TFA reaffirms its philosophy

“Teach For America (TFA) has been a challenging but incredibly rewarding experience. I don’t think it is the solution, but it’s part of a movement to help address a crisis in our education system,” said Hallie Fox ’09, reflecting on her first year in the program.

Since its inception in 1990, TFA has been amassing college graduates to join its ever-developing teaching program. The program places college graduates in low-income areas to teach for two years. Wendy Kopp, TFA founder, said her goal for the organization is to bridge the “achievement gap” or disparity of achievement between low-income area children and middle to high-income area children, due to lack of sufficient educational resources.

The TFA motto is: “Our mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity.” To develop this movement throughout American society, candidates are sought out from all backgrounds and with varying experiences in education. What they all have in common is their potential as leaders.

While TFA’s overall mission has succeeded in attracting a growing number of highly qualified, though sometimes inexperienced, students (as of 2008 it received almost 25,000 applicants), Teach For America’s two-year teaching stint has seemingly created a contradiction to Kopp’s desire to “counteract teaching’s image as a ‘soft’ and downwardly mobile career” (as expressed in her book “One Day, All Children”) and has for some become more of a pit-stop for those college graduates who have not yet decided on their future career.

“I’ve heard through the grapevine that some of the people TFA chooses are legitimate Middlebury seniors who just decided they don’t know what they want to do with their life, and they might as well teach,” said Lecturer in Teacher Education Gregg Humphrey.

“How can [TFA] possibly get [corps members] ready in a legitimate way knowing that [it is] not honoring the potential of these other students out there that are more ready?”

While teaching experience would clearly come in handy once the TFA corps members enter the classroom, TFA’s model for corps member selection, largely focused on leadership abilities, is less concerned with applicants reasons for joining TFA and more concerned with what they achieve once accepted.

“We recruit these people because they’re great young leaders and what we’re trying to do is let them follow their passions about how to attack this problem, because [the organization] will be richer for it,” explained Jeffrey Brown, chief program officer on TFA’s Senior Operating Team, about why TFA does not cater to future teachers. “While we think having high quality teachers in low-income schools is an important part of the problem, it’s clearly not the whole solution.”

One young leader who will be participating in TFA next year is Dale Freundlich ’10. “I think one of the biggest things that I’m excited about is knowing that I am going to be effective in the classroom. I feel that one of TFA’s biggest strengths is making teachers out of students in a short time,” she said.

“I’m nervous about being in an unfamiliar situation because the only people I’ve really ever taught are my peers, and being placed in a situation where my students are at an extreme disadvantage will be a much bigger challenge.”

Brown asserted that placing college graduates in these challenging situations effectively combats the achievement gap.

“We’re not trying to replace education — we’re trying to serve a need that hasn’t been addressed to the extent that people have made progress and it’s starting to turn around,” explained Brown.

“We go into school districts to serve low-income kids…We would love it if 90 percent of our corps members decided they wanted to stay teaching [there].”

Some critics see TFA as a threat to traditionally certified and more experienced educators who cannot compete with the TFA prestige, as well as the starting salary. In 2009, about one in four hires in the Baltimore public school system was a TFA corps member.

However, research on TFA corps members’ work in inner city and rural schools has shown a high enough success rate to silence those concerns, at least at this point. In North Carolina alone, TFA corps members outperformed traditionally prepared teachers in five of nine comparisons and in the other four were still comparable.

Despite criticisms or organizational flaws that might be associated with any innovative organization, TFA represents a noble cause making legitimate strides in achieving its goals and overcoming its obstacles. Though with each year the achievement gap diminishes more and more, “We’ve got a long way before I would say we’re effective in achieving our goals,” said Brown. In the meantime, TFA will continue searching out the best young leaders of today to do what the exciting educational system cannot do alone: that is, foster equality in hopes of a better future.

“College-aged kids want to do stuff that’s worthwhile in their lives,” said Humphrey. “[Teach For America] is worthwhile so they’ve got a captive audience.”