulated: "Students will make 1.5 years growth in reading as measured by a reading growth assessment."
Corps members learn how to track student test data on Excel spreadsheets, but this focus on routines associated with business doesn't necessarily provide support in practical settings. As one novice said,
So we had this kid crying on the first day. They're preK, 4-, and 5-year-olds. And here we are. We're supposed to be professional. We're supposed to be knowledgeable about what we're doing. And all you want is for somebody to show youwhat you're supposed to be doing.
Compressed Learning
Teach for America seems to have compressed years of teacher development into a two-inch-thick training manual, which is the mainstay of the summer training institute. Clearly, recruits must get the hang of teaching quickly.
The preparation program is so short that recruits must keep pace or fall behind. Moreover, the compressed training creates processing overload. As one recruit explained,
We were so exhausted that we didn't know what we were responding to. As the manual states, we were directed to be challenge ready, [but] without the tools to do the job well. The focus was always on the assessment and the big goals, and we often were just repeating the ideas to ourselves but internally questioning, How is this really going to happen when I have live kids in the class?
Researchers (Carter & Gonzalez, 1993) have synthesized the knowledge that novice teachers need to learn into three areas: information processing, practical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. It's doubtful whether a novice could learn any one of these in a five-week span, let alone retain and apply this information on the job. Noted one veteran teacher who had worked with new Teach for America teachers, "They don't have anything to hang all of this information on to."
One Size Doesn't Fit All
The Teach for America training model seems to be generic. Said one recruit, "Teach for America consistently refuses to acknowledge that there are distinct differences between teaching high school mathematics and 2nd grade, saying that their methods work across all grade levels."
Take the case of a member of the 2011–13 Teach for America corps about to enter week four of her five-week summer teacher training—she still didn't know what grade or subject area she would be teaching. She wondered why she couldn't be trained for her specific assignment during the training itself, rather than later, when she would have to quickly figure out her program for either elementary or middle school learners.
Another recruit had a similar concern:
At [the] institute, I was trained for high school and had no clue what to do with little kids. I never met a 7-year-old, and then I end up teaching them … People assume that you can just be generically trained for any grade, but that's not the way kids learn.
Special Ed—in 30 Minutes or Less
The most challenging aspect of the program's condensed preparation relates to those who teach special education. One recruit I spoke with told me that he received, in total, about a half-hour of training in how to teach students with special needs.
For new Teach for America teachers, limited preparation can have serious consequences in the classroom. One veteran who works with new Teach for America teachers who are assigned to special education classes noted that "in my district, 82 of the 82 IEPs [individualized education programs] prepared by TFAs did not meet state guidelines. The TFAs don't even know general education, so how do you expect them to know how to teach special education?" One novice teacher who was slated to teach in general education pointed out that the classes he was assigned to teach nevertheless had many students with special needs. "I felt helpless in terms of knowing how to work with them appropriately," he said. "Working with special education students was very minimally addressed during TFA's summer training."
Learning With—and From—Novices
Many Teach for America applicants expected they would learn how to teach from veteran teachers in the program. This was not the case. Recent Teach for America alumni conduct the workshops and support the new teachers. No one with extensive experience in teaching was ever brought in to teach or supervise the recruits with whom I spoke in their five-week training.
Said one recruit who had tired of being instructed by second-year recruits, "Give me time with someone who knows what they are doing, let me watch them do it, and then let me try to figure it out." Nor do corps members find guidance and expert advice from their assigned "managers," who themselves learned teaching from a five-week preparation model.
Not only do novices have to rely on recent alumni and even a few second-year Teach for America teachers—but they're also supposed to learn how to teach from one another. During the summer institute, corps members team up to practice teach in one of the partner public schools as part of the district summer school. Novices observe, reflect on, and critique one another's practice. Noted one recruit,
I had to teach my lesson and then observe three other TFAs teach their lesson. We gave each other feedback, which was OK. But we are pretty new at teaching, and what we thought was a well-developed lesson had some holes in it.
This team teaching serves as the novices' only classroom teaching experience before they assume responsibility for their own classes. But they appear to learn little from the experience. As capable as their peers might be outside the classroom, they're simply not able to effectively critique another's budding teaching skills and zero in on an action plan.
Novices need to work, instead, under the watchful eyes of an experienced teacher who scaffolds their learning and helps them build a repertoire of skills. One Teach for America recruit ultimately found such a mentor who offered him months of intensive support when he was learning on the job. The mentor told him to "forget what [you] learned in the manual because the kids you're teaching are not in any manual. They're real, and you'd better get real quickly." Looking back on what he learned and how he had grown as a teacher as a result of that mentoring experience, the recruit felt "like a far cry from the toneless and jumbled mess of a Teach for America teacher" that he'd been just one year earlier.
Universities that partner with Teach for America understand that on-site mentoring from a non-TFA-trained educator is priceless. It's the one strategy that successfully supports and prepares the corps members, who teach under difficult circumstances armed with little more than a heavy Teach for America manual.
Not Just Anyone
Incoming corps members assume that their Teach for America training will prepare them not only to teach, but also to teach well. However, the program doesn't focus on that. Said one alumnus from the program,
Teach for America perpetuates the stereotype that anybody could walk into a classroom and make it a successful classroom … In any other profession, we would never have a doctor … pretend to be a doctor for two years. It's just unbelievable … I mean, not anyone can do it.
The purpose of Teach for America's training is twofold: to learn to think like a Teach for America teacher and to learn to teach like a leader. However, most corps members don't yet understandhow to think like a teacher—someone with the seamless and seasoned techniques of simultaneously observing, selecting appropriate action, and adapting to the situation and the student at hand. Most of Teach for America's corps members don't think like teachers because they must grow into this professional work—and that can only develop over time.
