Put Up The Proof, TFA
Anthony Cody points us to a remarkable claim from Teach For America's Wendy Kopp:
In this interview, Wendy Kopp states: "On average, our corps members stay in the classroom for eight years." Honestly, I find this claim incredible.I have firsthand experience with Teach For America. I worked in high poverty schools in Oakland, California, for 24 years. In my last four years (2007 to 2011) I led a mentoring program that was developed to provide support to the many new science teachers we had in the District. The District was relying on TFA and a program affiliated with The New Teacher Project to fill vacancies. Unfortunately this simply fed into the cycle, because these novices did NOT last an average of eight years. In fact, three years after they started, 75% of them were gone. That meant we were constantly training the replacements for the ones that were leaving. While our mentoring program was