StickWithANose

My continued critique of Teach for America is often greeted with scoffs of disbelief: How could top graduates from top schools not turn out to be great teachers? Easy. The assumption behind such a question is that all that one requires to become an effective teacher is to be knowledgeable about ones subject area. Thus, TFA participants receive only 5 weeks of summer training prior to entering some of the toughest classrooms in the country. It should not be surprising that under-prepared teachers who leave the profession after their two years are up turn out to be poor teachers. Teaching is a profession that requires training and experience to master. When education systems focus on the professional development of its teaching force and create a flexible institutional framework that utilizes its professional labor force, academic achievement grows and communities reap the benefits.

Today’s New York Times gives us yet another reason to tone down the rhetoric over TFA. [h/t Schools Matter]

Teach for America, a corps of recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, has become a campus phenomenon, drawing huge numbers of applicants willing to commit two years of their lives.

But a new study has found that their dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.

In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.

The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.

The study, “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters — had become more politically active.

Again, this really isn’t that surprising. From a sociological perspective, comparing Freedom Summer to TFA is like comparing apples and oranges. Freedom Summer was a politically motivated movement based on the idealism of its participants and the grassroots organizational work already “on the ground” in the South. Further, Freedom Summer participants engaged in meaningful political action that yielded tangible results. In contrast, TFA is an astro-turf organization funded by venture philanthropists and is based on corporatist education policies designed to undermine traditional pathways into teaching, teachers unions and [more generally] the public mandate for schooling. TFA participants are motivated primarily by enhancing their career goals [demonstrating a proven record of "service" looks great on a resume] not overtly political goals. Further,  the “service” they provide to poor communities yields few concrete results in student achievement or community empowerment.

That the participants of a grassroots movement that engaged in concrete political action that yielded tangible results and who were motivated by their ideals came away from the experience more optimistic and politically active than do participants in an astro-turf organization that yield few tangible results and who are motivated by their career goals should be a surprise to no one.