Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America
Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.
For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.
The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.
“I want the numbers to be higher, because the demand from districts is extremely high and we’re not going to meet it this year,” said Matt Kramer, a co-chief executive of Teach for America. But, he added, “it is not existentially concerning.”
Last year, the highly selective program accepted about 15 percent of its applicants. Mr. Kramer said there were no plans to lower standards for the current year simply to yield a larger corps of teachers.
Some say the decline in applicants could point to a loss of luster for the program, which rose to prominence through the idea that teaching the nation’s poorest, most needy students could be a crusade, like the Peace Corps. Teach for America has sent hundreds of graduates to Capitol Hill, school superintendents’ offices and education reform groups, seeding a movement that has supported testing and standards, teacher evaluations tethered to student test scores, and a weakening of teacher tenure.
“We are sort of at 2.0 of education reform, and its future direction seems a little bit uncertain at this point,” said David M. Steiner, the dean of the Hunter College School of Education in New York.
Leaders of the organization say their biggest problem is that the rebounding economy has given high-achieving college graduates more job choices.
“It’s so different from three years ago, where suddenly you have candidates that may have an offer from Facebook and Wells Fargo and an offer to join the T.F.A. corps, and clearly, the money is going to be radically different,” said Lida Jennings, executive director of the Los Angeles office of Teach for America.
Mr. Kramer dismissed the idea that the group’s philosophy was driving candidates away. “As I talk to people on campuses, it is not like the central thing I hear,” he said. “I don’t hear people say, ‘Oh, I hear this criticism and therefore I don’t want to do Teach for America.’ ”
Teaching in general has been losing favor. From 2010 to 2013, the number of student candidates enrolled in teacher training programs fell 12.5 percent, according to federal data.
But Teach for America’s belief that new college graduates can jump into teaching without much training, as well as its ties through prominent alumni to the testing and standards movement, may also be taking a toll, driving away the kind of students the program once attracted.
When Haleigh Duncan, a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, first came across Teach for America recruiters on campus during her freshman year in 2012, she was captivated by the group’s mission to address educational inequality.
Ms. Duncan, an English major, went back to her dormitory room and pinned the group’s pamphlet on a bulletin board. She was also attracted by the fact that it would be a fast route into teaching. “I felt like I didn’t want to waste time and wanted to jump into the field,” she said.
But as she learned more about the organization, Ms. Duncan lost faith in its short training and grew skeptical of its ties to certain donors, including the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart. She decided she needed to go to a teachers’ college after graduation. “I had a little too much confidence in my ability to override my lack of experience through sheer good will,” she said.
Founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton University student who proposed the idea in her senior thesis, Teach for America started as a kind of civil rights crusade, with 500 novice teachers in six regions across the country.
The nonprofit organization faced financial and management challenges during its first decade, but since 2000 had been growing its teaching corps by close to 20 percent every year. Ms. Kopp, who now runs Teach for All, a global spinoff initiative she founded, declined to be interviewed for this article.
With corporate sponsors like Wells Fargo and Comcast NBCUniversal,charitable contributions from the Walton family, and foundations overseen by the families of the billionaires John D. Arnold and Eli Broad, Teach for America now has 10,500 teachers in classrooms in 35 states and employs 2,400 people across its regional offices. Last year, it had revenue of $196.2 Fewer Top Graduates Want to Join Teach for America - NYTimes.com:
