Sneak Preview: How Citizens Can Hold Teach For America Accountable
Following the comprehensive 2010 National Education Policy Center (NEPC) TFA brief (See Teach For America: A review of the evidence (The research that TFA loves to hate…), we received many requests for input from parents and educators across the nation regarding the impact of TFA in their community. Many of the requests came from new communities in the 8 states to which TFA has expanded in recent years, such as Seattle. It is important to note that the numbers of TFA teachers, attrition rates of TFA teachers, cost to communities amongst other aspects do vary by community.
To address this variation in the upcoming 2013 NEPC brief we have created a template for citizens to conduct research on Teach For America in their own communities. We will suggest that stakeholders in communities across the U.S. conduct citizen research to understand the various aspects (cost, attrition, achievement) of TFA in their districts and schools. The vast majority of records relating to TFA in each community are available via public records requests. In preparation for this brief, we created a template list of public information that individuals in regions across the US can request from districts to better understand the breadth of TFA. Follow Cloaking Inequity (enter email in the upper left hand corner of this page) and check the NEPC website for the 2013 brief and the new template. It will be released soon.
However, we did have a word limit for the 2013 NEPC TFA brief, so some of the text ended up on the cutting room