Op-ed: Teach for America stumbles because its teachers aren’t prepared
Teach for America is celebrating its 25th anniversary, but, for the second time in two years, its recruitment numbers are down. The program, which handpicks college graduates to teach in high-need schools, has been so popular that 18 percent of the graduating class at Yale applied in 2010. So what happened?
To explain the decline, Teach for America's co-CEOs point to the improving economy, a broader decline in applications to teacher preparation programs and an "increasingly polarized public conversation around education" and "polarization around TFA." However, this assessment overlooks another important factor: criticism and pushback from Teach for America alumni like me who felt ill-prepared to be classroom teachers.
Over the past few years, much of the criticism from alumni has come in the form of articles and blog posts with titles like "Why I did TFA and why you shouldn't" and "How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million." A piece titled "I Quit Teach for America" went viral online, and even The Onion has chimed in with satiric takes on the savior mentality of some TFA teachers. More recently, this alumni resistance has become more organized, with TFA alumni holding conferences to discuss ways to resist Teach for America and even publishing a book of counter-narratives about their experiences in the program.
Like many former TFA "corps members," my critique of the organization grew out of some difficult first months at a high-need middle school in New York in 2007. Though I completed Teach for America's five-week training and lesson planned over the summer, my first week in the classroom left me feeling overwhelmed and ill prepared. Unsurprisingly, my liberal arts degree hadn't provided the slightest idea how to meet the learning or behavioral needs of my bilingual special education students, and the TFA training only provided basics like lesson planning and classroom management. My inexperience, coupled with the impossible daily task of learning to teach multiple unfamiliar subjects literally "on the job," made me feel demoralized and incompetent.
One evening, as my head nodded on the subway, I summed up my feelings in a notebook, scribbling: "I am failing every day."
Although I eventually achieved success as a classroom teacher, I only fully realized how unprepared I was when I became a teacher educator in traditional teacher education programs at the University of Texas and at BYU. Instead of learning science or language arts concepts the day before teaching them as I had previously done, my new education students took several content area courses and learned to appreciate the nuances of teaching different subjects. Similarly, if they wanted to specialize in bilingual or special education, my undergraduate students received focused training in things like language acquisition and learning theory before setting foot in a classroom.
By contrast, entering teaching through TFA meant that I only received an in-depth training in these topics through graduate school courses taken during nights and weekends over my first two years in the classroom. The differences between my TFA training and the preparation of my undergraduate education students made two things uncomfortably clear: 1) that my former middle schoolers deserved someone who was fully trained on the first day of school and 2) in 2007, that person was not me.
Teach for America justifies its short training program in part by pointing to the high demand and high approval rating that their corps members receive from principals. However, citing a demand from chronically understaffed and under-resourced schools seems disingenuous. Students in high-need schools need a sense of continuity, and an ongoing cycle of short-term TFA teachers creates a culture of high turnover in a profession Op-ed: Teach for America stumbles because its teachers aren't prepared | The Salt Lake Tribune:
