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Saturday, February 23, 2019

TFA Celebrates New Research That Suggests That Corps Members Are Ineffective Teachers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

TFA Celebrates New Research That Suggests That Corps Members Are Ineffective Teachers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

TFA Celebrates New Research That Suggests That Corps Members Are Ineffective Teachers


Over the years there have been various studies comparing the ‘effectiveness’ of TFA teachers to non-TFA teachers.  Though these studies are based on the results from standardized tests that may or may not be appropriate for this purpose, the results of these papers are still interesting to look at.
Many of these studies have concluded that TFA teachers, especially, corps members who have not become alumni yet, are a little less effective at teaching reading and a little more effective at teaching math compared to non-TFA teachers with the same amount of teaching experience.  Considering all the teacher bashing allies of TFA, I always find it pretty ironic that if the average teacher in this country is supposed to be so bad and that the TFA teachers are about the same, then what does this say about the TFA teachers?  But the reformers don’t really mind that TFA teachers aren’t so good.  Most of those TFA teachers aren’t going to be in the classroom for very long anyway and some of them are going to be fast-tracked to help join in the fight to bash teachers.
The other day I noticed this tweet from TFA:



So I took a look at the research paper and found that when you look at the whole thing, there is actually a lot of data that suggests, according to their way of comparing teachers, that TFA corps members, particularly the ones who are in their first of second year, are actually underperforming compared to non-TFA teachers with the same amount of experience.
This diagram summarizes most of the results, though it does CONTINUE READING: TFA Celebrates New Research That Suggests That Corps Members Are Ineffective Teachers | Gary Rubinstein's Blog