Field Report:

The Toughest Critic

Teach for America closely tracks the successes and failures of its own corps members like a management consulting firm, so it may beat critics of the program to the punch.

By Catharine Bellinger
January 26, 2010

Elizabeth Venechuk, a third grade teacher at Powell Elementary School and Teach for America participant, teaches a math lesson in Washington, Monday, May 12, 2008. (AP Photo/Brendan Hoffman)

When Wendy Kopp was 20, she spent the hours outside class at Princeton University editing the campus publication Business Today, immersed in a data world: investment banks, money markets, and management consulting firms. She went on to found Teach for America in 1990, and today, 20 years later, she still lives in that data world but now focuses on education data. Although TFA is often criticized for one particular data point—that 17 percent of its corps members leave before the end of their two-year commitment—current members, alumni, and employees of the organization cite its data-driven focus as its greatest strength.

See the original Campus Progress article "Teach for America Dropouts"

Also see a TFA alum defend the program

A recent Campus Progress article quoted 2000-2001 corps member Josh Kaplowitz, whose experience with TFA is frequently cited by the program’s detractors, as criticizing TFA’s "dogmatic and inflexible" philosophy. But current corps member Matt Brown, a 2009 graduate of Ohio State University, found something quite different.

After an experience at Summer Institute, TFA's training program for its rising teachers, that left some corps members feeling inadequately prepared for classroom management, Brown and others notified the program of a mistake it had made: It had been placing future New Orleans teachers at Summer Institute in Phoenix, AZ, where corps members encountered "zero behavior problems," only to later face "full scale riots" in the chaotic greater New Orleans classrooms. Fortunately, Brown says, the administrators at Teach for America "track everything, and take internal data pretty seriously." When the numbers showed that New Orleans corps members were not being adequately prepared in the calmer Phoenix classrooms, Teach for America decided to begin sending greater New Orleans teachers to Atlanta for training starting in 2010, where they will encounter a more representative student population. According to Brown, corps member feedback was "the primary reason they changed it."

Beyond the Type A Personality

Teach for America, like a successful management consulting group that Kopp often wrote about in Business Today, knows to set goals for its employees and measure their progress every step of the way. "The fact that TFA ties recruitment, selection, training, and support to measurable achievement outcomes is a testament to their strength as an organization," says Nick Ehrmann, a 2000 alumnus who taught in Washington, D.C., with Kaplowitz and who has now gone on to start his own education entrepreneurship venture. Heather Harding, vice president of research and policy at Teach for America, shared a similar view. For the corps members, she says, "There's a focus on setting big and ambitious goals and on tracking their goals." The organization has its own goal that's centered entirely on the students; it hopes to have as many corps members as possible with "significant gains" by the end of the year. In order to achieve that status of making significant gains, teachers' students must have made over a year and a half of academic progress during one school year.

Brown is slightly critical of the fact that Teach for America measures "significant gains" by relying heavily on state standardized tests, which Harding separately acknowledged can fail to be aligned with what students need to be learning. "The metric of 'success' is pretty single-minded," he says. Brown agrees with Teach for America's focus on improvement, but he prioritizes retention and decreasing burn-out. Among average public school teachers, Brown says, "100 percent believe their cause is hopeless." He would like to see Teach for America answer the question, "What causes a highly motivated, energetic teacher, be they TFA or not, to withdraw?"

It can be hard to know a teacher's exact reasons for quitting the profession, as Lauren Baideme, another corps member profiled by Campus Progress, did in 2008. Baideme attributed her decision to her Type A personality, but alumna Gillian Conner thinks teachers—especially Teach for America corps members—are more apt to fail when they don't know when to ask for help: "Plenty of Type A personalities are successful teachers who make significant gains, but it takes more than being a hard worker. You have to have grit and the ability to not only acknowledge when you fail your students but also the resiliency to correct those failures."

Conner, who after her corps experience taught for the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, known for their "No Excuses" philosophy, continued, "It's easy to blame the children, the administrators, the system, etc. What's harder and what's necessary is to admit the fault lies with you and to figure out how you are going to by the type of teacher your students deserve." During her corps commitment, Conner brought her entire class of eighth-graders from below grade-level to on or above grade-level on the yearly standardized tests mandated by No Child Left Behind. After her corps experience, Conner taught for the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools, known for their "No Excuses" philosophy.

Conner’s attitude is something Teach for America actively seeks in its recruitment of applicants. TFA’s North Carolina recruitment director, Victor Wakefield, wrote in an email, "I was drawn to this organization because it is rooted in the fact that every student can learn and deserves a high-quality education.” Wakefield, an alumnus of the Gary, Ind. corps, says, "I make all of my recruitment decisions based on what my students deserve."

Measuring Success—And Failure

Providing students with the best possible teachers was a consistent theme in conversations with TFA affiliates. When describing a special test called the Student Achievement Measurement System (SAMS) that Teach for America has developed to examine student gains, Harding says, "We're using it to figure out who we need to provide the most support so the kids we're serving get the best we can give them."

When analyzing data from SAMS, TFA program directors—those directly responsible for supporting corps members—decide whom they need to observe more often and provide more feedback to. Meanwhile, the TFA leadership teams looks especially at the "high-fliers," according to Harding, and those who go from good, but not great, one year to making "significant gains" the next. Why not just look at those who are good all along? Business practices guided this decision as well: The idea comes from Jim Collins' classic text Good to Great. One of the first lines of the book, in fact, is that "we don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools." Teach for America believes settling for good teachers is not enough—to create great schools, they need great teachers, and they need to see how teachers go from "good to great."

A recent Atlantic Monthly article covered the immense amount of data TFA has been gathering about what makes a teacher great. By applying that information to summer training and year-round support, Teach for America believes they will substantially improve the quality of their teachers.

Refining Teaching School

And fortunately for many corps members, some education schools and other certification are beginning to catch on as well. Before 2008, most New York corps members used to take classes at a local education school, often pursuing coursework unrelated to their instruction. Now, however, a recent partnership with the alternative certification program Teacher U is providing corps members the opportunity to receive instruction specifically targeted to giving them skills they can apply in the classroom. Teacher U is a new collaboration between Hunter College and the three most well-known charter schools on the East Coast—the Knowledge Is Power Program, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools. The program doesn't have students attain their certification and master’s degree by writing a master's thesis. Instead, they must show that over the course of two years, their students have made significant positive academic growth as the result of teaching strategies.

Partnerships with alternative certification programs—or at least education schools with a like-minded data-driven focus—may be the future for Teach for America. Currently, the vast majority of TFA sites are partnering with colleges and universities, but Harding says "the innovation has been driven from working through programs like Teacher U or even The New Teacher Project. It's harder for institutions of higher learning to be flexible. They're not so used to working with [current teachers]."

Programs like The New Teacher Project (TNTP) and Teacher U offer classes targeting students’ academic achievement. Such programs relentlessly track data about effective teaching and frequently share their best practices through online video platforms. TNTP even calls its curriculum “Teaching for Student Achievement.” At a typical education school, master's degree candidates are taught almost exclusively by professors, although they typically observe or assist in public school classrooms. At Teacher U, however, experienced “master teachers,” current teachers with track records of raising student achievement, actually give lectures and teach seminars.

It can be tempting to look for faults with a program so widely lauded by everyone from Barack Obama to rapper Dr. Dre, who has guest-taught in Teach for America classrooms. Unfortunately for most critics, Teach for America itself might beat them to it: Like any good business, TFA is not comfortable resting on its laurels, and it prefers being its own toughest critic. "I don't think TFA is perfect by any means," says Brown, "but their internal reflectiveness is a strength." From inside the leadership structure of TFA, Wakefield agreed: "We’re deeply committed to being self-reflective and self-critical."

Catharine Bellinger is a sophomore at Princeton University. She is the editor of the American Education Review, part of the Campus Progress Journalism Network.

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