Teach For America is on the tip of my tongue again (love it or hate it, it does have an annoying way of staying there, doesn't it?) with two big stories. The first is a new study examining the civic activity of TFA corps members, and the second is a big wet kiss from The Atlantic (which it deserves for getting anywhere on figuring out what pre-service indicators are worth worrying about for new teachers).
The Atlantic story is a high profile spotlight on what we already knew - TFA focuses on recruiting corps members with a proven track record of significant accomplishments and leadership. This, along with a relentless focus on improving and ambitious goals for students, helps some TFA corps members achieve remarkable gains in student achievement. The work that Teach For America has done to track its teachers and connect these characteristics to student achievement is absolutely critical. It's also work that states and districts should be doing more (as recommended in "Policy 2.0: Using Open Innovation to Improve Teacher Evaluation Systems." Here's hoping they follow suit.
The second story is about a new study out of Stanford looking at the civic engagement levels of TFA corps members (here's the NYTimes, you can read an abstract and purchase a PDF of the study here). The study found that "graduates" who completed their two years of teaching had lower rates of civic participation than "non-marticulants" (who were accepted but didn't teach with TFA) and "drop-outs," who didn't complete two years of teaching. The headlines about the study are giving Teach For America a bad rap - as Eduwonk points out, all three groups of accepted applicants had high rates of civic engagement when compared to the general population.
Doug McAdam, who authored the study, has also looked at civic engagement of participants in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964 in Mississippi and found the opposite - those participants continue to be involved in activism in later years. Freedom Summer is a fascinating foil for Teach For America, with more contrasts than similarities. It's interesting that Wendy Kopp suggested this study, and I wonder if she's surprised by the results.
Either way, the "burnout" factor comes up in an interesting way in both stories. The first is in The Atlantic piece's introduction to Steven Farr, a TFA alum who rejoined the organization to try to identify characteristics of effective teachers. Of his own time in the classroom, he says "I was not the teacher I want our teachers to be." "Burnout" is also suggested as a contributing factor to low rates of civic participation among TFA alumni in the Stanford study. Anyone who has spent time teaching in our worst schools can tell you that failure, despair, and chaos are part of the learning process. How we react to failure could be an interesting part of the puzzle.
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