Corporation
of New York
Vol. 3/No. 2
Spring 2005
Alternative Paths to Teacher Certification
Election Reform: Lessons from 2004
Also in this issue:
Virtual Library Model: A Report to Carnegie Corporation of New York
What Would John Steinbeck Say?
A Milestone For The Carnegie Reporter
Past Issues:
Request a free subscription to the print edition
Alternative Paths to Teacher Certification
The Use of Outrage as
a
Tool for Educational Reform
It would be hard to think of two alternative routes to teaching more dissimilar
in design, yet more united in purpose, than MMTEP and Teach for America.
Founded in 1988–89 by Wendy Kopp, then a recent Princeton University
graduate, Teach for America recruits high-achieving recent college graduates
from selective colleges and universities who are committed to social change
and eager to make a two-year commitment to teach in underserved urban
and rural school districts.
Characterizing Teach for America as “a mission-driven organization” aimed at closing the educational achievement gap between rich and poor, Abigail Smith, vice president for research and public policy, and herself an alumnus of Teach for America, acknowledges that the program’s primary goal is not to prepare teachers for certification, though that may be an outcome, but to advocate and cultivate leadership on behalf of social justice among its participants. According to the SRI International study, only 11 percent of Teach for America participants indicated that they expected to be teaching in ten years, and about one-third said that they “wanted to contribute to society before moving on to another field outside education.” Says Emily Feistritzer, “Teach for America is a domestic Peace Corps program”—a point readily granted by Smith. “After two years,” she explains, “we want Teach for America teachers to continue to address this gap between rich and poor [and] to use their outrage in other areas to get at this problem.”
 |
|
Remarkably, Teach for America appears to have succeeded in rising above the highly politicized and polarizing debate surrounding alternative pathways to teacher training. “The Bush administration has been very supportive of Teach for America,” says Smith, “because, we like to think, it’s a good program, but also because there are no regulations.” On the other hand, she observes, “Social justice [proponents] also support it. So we can reach in both directions.” While Teach for America receives some of its funding from Americorps and the Department of Education, 80 percent of its funding comes from private corporations and foundations.
Admission into Teach for America is a criterion-based process with an acceptance rate of 15 percent out of 16,000 applications. With an average GPA of 3.4, Teach for America candidates are an idealistic, high-achieving group of young men and women with demonstrated leadership, communication, and organizational skills. Above all, says Smith, they must have “perseverance.” Candidates are first required to apply their perseverance in an intensive five-week summer training session and a one-to-two-week orientation in one of the 21 Teach for America regions located throughout the nation. Before they even start their formal training, however, says Smith, “They have already read a ton of materials. . .and had 12 hours of classroom observations, which they write about.” Smith adds, “We work hard to instill [the idea that] learning to teach is an ongoing process.” Keenly aware that they have a lot to learn, when Teach for America candidates enter the classroom “They go in with the attitude: ‘I’m going to ask for help; I’m not going to act like I’m the be-all and end-all.’”
Of course, there’s little danger of their developing swelled heads since, according to Smith, “The first year is overwhelming”—as it is for all new teachers. Despite the daunting nature of the challenges they face, the retention rates for the first and second years are high; by the third year, 60 percent are still teaching. Teach for America’s most recent annual survey of alumni—and there are 8,000 now—indicates that approximately 60 percent are working in or studying education, as teachers, principals, education policy advisors, and leaders and staff of education reform organizations. The other 40 percent enter a variety of professions, including medicine, law, business, journalism and government service. Regardless of the profession they choose, the essential goal is the same for all Teach for America alumni: seasoned by their deeply personal experiences in the classrooms of many of the nation’s most impoverished schools, and fired by their outrage over the inequities they have witnessed, they are primed to advocate for educational equity and social justice for America’s children.
And the children who are taught by Teach for America teachers, how do they fare? According to Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action, the report of The Teaching Commission, “. . .[I]nitial findings on TFA are positive.” The report states that a study of Teach for America participants in Houston, Texas, conducted by Macke Raymond and Stephen Fletcher, “found that TFA teachers perform at least as well as, and in many cases, better than, other teachers hired by the Houston Independent School District.” Citing the same study, however, Linda Darling-Hammond writes, “In 1999–2000, the last year covered by the study sample, about 50 percent of Houston’s new teachers were uncertified, and the researchers report that 35 percent of new hires lacked even a bachelor’s degree; so TFA teachers were compared to an extraordinarily ill-prepared group.” The problem, according to Darling-Hammond, is that TFA teacher outcomes are not compared to those of “trained and certified teachers or to others with a bachelor’s degree,” even though, she points out, data were available to those conducting the study.
Regarding the latter point, Dan Fallon explains, “At the time that was not a question that interested them. They simply wanted to know, of the entire pool of teachers that they hire through nontraditional venues (excluding normally prepared certified teachers), are the Teach for America teachers competitive?”
What Darling-Hammond’s analysis of the Houston study suggests is that schoolchildren taught by the intensely idealistic yet inexperienced Teach for America teachers might be only relatively better off than if they been taught by the largely underqualified and unqualified teachers concentrated in Houston schools and classrooms. Fallon agrees: “The study shows that Teach for America teachers are doing no harm in those positions (relative to what the pupils would otherwise have had for teachers) and are often doing better than the norm.”
Another more recent study by Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., a group that conducts research on public policy issues, focused on the question, “Do TFA teachers improve (or at least not harm) student outcomes relative to what would have happened in their absence?” The sample included six of the regions in which Teach for America placed teachers at the time: Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Delta. Teach for America teachers were compared to a control group defined as “any teacher who was never a TFA corps member”—a group that included “traditionally certified, alternatively certified, and uncertified teachers.” The June 2004 study, prepared with support by Carnegie Corporation of New York, found that students in low-income, high-minority classes taught by Teach for America teachers fared slightly better in mathematics achievement and about the same in reading than similar students taught by the control group. The study concludes that “From the perspective of a community or a school faced with the opportunity to hire TFA teachers, our findings suggest that TFA offers an appealing pool of candidates.” Indeed, according to the report, “The finding that many of the control teachers in our study were not certified or did not have formal pre-service training highlights the need for programs or policies that can attract good teachers to schools in the most disadvantaged communities. Our findings show that Teach for America is one such program.”
Darling-Hammond draws a different conclusion from the study. The generally poor quality of the teachers in the control group, she observes, underscores a more fundamental question, “not whether districts should hire more TFA teachers but what our country is going to do about hiring a stable force of really well-prepared teachers for the students most in need so they can do more than tread water until they drown.”
.