TFA answers my FOIA-like request
Though education ‘reformers’ always speak of the need for transparency, Teach For America is one of the least transparent organizations out there. Though they get a lot of public money, I don’t think that there is a way to FOIA their internal records so we are often left with their interpretations of the data with no way to verify it or put it into some kind of context.
About four years ago, way before I starting ‘resisting’ TFA, I had a lengthy conversation with Hearther Harding, who was a VP of research, I think. I had asked her about the alumni survey, the attrition rate, and also about the principal survey. At the time I was not considered an ‘enemy’ of TFA so she did not have her guard up and she told me a lot of interesting information, some of which she now denies telling me. For example, about the principal survey where something like 90% of principals say that they are happy with their TFA teachers, she admitted to me that the results could be affected by principals who are happy with their second year TFAers but not with their first, and with the fact that it was a four level satisfaction survey, where the second two levels counted as ‘satisfied.’ She also said something to me along the lines of how the intended audience of the principal satisfaction survey is potential funders.
When I asked her about the attrition rate, she told me that 92% of TFAers complete the first year, and 89% complete the second year, and that 60% of TFAers stay for a third year. I can’t remember exactly what she said about staying for a fourth year — I believe it was something like 25%, but for beyond the fourth year, she said something like “it really drops off after year four,” which agrees with the numbers that have popped up in various papers over the years