TFA recruits primarily high-achieving college seniors to serve as teachers for two years in low-income schools. Applicants undergo a rigorous selection process, with an acceptance rate of roughly 12 percent, currently comprising two rounds: an online application and a daylong in-person interview.
Our analysis includes only applicants who advance to the interview stage. Once accepted, TFA participants are assigned to one of roughly 50 regions nationwide; their subjects and grade levels vary. After summer training, TFA teachers lead classrooms in high-need schools. In the average TFA placement school during our study years, 80 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and 90 percent of students identified as racial or ethnic minorities.
Participants receive ongoing training and support from both the organization and local higher-education institutions during their two-year commitment. Such alternative hands-on training programs, which quickly place teachers in the classroom, are in contrast to traditional programs, in which years of college or graduate-school coursework culminate in a classroom teaching experience.
While the annual enrollment for each of these programs is not publicly available, our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest there are collectively at least as many alumni of these TFA-like programs as there are alumni of TFA itself, if not more. However, teaching through TFA may be a different experience than teaching through other alternative pathways, in part because of its robust alumni network and explicit goal of influencing education from both inside and outside the classroom.
A spinoff organization, Leadership for Educational Equity, encourages and supports alumni looking to run for office or gain decisionmaking power in their communities through board appointments or other public-service roles, for example. Our study is the first large-scale empirical investigation of how participation shapes alumni views on education policy.
To assess these attitudes, we asked applicants who advanced to the final stage of the TFA admissions process between and to take part in an online survey, which launched in All of the TFA participants within these application cycles would have finished their TFA assignment at the time of the study.
Of that group of 91, unique individuals, 27 percent started the survey and 21 percent completed it, yielding complete responses from 19, people. The survey contained a wide range of questions on educational inequity and reform. In particular, we asked individuals to: share their beliefs on why there are income-based differences in educational outcomes; assess the promise of politically charged educational initiatives, including charter schools, vouchers, preschool, standardized testing, and teachers unions; and share their views on the extent to which we could reasonably expect teachers to help students improve under challenging circumstances.
We then link those responses with TFA administrative data, including demographic information and scores they were assigned at the end of the selection process. The vast majority of those with a score above that cutoff receive an offer, while only a fraction of those scoring below it do. As a result, the probability that an applicant ends up teaching through TFA also jumps sharply at that cutoff: those who score just above the admissions cutoff are 30 percentage points more likely to participate in TFA than those who score just below see Figure 1.
It is this feature of the selection process that makes it possible for us to estimate the causal effect of TFA participation on the education policy preferences of applicants. In particular, we can compare the attitudes of applicants who scored just above the selection cutoff with those who scored just below it. When making this comparison, we take into account that not everyone scoring above the cutoff actually taught with TFA, while some scoring below the cutoff did.
Because the actual difference in participation rates across the cutoff was 30 percentage points, this amounts to multiplying the differences between the two groups of applicants by a factor of roughly three. Overall, we find that TFA participants are more likely than comparable non-participants to believe that societal issues, not differences in the actions or values of students from low-income backgrounds, exacerbate income-based differences in academic achievement see Figure 2.
For example, we observe no difference between participants and non-participants in terms of support for unions, Common Core curriculum standards, performance pay for teachers, and allocating school funding based on student need see Figure 3.
However, an important exception is that TFA participation appears to decrease support for school choice. Or: Students will be able to compare the strategies of different social movements. Of course, these objectives are not one-day lessons; I hope to build towards them throughout the course of the year. These objectives are not easily reduced to bite-sized testable items.
But in the TFA model, specific testable objectives are of primary importance. As I write, I am in the middle of a unit on the world wars with my history classes. Tennessee state standards for world history generally offer little guidance on what you should teach this is not true of subjects like U.
There are a number of things I could test them on based on the TFA approach. I might expect them to remember the alliance system in Europe before the war, reasons different countries had for joining alliances, and some of the major events leading up to the war, including the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
From the perspective of TFA, my lesson would be successful if students were able, on average, to recall 80 percent of that information on my test.
With so much information to remember, the TFA approach might involve creative guided notes in which students take down the information and then draw a little sketch for each point to help them remember. They might also read in groups, with a graphic organizer to help them take notes. In teaching World War I, I did want students to understand what actually happened, but having them memorize lots of bits of information was not what I was after.
It was more important that students see that these types of conflicts usually arise from a competition for resources. While some countries may have been more responsible for instigating the war, I wanted them to understand that the ruling classes of all the major European countries involved were trying to protect their own interests often in the context of exploiting their own people as well as militarily weaker peoples around the world.
After giving them a quick background on the start of the war and the alliance system, I broke them into small groups to prepare for a role-played trial in which we interrogated who was to blame for WWI. This is an oversimplification of the historical legacy of the exploitation of Africa by Europeans, but when I pressed him, Deandre was able to give well reasoned specifics.
I also determine student learning with a post-trial reflective writing assignment in which they use evidence to parse out blame for the war. For a year and a half, I have run a social-justice-oriented classroom of the kind that might raise eyebrows, especially in a relatively conservative place like Memphis.
Through it all, Teach for America staff has been supportive, not criticizing or attempting to influence my teaching choices, but instead trying to help me improve my classroom. But TFA training has not included many of the strategies that I find most effective. In fact, our summer training on social studies teaching techniques was quite limited. Instead I taught a remedial math class to 8th graders preparing to retake a test they needed to pass to move on to high school.
Though most corps members seem to train in a relevant subject, I worked closely throughout the summer with more than a few future members of social studies or Spanish departments on how to become better math teachers.
Training specific to social studies was offered during only three or four sessions throughout the summer.
Like all TFA sessions, these were led by current or former corps members. They were competent, engaging, and, no doubt, effective teachers. Contrary to what one might expect, this does not mean that TFA is producing career teachers at astonishing rates. It means the organization is reaching the entire education ecosystem, with high-need classroom experience as its number one priority.
TFA commissioned the study to analyze the trajectory of its corps members compared to their traditionally certified peers. Ultimately many corps members go on to strengthen the educational ecosystem in administrative, political, and community functions. The program, which places alternatively certified teachers in high-need schools, requires a two-year commitment from its corps members. Numerous other studies have found the program to have a positive effect on students and student outcomes. Critics of the program say that these short-term commitments are evidence that the program does not adequately prepare TFA recruits for what they will find in the classroom, and that their lack of longevity is not good for students, schools, or districts.
This criticism misses the point of TFA, Carreon said. Many go on to targeted areas where they have witnessed barriers to student success, be it policy-making, administration, or community support. Texas currently does not produce enough traditionally certified teachers to meet demand in public schools, and alternative certification programs have been necessary to fill classrooms.
Some have questioned whether these programs, even selective ones like TFA, adequately prepare teachers for the actual classroom.
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