TFA says 8 Year Claim is an Estimate, "Not Really Appropriate for Publicizing"
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HUH? "Not Really Appropriate for Publicizing" WTF |
I am afraid I am a bit bothered by the dance we are being led on this week by Teach For America. First, in an interview on the Huffington Post, TFA founder and CEO Wendy Kopp states, unequivocally, the following: "On average, our corps members stay in the classroom for eight years."
I asked in my blog post of two days ago for some substantiation of this claim, which runs counter to both my experience in Oakland, and the data I have seen, which generally reflects that fewer than ten or fifteen percent of TFA corps members stay past their third year.
Fellow blogger Jersey Jazzman chimed in, with some "back of the envelope" calculations to see if there is any way this claim could be true - and finds it very hard to make the math work.
He wrote:
I asked in my blog post of two days ago for some substantiation of this claim, which runs counter to both my experience in Oakland, and the data I have seen, which generally reflects that fewer than ten or fifteen percent of TFA corps members stay past their third year.
Fellow blogger Jersey Jazzman chimed in, with some "back of the envelope" calculations to see if there is any way this claim could be true - and finds it very hard to make the math work.
He wrote:
... what do we know about TFA teachers' attrition rates? This research brief on TFA states "all one