Teach for America: helpful or harmful to public education in the U.S.?

Over the weekend, my Twitter feed was bombarded with #TFA25 as Teach for America (TFA) held a big 25th anniversary event.  Soon after I noticed #TFA25FactCheck popping up as well, providing counterpoints to the celebration in D.C..  There are few organizations as polarizing as TFA with passionate supporters and ardent critics.  I’ve been asked several times in the past what my opinion of TFA is, so I thought I’d give you my view in the blog this week.  First, though, a little background for those who might not be familiar with TFA.

The TFA website includes this short snapshot of the origins of the organization:

Teach For America began in 1989 as Wendy Kopp’s senior thesis at Princeton University. At the time, academic outcomes for low-income kids had not changed in a century, school districts were facing a national teacher shortage, and the U.S. was navigating the first wave of a competitive global economy that required a workforce with evolving skills and knowledge. Public schools, decades after desegregation, remained a realm of inequity, unable to make up for the long-term effects of poverty, racism, and other deeply rooted injustices. Many people were unaware of this inequity or held little hope that it could ever be fixed. Wendy Kopp had a big idea: If our country was going to address this problem, more leaders had to make it their life’s work, and they would need to be grounded in the issues at the classroom level. Her plan—to recruit high-performing college grads to teach in high-need urban and rural schools—was truly innovative. In December 1989, Wendy gathered 100 part-time student recruiters from 100 universities to begin Teach For America’s first recruiting season.

TFA takes recent college graduates (and, more recently, mid career individuals new to teaching) and has them commit to at least two years in the classroom in hard-to-staff schools in urban and rural areas around the country.  Since its founding 25 years ago, TFA has placed—by its count—over 42,000 teachers in classrooms as corps members.

Opponents of TFA seem to have grown in number in recent years with critiques centered on what they believe is inadequate training, TFA corps members taking jobs for other more qualified teachers, and/or TFA not addressing more systemic problems hurting hard-to-staff schools.  At the same time, there’ve been studies of conducted of TFA corps members nationally and here in Georgia that point to the positive impacts of the organization and its teachers.

I was not a TFA corps member (I went through a more “traditional” teacher preparation program as an undergraduate) and we’ve not ever had TFA corps members at ANCS, so my vantage point on the organization is somewhat limited.  But my take is that TFA does, on the whole, way more good than its harshest critics give it credit for.

While we’ve not had TFA corps members at ANCS, we have had a few TFA alums as teachers at our school and every single one of them was a strong teacher.  Does that mean that TFA’s approach to teacher support is strong despite what detractors say?  Not necessarily.  Personally, I think preparation and support for new teachers is pretty flimsy in many places across the country, from alternative certification programs like TFA to traditional teacher prep—an issue our CREATE teacher residency program with Georgia State University is trying to address.  So I think that calling TFA’s training insufficient is missing a much larger problem we have with supporting teachers nationally—and also ignoring the work of many solid teachers who come out of TFA.

TFA also traditionally places corps members in hard-to-staff schools, so I’m not sure that I really buy the argument that the organization is keeping qualified teachers from jobs they’d otherwise have.  And to those that say that those schools are most in need of the best, most qualified veteran teachers, that’s true—but that’s a problem that districts need to tackle.  TFA is simply helping to fill a need.

I’ve met several people in the world of education policy and other professions who are TFA alums.  I think the more exposure we can give people to the reality of classroom teaching, the better.  The fact that not all corps members remain in teaching is not a big problem in my mind.  We laud people for taking part in the Peace Corps, even if they don’t remain living in another country or working within the area that was their focus during their two-year Peace Corps stint.  In the same way, I think, we should be happy that we have talented young people who dedicate themselves to teaching and learning in our cities and rural areas.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, there are 3.1 million teachers currently working in public schools.  Even if all 42,000 TFA alums were teaching today (which they are not), that would represent 1% of the nation’s public school teaching force.  At the end of the day, the attention—from all sides—TFA gets is relatively outsize for its reach and distracts us from taking on bigger issues in public education.  But I think the impact TFA does have generally helps K-12 education.