Teach for America’s biggest problem isn’t green teachers or failing schools. It’s that it can’t take criticism.
The organization spends millions defanging its critics without ever listening to their ideas.
If you’ve taught your way through Teach For America like I have, you know that feedback is part of the job. Not only do new teachers receive critiques from principals, fellow educators and students, they’re also deluged with weekly and monthly reports on their success from the organization itself.
Although the amount of feedback varies from region to region, the message is clear: With enough data, anyone can become a champion educator, able to lift students’ reading and math scores many years in a single leap.
Although the amount of feedback varies from region to region, the message is clear: With enough data, anyone can become a champion educator, able to lift students’ reading and math scores many years in a single leap.
Unfortunately, TFA does not apply a similar philosophy to its own organization. Not only is TFA notoriously unwilling to listen to outside orinternal critics (one former TFA manager decried its “inability and unwillingness to honestly address valid criticism” in The Washington Post). The organization has also spent millions of dollars on a press shop built to promote its brand while aggressively and proactively discrediting critiques.
This is bad for the organization, and it’s bad for students. TFA has real problems — its teachers are largely unprepared and fare no better than regular educators. It has a high drop-out rate, and the number of applicants has plummeted. Additionally, TFA sends its volunteer teachers to school districts in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, places now facing teacher layoffs and hiring freezes. Some school districts have even rescinded contracts with TFA, citing teachers’ lack of preparation and low retention rates.
Alum Catherine Michna, now a professor of education at Tulane, has said that she won’t write recommendation letters for students who want to join the program. “TFA members do not work in service of public education,” shewrote in Slate. “They work in service of a corporate reform agenda that rids communities of veteran teachers, privatizes public schools, and forces a corporatized, data-driven culture upon unique low-income communities with unique dynamics and unique challenges.”
TFA has the resources and the clout to address these concerns. Instead, it has chosen to ignore its dissenters. The organization is stuck, and it shows few signs of evolution.
* * *
TFA was born in a Princeton undergraduate thesis, written by founder Wendy Kopp in 1989. In that paper, Kopp imagined a program that made teaching “an attractive choice for top grads” across the country. Ideally, she wrote, getting into TFA would be as competitive as winning a Rhodes scholarship. Controversially, Kopp didn’t want to build better lifetime teachers. In a 1996 interview, she described the organization as a “leadership development program.” College grads would start in TFA, then go on to education leadership positions across the country.
In this, she’s succeeded. Today, TFA educators make up less than 0.2 percent of America’s teaching force, heavily concentrated in many poor urban Teach for America’s biggest problem isn’t green teachers or failing schools. It’s that it can’t take criticism. - The Washington Post:
