TEACHING for AMERICA

Interesting (and long!) blog by Alexander Russo this week, in This Week in Education. Russo’s general modus operandi is a pithy paragraph, but he stretches out with some speculation on why Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp (she of the dazzling smile and silver tongue) has not yet won a MacArthur genius grant, darn it, when all the stars and planets seem to be in alignment for that to happen. He follows with a pretty fair assessment of what Teach for America has actually been able to accomplish.

If you were hoping for an anti-Teach for America screed here, you will be disappointed. Any bright idea on how to get smart people into teaching is worthy—the key factor in learning always being who is standing in front of the classroom. I know several Teach for America veterans, and to a person, they are civic-minded, articulate and concerned about schools and kids. One of them has taught in my district for several years, making her a rarity—one of the 18% who actually find teaching a career worthy of extended pursuit.

Kopp’s genius, if you will, was positioning teaching in high-needs schools as a kind of missionary work, and then offering a limited number of jobs to a pool of highly motivated graduates looking for something interesting and worthwhile to do before returning to school. She helped get smart people into teaching, all right—for two years. Business Week recently named Teach for America in its top ten  “Best Places to Launch a Career.” It’s ironic that such a career will certainly not be one in teaching.

It’s not Teach for America’s fault that the culture and occupation of teaching are often dysfunctional. Still, TFA has done nothing to re-conceptualize the work of teaching as both socially valuable and complex professional practice. In fact, TFA and similar “fellowship” programs have spawned a rash of research projects bent on proving that teacher education isn’t particularly useful—that any smart person can teach. Pitting native intelligence and content knowledge against professional learning about how to teach well is a yet another false dichotomy in the ongoing argument about effective teaching. What we need, to solve the problems of our most challenging schools, is a) bright, motivated people and b) a willingness to invest the necessary time and experience in learning to be good, efficient teachers. Not one or the other.

It’s always interesting to look at how other modern nations approach teacher recruitment, training and ongoing professional development. Maybe we need to ask why most other developed countries don’t see a need to recruit their best and brightest into short-term teaching careers. How did the vocation (and I choose that word deliberately) of teaching get such a bad rap in American society?

When Wendy Kopp comes up with an idea to keep TFA folks in teaching or reposition teaching as a flexible, entrepreneurial professional career, I personally will carry signs nominating her for a MacArthur grant—or Secretary of Education.

Comments

[TeachMoore]

TFA (known in some parts as Teach-For-A-minute) has helped us in some ways: here in the Miss. Delta where we are chronically short of teachers, they do help fill classrooms that would otherwise be manned by substitute teachers. And, for the most part, they are willing. But they are just here for two years (several don't last that long), and they do see this as missionary work. Which means sometimes they arrive with a "save the savages" mentality towards students and teachers.
We (MS) have found that home-grown alternate route programs are more successful as the newly minted teachers tend to stay longer and pursue additional formal training in education.

[Ariel Sacks]

I've met some TFA'ers who profess love and loyalty to TFA and it mission and who experience success in the classroom; but I hear a larger proportion of TFA participants express anger toward the organization for setting them up for failure. Many TFA'ers find themselves in almost unworkable conditions, in which TFA did not intervene when help was needed. Support would also be an area for TFA to further develop before I'd be able to call it a genius plan.

[Clix]

Hm. It'd be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison of TFA and career teachers to mission trips and missionaries.

[TMAO]

I don't think TFA and other alt certification progams like those run by The New Teacher Project make the argument that teacher education/ prepartion isn't useful, in principle. Rather, they make the argument that teacher prepartion, as currently constituted in all its jump-through-the-hoop ineptitude, isn't useful. These programs make the argument that going to state college to get a certificate that probably isn't geared toward the population you will teach, is watered down and smoothed over, and taught by folks long removed from the classroom, is not time well spent. There is an implict call to improve these preparation programs, and the stuff folks are getting from TFA and TNTP, especially in terms of management, goal-setting, assessment, progress tracking, and investment, are far superior than what I see coming out of traditional certification programs in my neck of the woods.

What TFA and TNTP demonstrate is that smart people are good, but smart mission-oriented smart people with certain key skills oriented toward teaching low-income kids, and the desire to learn more such skills, will become effective teachers. The implications for traditional route reform are clear.

[Nancy Flanagan]

Well--thanks to everyone who's posted. I see several issues: recruiting the right folks, providing useful training, and addressing the tough situations that (alt-cert AND traditional prep) often face.

I do wish that schools of education would be pickier, in general. There are lots of issues around that, however--using tools like test scores and elite institutions to screen for the "smartest" teachers often skews the pool of potential teachers, demographically--and can lead to Renee's "taming the savages" (for 2 years) atmosphere. We need to get smart people of all ethnicities into the classroom for sustained periods of time. And provide them with genuine leadership opportunities once they get their feet wet so they don't see teaching as a dead-end career.

I am troubled by the assertion that traditional teacher preparation is watered down and smoothed over--or that people in traditional prep programs never get experience or training in goal-setting, progress-tracking or assessment. They do. There are many fine teacher preparation programs--and many lousy ones. The fact is--most teachers really learn to teach on the job, and it takes a couple of years to start getting a reliable handle on good practice. It goes a lot faster when teachers come to the classroom with some tools and ideas, then have ongoing guidance and some good role models to work with. To paint all conventional teacher education as weak and inept is just too facile.

The people from the lousy programs? A lot of times they end up in the places with the lousy working conditions. Teachers coming out of high-quality prep programs (with a 2-year internship/student teaching model, for example) are quickly scooped up by advantaged schools with early-hiring policies, leaving the critical-needs schools with the underprepared and lesser candidates, and fewer role models. It would be easy to see traditional teacher prep programs and universally failing if those were your idea of "regular teachers."

How do I know this? Because I work with adult second-career teachers who see their (traditional, generally two-year)teacher prep coursework as very useful. They are, in fact, surprised at how difficult it is to take their content knowledge and turn it into engaging lessons, manage large diverse groups of learners, work in school cultures through extensive field experience, etc.

While I fully agree that teacher preparation can and should be improved (mostly around 21st century learning issues), it's also true that the perception that all teacher prep programs are weak is politically useful. Positioning teaching as an easy job needing no special training is not the way toward better schools for all kids.