StickWithANose

It appears as though Australian philanthropists want to get in on the corporate schooling train by importing that very American invention, Teach for [insert nationality]. Here in the states, the only contrarian views on the corporatization of public schooling that make it to print are couched in infantile narratives of teachers unions and reformers, but it appears as though the Aussies are engaging in a real debate over policy… like grown-ups! Case in point: Here is an article from the Sydney Morning Herald that makes space for real academics who have studied the Teach for America program to offer up words of warning in a piece entitled “Teach for Australia: What in the world are you thinking?”

The news that Australia is following the United States in introducing a program which puts untrained teachers in the classroom came as a real shock to us here.

Simply put, you are being conned. Teach for America (TFA), the model for your national program, is not effective in helping students in poverty learn more, though it is very effective at raising large amounts of money…

Professor Donald Easton-Brooks, concluded that students in the early grades taught by fully certified teachers scored higher than students of teachers trained in the way that Teach for Australia proposes. Further, full university certification was associated with a narrowing of the achievement gap between African-American and European-American students.

Dr Ildiko Laczko-Kerr and I conducted a study published in a high-quality journal that found students of TFA teachers make about 20 per cent less academic growth a year than students of beginning teachers with full certification.

Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond (past president of the American Educational Research Association) and others,analysed the records of 132,000 students and 4400 teachers across grades and over years.

They looked at six different achievement tests. Students of TFA teachers performed worse on all six tests. On five of the six tests, the uncertified TFA teachers depressed student achievement by between two weeks to three months annually, when compared with fully certified teachers with the same experience and working in similar schools.

The researchers also found that 69 per cent of TFA teachers had left by the end of their second year of teaching and 88 per cent had left by the end of their third year. That is, most TFA teachers do not stay in education long enough to make up for the damage they cause to their students during their first few years of teaching.

In a study also published in a rigorous peer-reviewed scientific journal, Donald Boyd and other economists found that students assigned to new TFA recruits scored significantly lower in reading and language arts and marginally lower in elementary mathematics when compared with teachers prepared in college pre-service programs.

Moreover, by year four, 85 per cent of the Teach for America teachers had left the profession, compared with a leaving rate of about 37 per cent among those who were traditionally prepared.

Researchers with the Houston, Texas, school district looked at student growth on tests and identified some teachers as their best-performing and others as their worst-performing in producing learning gains.

Although TFA teachers make up about 1 to 2 per cent of the teachers in this district, they made up 8.3 per cent of the worst-performing teachers of reading, 9.1 per cent of the worst-performing teachers of language arts, and 4.2 per cent of the worst-performing teachers in social studies. That is, they were heavily over-represented among the poorest teachers in the district.

To my knowledge, none of the papers of record in the US have published an article on any education policy, let alone TFA, that utilizes this much peer-reviewed research. No “education experts” from the Hoover/Manhattan/Brookings Institute, no “policy experts”, no……. well, “hacks.”