A Civil War in Teach for America, and the fight for the heart of US education reform

[Masada]

Basically, yes, although at least these fly by nighters are very smart. Prior to that, they'd just throw the rookie teachers in those schools, (well, they do that too), which in some ways was worse.

I'm sure they are; they'd have to be. But five weeks training... I'd also like to think that people with education degrees are a little bit more prepared.

 

[Cutlass]

I don't know how the hell you went from "it's voluntary" to "it's compulsory" so quickly, quite incredible. No, it's not "one option for a compulsory national service". It's a voluntary thing. It is entirely voluntary. There is no compulsory element involved whatsoever. There is nothing about it that is not voluntary. It is a voluntary thing. Voluntary, not compulsory. Voluntary.



In the UK, a year in industry is an optional part of your degree. They pair you up with a company and the company is supposed to give you valuable experience that might be useful for the rest of your degree, but more importantly for future employment. It doesn't often do that - they're usually completely useless donkey work, like paperwork and tea making - but the principle is that students, before they graduate, spend a year in industry gaining experience.

Sending students to schools instead of industry seems like a decent way of getting more teaching staff in schools, assuming the economists are right, churn is not a problem, and you can train students to teach during the summer. I.e. if we side with TFA and take what they're saying as true.


Oh and again, for Cutlass's benefit, this would be voluntary. Not compulsory. Voluntary. Much like how the year in industry scheme currently works at the moment.

Whenever the subject of "national service" comes up in the US, the "voluntary" part never gets attached to it.

 

[Mise]

Whenever the subject of "national service" comes up in the US, the "voluntary" part never gets attached to it.

Yes I know, that's why I said "I understand why you assumed I meant for it to be compulsory from what I wrote, but that isn't what I meant".

 

[Formaldehyde]

For what it's worth, for as lousy as teacher I was, my students still performed better, and had a higher grade completion rate, than multiple of our experienced teachers, and all of our non TFA rookies. We had a lot of teachers with negative WAR in my building.

On what basis can you possibly discern that this was due solely to your own efforts? That it didn't have far more to do with the students which you were assigned, their previous teachers, as well as those who taught them during the other periods that year?

This is one of the real problems with the pervasiveness of standardized testing. It leads to such absurd conclusions.

Basically, yes, although at least these fly by nighters are very smart. Prior to that, they'd just throw the rookie teachers in those schools, (well, they do that too), which in some ways was worse.

I find this insinuation that these supposedly "elite" "high achievers" are far smarter than the typical school teacher to the point where their presumably vastly greater intelligence and motivation somehow makes up for a near complete lack of educational training to be completely reprehensible.

What students actually need are caring teachers who are willing to commit their nearly entire adult lives to this endeavor.

Mind the Gap: An Insider's Critique of Teach for America

Among corps members, Teach for America is in the midst of promoting, with its characteristic zeal, a 20th-anniversary summit, to be held in eight months in Washington, D.C. For all of the reasons outlined in my previous post, mainly because I'm proud of the movement the organization has helped launch and endlessly intrigued by alums' current endeavors, I plan to attend.

That being said, I hope Teach for America isn't around when the time comes to hold another summit 20 years from now.

I express this wish half-heartedly, as I've developed sentimental ties to the organization that I was recruited into as a college student and have been a part of ever since. However, I believe the long-term health of public education would be best served if Teach for America acted like jumper cables, by giving the establishment a jolt, which it has largely already accomplished. But then, it would go away.

Teach for America agrees in theory, proclaiming on its website that “we know that enlisting additional high-quality teachers”—by which they mean corps members who mostly serve for two years—“is not the ultimate solution.” Teach for America is looking to replicate the success of Michelle Rhee, a 1992 corps member who was effective in the classroom—bringing her students from the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to the 90th percentile in two years. Rhee went on to implement systemic reform as an alumna, founding the New Teacher Project in 1997. She now oversees the D.C. Public Schools, which have made significant progress since she took over as chancellor in 2007.

The idea seems to be that Teach for America will cease to exist once it has accomplished its oft-stated goal that "all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education." With that goal still out of reach, the organization is expanding from its 35 current regions to a number of new sites next year —among them, Detroit, Alabama, and Rhode Island.

Is such expansion, or even existence, a plus for the American public education system? To help answer that question, I thought I’d address the four most common criticisms of Teach For America.

1. We’re inexperienced, ineffective educators.

Inexperienced? Yes. Ineffective? Too often. When I accepted the offer to join the corps, Teach for America inundated me with materials and videos that showed its teachers as miracle workers. I drank the Kool-Aid, honestly shocked during my summer institute training to see data that showed not all corps members were making significant gains with their students.

I wish I had links to studies that clearly showed corps members’ effectiveness. While a smattering of research does exist, corps members are not conclusively more effective than other teachers. Teach for America’s rigorous recruitment and training process is about as effective as it could possibly be—there is only so much progress that can be made in five weeks of preparation and the occasional follow-up visit.

2. We leave after two years.

This criticism is true for the majority of corps members. Even for those of us who do have a compelling impact on our students’ academic achievement and intellectual development, few of us stay at our schools long enough to make these changes systemic.

My predecessor was a fellow corps member, and his students had very high test scores. My students have done well, too, and they have also been able to partake in a myriad of opportunities outside of school. That said, if I follow his lead and also leave after my two-year commitment is up this June, neither of us will have significantly improved my school in any kind of enduring way.

3. We’re a stopgap solution.

My sister advocated against me joining Teach for America on the grounds that the organization provided a band-aid solution to the shortage of quality teachers nationwide. Around the country, she argued, school systems and graduate schools of education are not forced to reform themselves when there is a ready supply of eager college students willing to work hard for little money.

She has a point. If I was the superintendent of a struggling school system, I would be loathe to invite Teach for America in. While I know some teachers would make remarkable gains, those educators would likely leave after their two year commitment was up, leaving me in a situation similar to what I was in before they ever got there. While those effective teachers might go on to become school leaders, education reform-minded politicians or anything of the sort, I would be reluctant to let my students serve as their laboratory, their training ground.

4. We have a holier-than-thou attitude.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to quibble with the critics who lament the “strain of self-righteousness” that permeates some of the corps. Some of my peers are remarkably modest; many of us have been humbled by this most trying of experiences. Yet I do not take issue with the commentators, including some on my last post, who claim some corps members act like they know more than they do. You need a very healthy amount of self-confidence to think you can take on this role and be effective, and for some of us, the cup of confidence has surely runneth over.

Going forward, Teach for America would do well to push its alumni efforts as much as possible, thereby getting effective leaders into positions of power and creating the kind of profound changes that will, in time, eliminate the need for such an organization to exist in the first place.

It’s time for Teach For America to fold — former TFAer

Teach For America is one of the most controversial school reform organizations operating today. TFA recruits new college graduates, gives them five weeks of summer training and then places them in some of America’s neediest classrooms, presuming that just a little over a month of training is sufficient to do the job. Critics point out that high-needs students, who are the ones who get TFA teachers, are the children who most need veteran teachers. In fact, some veterans are now losing their jobs to TFA corps members, because TFAers are less expensive to hire, and some school teaching communities are becoming less cohesive because TFA members promise only to stay for two years and leave teaching at a greater rate than traditionally trained teachers.

With this backdrop, here is a piece by Matt Barnum, who was an eighth-grade language-arts teacher in Colorado Springs for the Teach For America – Colorado 2010 corps, who makes a compelling argument that it is time for TFA to fold. He is currently a law student at the University of Chicago, but still writes regularly about education.

By Matt Barnum

Last year, when I was finishing up my two years teaching eighth grade through Teach For America, a fellow corps member reached out, asking me to give to a TFA fundraising drive. I almost did. TFA had, after all, changed the course of my life, offering me two years that were at once mind-numbingly challenging and mind-blowingly rewarding. More importantly, TFA has had a huge – and in my view positive – impact on education since it started more than two decades ago. But ultimately I chose not to fork over any money. In making that decision I realized something that at the time was hard to admit to myself: TFA had run its course.

Consider TFA’s two original missions: first to help understaffed school districts fill teaching positions with talented, energized college graduates, and second to create a broader education advocacy and awareness movement. On both counts, TFA has had an impact, but ironically as TFA continues to grow, in many ways its impact is fading.

No longer are TFA corps members only filling spots that would otherwise go to long-term subs. In some districts TFAers are replacing veteran teachers who have been let go. Other districts, like the one I used to teach in, appear to cycle through corps members every two years, with high turnover among TFA teachers who are in turn replaced by a fresh slate of bushy-tailed, ill-trained corps members.

Here I have only my own experience to draw from; the validity of my claims can only be judged by other corps members’, educators’, and district leaders’ experiences. I’ve come to fear that many schools have become overly reliant on TFA as a teacher pipeline. Think about this way: A district has trouble filling all its teaching slots, so it hires many TFA corps members; inevitably, a large number of those teachers leave after two or three years; the district then fills those vacant slots with even more novice teachers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Perhaps this model is not all bad. If TFA teachers are exceptionally effective while teaching, sure, it’d be great if they stayed in the classroom longer, but two years of effective teaching is better than none. The research on this is mixed (surprise, surprise), but my interpretation is that although corps member are probably a bit better than traditionally trained novices, they’re not significantly better (and perhaps worse) than veteran teachers.

The other problem is the wasted investment a school makes in a teacher who leaves after just a few years. Sadly, I’m a poster child for this. I remember my last day at my school in Colorado, as I made the rounds saying goodbye to veteran teachers, my friends and colleagues who had provided me such crucial support and mentorship. As I talked of my plans for law school in Chicago, and they bade me best wishes, I felt an overwhelming wave of guilt. Their time and energy spent making me a better teacher – and I was massively better on that day compared to my first – was for naught. The previous summer I had spent a week of training, paid for by my school, to learn to teach pre–Advanced Placement classes. I taught the class for a year; presumably, I thought, someone else would have to receive the same training – or, worse, someone else would not receive the same training. All that work on classroom management and understanding of the curriculum, all the support in connecting with students and writing lesson – it would all have to begin again with a new teacher. (Indeed, my replacement apparently had a nervous breakdown and quit after a few months. She was replaced by a long-term substitute who one of my former colleagues must write lesson plans for.)

If Teach For America disappeared next year, I imagine that my old district and many across the country might suffer in the short term. (If TFA did ever close shop, phasing itself out slowly would surely be preferable to shutting down immediately.) But in the long term, I think it might be better for schools. Perhaps the loss of TFA would force districts to work on improving working conditions or pay, in order to retain top teachers. Perhaps it would help create more stability in schools. I admit this is speculative, and that many of these problems existed before TFA. It’s just as speculative, though, to suggest that TFA is currently having a positive influence on schools and students.

Nevertheless, some still believe that TFA is on a balance a force for good. Even taking that for granted, I am extremely skeptical that TFA is whatsoever cost-effective. Needless to say, this is important because money is scarce; money spent on education is even scarcer. If TFA is crowded investment into more effective organizations, then its money could be better spent.

TFA is now massive, with annual expenses (pdf) at $220 million in fiscal year 2011. According to the charity site Give Well, TFA’s budget 2009 budget came to a stunning $38,046 spent per corps member who started teaching; this was a more than twofold increase from 2005. (Corps member spending by TFA does not include corps members’ salaries, which are paid for by their respective school district. School districts also pay TFA a fee for each corps member hired.) Admittedly, a per-corps-member measurement is imperfect because it accounts for recruiting a new and ever-larger corps, as well as a ballooning alumni base. The question remains: if you have money to donate to education causes, is TFA your best investment?

Consider some of the main items in TFA’s budget (pdf): recruiting and selecting corps members (18%), management and general (9%), alumni support (8%). None of these makes corps members effective teachers. “Corps member development” (39%) and institute training (17%), on the other hand, purportedly do. Reality, as is its wont, is not so simple.

For many corps members, the required five-week summer training “institute” is close to useless. Why? Not, as some have argued, because it’s so short. Rather, it’s because for many of us the training doesn’t come close to simulating what it’s like to be teaching during the real school year. As alumni blogger Gary Rubinstein has pointed out, many institutes’ corps members teach for very little time in front of very few students.

That was precisely my experience. At the Phoenix Institute, I taught for four weeks, one-hour each day, in front of an average of ten exceptionally well-behaved sixth graders. (The first week of Institute did not involve any teaching.) And did I mention that there was no summer school on Fridays? In sum, I taught for a total of sixteen hours, in a room that often had half as many adults as students. At my middle school in Colorado, I taught an average of eighteen eighth-graders per class for about six hours a day, where I was almost always the only adult present. And these students’ parents had not elected for them to attend summer school. In other words, my placement school had more students, more hours, more days of the week, fewer adults, and a different student population (not to mention a different age group, and, for many, a different subject). TFA’s training model is not effective, yet $33 million is spent to doing a poor job teaching corps members to teach.

TFA loves to talk about the coaching of and professional development for its teachers. This sort of talk sounds good to prospective corps members, to districts, to donors, and to the media. Again, I can only draw from own experience and those of others I know, but with few exceptions, TFA’s continued support rarely made me a better teacher.

Managers of Teacher Leadership and Development (MTLDs) are supposed to be the first line of support for corps members struggling in the classroom. My MTLD – at the time, called a PD, program director – my first year did her best, but stopping by my classroom once a month, and having a half hour “debrief” after was little help. This support mirrored TFA’s training: not enough depth, not enough breadth, not enough time. My second MTLD was no better. I didn’t know her until a week into the school year, when she appeared in my classroom with no warning – I had not met her, and didn’t even know who she was as first – only to sweep out, fifteen minutes later, after leaving a post-it note that said something along the lines of, “Keep up the great work!” That about set the tone for the rest of our interactions.

This is the sort of corps member development that millions and millions of dollars are purchasing. Not to point to fine a point on it, but there are many, many other organizations that are doing great work that are far more worthy of donors’ money than TFA.

The second prong of TFA’s mission is to raise awareness of educational issues and develop lifelong advocates for educational equity. On this point, TFA has undoubtedly been successful; some of the biggest names in educational policy started their careers as corps members. Although one can debate whether all these individuals have had a positive impact on education (I think most have), it will suffice to say that TFA alumni sit on all sides of education policy debate, and it is surely true that TFA has gone a long way in focusing much-needed attention on low-income schools and communities.

All that said, I suspect that TFA has reached a critical mass on this point. With an “alumni network” of nearly 28,000 it’s difficult to see how pumping in several thousand additional corps members each year won’t lead to diminishing returns. Indeed, when I was considering jobs in education policy, multiple interviews mentioned how often they interview many TFA alumni for a single spot. In the educational world, TFA alumni have become a dime a dozen.

What should come out of TFA’s ashes? I expect some would answer enthusiastically, “Nothing!” I disagree. There are many talented people who work at TFA and many alumni who want to use their skills to further public education. I believe that such talent can continue TFA’s mission in a different form. Perhaps that form should be an off-shoot that requires a five-year commitment, as one alum recently suggested. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to try to bring veteran teachers from high-performing districts into lower-performing ones. Perhaps a huge effort should be exerted to improve schools of education so teachers are more effectively prepared for the classroom. Perhaps a different social cause is worth focusing on. I can’t say, but I’m confident that the idealism that TFA has tapped into is, and should be, here to stay.

Responses to Teach For America are often polarized in the education world: either TFA has a nefarious mission that will destroy public schools or it will save schools and solve education’s problems. The truth, I think, lies somewhere in the middle. TFA has changed the education world for the better, focused energy and concern around low-income communities, and harnessed the idealism of a generation of college graduates. In other words, TFA has had a good run, but today – for the good of those it hopes to help – it is time to retire.

Many would argue that TFA should have "retired" before it was even started. If you want to become an educator, go to college and learn how to properly do it like everybody else. Being a stopgap measure to replace incompetent substitute teachers until better ones can be found is one thing. Actually displacing professional educators because they are cheaper is beyond absurd.

 

[kramerfan86]

I dont really see much of a point to it, it seems like the organization almost exclusively exists to provide a pile of fairly cheap teaching labor that poor school districts dont have to worry about sticking around and sucking up raises and benefits. Now if the organization was committed to getting people who legitimately planned on making a career of it, I could easily see it as being a major positive force, but for now, Im just not seeing it.

 

[downtown]

On what basis can you possibly discern that this was due solely to your own efforts? That it didn't have far more to do with the students which you were assigned, and their previous teachers as well as those who taught them during the other periods that year?

This is one of the real problems with the pervasiveness of standardized testing. It leads to such absurd conclusions.

This is actually not that hard to figure out. Everybody gets tested at the beginning of the year, a process that typically takes about a week. You get an idea at roughly the grade level each student can perform. You evaluate the students twice during the year, and once at the very end of the year, in a similar process. Teachers are not just evaluated on final outcomes, but on value added growth.

I had 22 students, and only one of them tested at the 4th grade level at the start of the year. 13 of my students passed the final state exam, meaning they were certified by the state as being ready for 5th grade. I know my passage rate was a little below average (but still better than our rookie non TFA teachers), but my value-added score was much more solid. The woman who lead our school in both was a TFA teacher in her 2nd year. I think she's still teaching actually.

I taught all subjects to my students. The only other teacher they interacted with was their gym teacher.

I find this insinuation that these supposedly "elite" "high achievers" are far smarter than the typical school teacher to the point where their presumably vastly greater intelligence and motivation somehow makes up for a near complete lack of educational training to be completely reprehensible.

For one, I don't think you can really debate that folks in TFA, and for that matter, I suspect most alt-certification programs, are smarter. They have higher GPAs, higher SAT/ACT scores, do better on the Praxis and other certification exams, come from more rigorous academic backgrounds and are more professionally accomplished than their entry level peers. Typical teacher undergrad programs are drawing from a much less academically prepared pool, and that impact is even more pronounced in the inner city level.

Does that mean that they're totally well prepared for teaching? No. Being an effective teacher is more than just being able to craft a great lesson plan. To be honest, a very smart person could learn to do that very quickly. The pedagogy behind backwards planning a lesson objective and assessing it is something a really smart person can pick up in a month of intense practice and become reasonably competent at it (those 5 weeks, btw, are like 90 hour weeks). But classroom management? Dealing with parents? Classroom organization? That takes times.

As far as evidence as to the effectiveness of TFA teachers, I give you this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...cas-teachers-are-besting-their-peers-on-math/

A vocal minority has long resisted the idea that TFA teachers could be this effective. A 2005 study lead by Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond, who was considered a candidate to become secretary of education when President Obama first took office, found that having an uncertified TFA teacher reduced student progress by between 1/2 month to 3 months. A 2002 study by Georgia State’s Lorene Pilcher and Donald Steele found that regular teachers outperformed first-year TFA teachers via their students’ average reading, English and mathematics test scores.

But most researchers came to the opposite conclusion. In 2008, economists Thomas Kane, Jonah Rackoff, and Douglas Staiger found that TFA teachers in New York City did not differ much in performance from regular teachers, and may even have outperformed their traditionally certified peers on math instruction. A 2001 evaluation by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford found that students of TFA teachers outperformed students of regular teachers across all categories, though the differences were never statistically significant.


More recent studies have backed this up. Evaluations by or done in collaboration with the state governments of Tennessee, Louisiana and North Carolina in recent years have shown positive gains for TFA teachers in at least some categories, as did a follow-up study of New York City by Harvard’s Will Dobbie, who found gains in math but not reading. Most significantly, the consulting group Edvance did an evaluation in Texas released in 2012 with a very large sample of 27,076 students taught by TFA teachers and 320,225 taught by non-TFA teachers. They found no significant impact on reading or elementary school math, but middle school math scores were significantly higher in TFA classrooms.

....

A new evaluation did just that. Claremont McKenna’s Heather Antecol and Serkan Ozbeklik, along with Louisiana State’s Ozkan Eren, set about analyzing data from a trial conducted by TFA and Mathematica Policy Research between 2001 and 2003. The trial randomly assigned 1,900 students to either TFA or regular teachers and then tracked the results. The Mathematica researchers were also careful to check that students didn’t switch between classrooms, which would have negated the random assignment.

The initial Mathematica review of that evaluation found that TFA teachers performed no worse than regular teachers at reading instruction, but significantly better at teaching math. “The impact translates into about 10 percent of a grade equivalent, suggesting that the advantage to TFA students corresponds roughly to an additional month of instruction,” the Mathematica authors concluded.

It isn't a slam dunk, but there have been close to a dozen of these studies over the last decade or so, and the worst impact study said that a TFA teacher could harm development by 3 months, while most have either shown no statistical significant difference, or (more recently), improvement, especially in math. That would make the most sense to me, given that there is a less of a consensus on the best way to teach literacy (and it's more complicated), and the TFA lesson planning structure makes it really easy to isolate and improve math skills.

The debate I think (and this is what most of the OP is talking about really) is less about whether TFA teachers can teach, but if their endorsement of a technocratic political consensus is desirable, and if it doesn't have serious consequences outside of the classroom.

 

[Patroklos]

In the UK, a year in industry is an optional part of your degree. They pair you up with a company and the company is supposed to give you valuable experience that might be useful for the rest of your degree, but more importantly for future employment. It doesn't often do that - they're usually completely useless donkey work, like paperwork and tea making - but the principle is that students, before they graduate, spend a year in industry gaining experience.

That's true but it's a far cry from what you said. I think you meant most STEM programs, not course, offer such opportunities.

In the US most programs have business partnerships for a select few to be accepted into extremely competitive slots of this sort. 90%+ do not do this.

There are of course privately sourced summer internships that a lot of students enter, probably just as many non STEM students as STEM, but these are not part of the course work though you may get some credit if you market it to the admin correctly. It's these internships where the abuses you mention show up more commonly.

Sending students to schools instead of industry seems like a decent way of getting more teaching staff in schools, assuming the economists are right, churn is not a problem, and you can train students to teach during the summer. I.e. if we side with TFA and take what they're saying as true.

Like I said many teachers do go to a few months of teacher assistance gigs during their course work. I don't see it as analogous to most industries because at its core most teachers are solo actors and all I see happening is throwing sheep to the wolves (it's basically like that now with fully qualified teachers). I'd say two teacher classrooms are the way to go but what graduate wants to be a glorified assistant for years of their career and we already have the problem of no real movement inside the educator ranks. High year tenure might be a solution...

 

[Mise]

That's true but it's a far cry from what you said. I think you meant most STEM programs, not course, offer such opportunities.

"Course" and "programme" mean the same thing in the UK. They are used interchangably, with "course" being the much more widely used term. "Programme" isn't really used much to describe degrees. A "programme" is certainly not a "far cry" from "course" (unless "far cry" means something different where you're from, that is).

 

[Formaldehyde]

This is actually not that hard to figure out. Everybody gets tested at the beginning of the year, a process that typically takes about a week. You get an idea at roughly the grade level each student can perform. You evaluate the students twice during the year, and once at the very end of the year, in a similar process. Teachers are not just evaluated on final outcomes, but on value added growth.

What's "not that hard to figure out" is how arbitrary and inaccurate this standardized test process is in reality. How it is actually doing far more harm than good by forcing teachers to dwell on the students taking silly standardized tests instead of teaching what they need to know to be successful in life.

I taught all subjects to my students. The only other teacher they interacted with was their gym teacher.

I didn't realize you taught elementary school-aged kids. I thought you taught in a middle school or a high school.

For one, I don't think you can really debate that folks in TFA, and for that matter, I suspect most alt-certification programs, are smarter. They have higher GPAs, higher SAT/ACT scores, do better on the Praxis and other certification exams, come from more rigorous academic backgrounds and are more professionally accomplished than their entry level peers. Typical teacher undergrad programs are drawing from a much less academically prepared pool, and that impact is even more pronounced in the inner city level.

The ability to take standardized tests better than others hardly makes you "smarter" than them. This is a critical aspect of this ludicrous nonsense which has now infected the public education system in the US. And claiming that you were "professionally accomplished" in teaching, much less anything else, when you graduated from college is beyond absurd. By definition, you had no professional experience or accomplishments at that stage.

Regarding how well some TFA teachers did in the classroom compared to others is concerned, I think it shows how poor the current education curriculum is in colleges if those with hardly any educational training can occasionally function as well as those with 4-year education degrees. It also calls into question frequent criticism of how "soft" education degrees are, and what sorts of people are occasionally attracted as a result.

As far as evidence as to the effectiveness of TFA teachers, I give you this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...cas-teachers-are-besting-their-peers-on-math/

One blog entry is hardly definitive proof, especially after being directly disputed by one the the articles I posted above. You can always cherry pick the results of specific studies instead of overlooking the fact that the actual results have been quite mixed.

The debate I think (and this is what most of the OP is talking about really) is less about whether TFA teachers can teach, but if their endorsement of a technocratic political consensus is desirable, and if it doesn't have serious consequences outside of the classroom.

That is indeed a very important question. Any program which advocates charter schools while providing band-aid solutions in the form of 2-year commitments is deleterious to making public schools as good as they should be. As one if the articles I posted above addresses, the funds for this program could definitely be better spent providing real solutions to the known problems.

 

[downtown]

Like I said many teachers do go to a few months of teacher assistance gigs during their course work. I don't see it as analogous to most industries because at its core most teachers are solo actors and all I see happening is throwing sheep to the wolves (it's basically like that now with fully qualified teachers). I'd say two teacher classrooms are the way to go but what graduate wants to be a glorified assistant for years of their career and we already have the problem of no real movement inside the educator ranks. High year tenure might be a solution...

The two teacher route is something I think makes the most sense, and one that many TFA critics have pushed the program to go (into a 3 year commitment where the entire first year is spent as a teacher assistant). I think if you paid people a decent wage (~35K) to be a JV teacher full time, people wouldn't balk at the gig. I imagine this would lower turnover in the long run, but the initial investment may be hard for an already cash strapped district to make.

What's "not that hard to figure out" is how arbitrary and inaccurate this process actually is in reality. How it is actually doing far more harm than good by forcing teachers to teach students how to take silly standardized tests instead of actually learning what they need to know.

What could possibly be more important to an already academically behind 4th grader than mathematically literacy and the fundamentals of reading comprehension?

The knee-jerk reaction against testing is so stupid, since virtually nobody ever follows up with an alternative. The problem isn't that these tests exist. In order to figure out if a student (or anybody really) learned a particular principle, you have to be able to assess it. The problem is that typical pen and paper, fill in the circle tests do not often adequately reach higher levels of cognitive measurement, OR they are they are given disproportionate weight in making staffing decisions. I think it would be very hard to argue, especially at the 8th grade or under age level, that the content is not relevant.

Only the state-administered end of year test was a fill-in-the-bubble exam. The others that we used to determine grade level ability involved a holistic assessment approach, including multiple interviews. There isn't anything arbitrary about it.

I think it would be fair to argue that the technocratic-consensus for education reform, in an effort to try to measure and analyze instructional data, is pushing too much decision-making emphasis on the wrong kinds of testing. But saying that current testing has no predictive value, or that the content is irrelevant, is ignorant.

I didn't realize you taught elementary school-aged kids. I thought you taught in a middle school or a high school.

Yup. Before I graduated from college, I taught rich high school kids at marching band camps during the summer, but my actual classroom was 4th graders.

The ability to take standardized tests better than others hardly makes you "smarter" than them.

College GPAs are standardized tests now? If we're going to throw out all testing data, what would you suggest? The SAT has some predictive power.

What utter nonsense which is actually part of this ludicrous nonsense which has now infected the public education system in the US. And claiming that you were "professionally accomplished" in teaching, much less anything else, when you graduated from college is beyond absurd.

In teaching, you're right, I wasn't more accomplished or prepared. TFA doesn't really care about that though, their recruitment method is centered around a general record of accomplishment, especially under duress. In that department, yes, I (and just about all of my TFA peers) were more accomplished than a typical 22 year old education major.

One blog entry is hardly definitive proof, especially after being directly disputed by one the the articles I posted above. You can always cherry pick the results of specific studies instead of overlooking the fact that the actual results of any sort of studies have been quite mixed.

It wasn't just one blog post, it mentioned like, 7 different peer reviewed studies over the last year. Can you find an actual study, other than the Darling-Hammond one, that shows that TFA causes educational harm, or lags behind other rookies?

That is indeed a very important question, and one which I think casts doubt on the opinions of anybody who participated in this silly program when discussing it. If anything it shows how poor the current education curriculum is in colleges if essentially rank amateurs with hardly any training can occasionally function as well as those with 4-year education degrees.

I'm bolding the important part here. A really key part of this entire debate is that traditional undergraduate teaching education is TERRIBLE. It does not have any predictive power for teaching success, it isn't selective, and it doesn't attract a high caliber of student. The fact that somebody like me can sit down with almost no classroom experience, ace a state certification exam, and produce results that are *at least comparable* to somebody who went through the traditional method says less about me, and more about how much the traditional method sucks.

 

[Lord Baal]

Does that mean that they're totally well prepared for teaching? No. Being an effective teacher is more than just being able to craft a great lesson plan. To be honest, a very smart person could learn to do that very quickly. The pedagogy behind backwards planning a lesson objective and assessing it is something a really smart person can pick up in a month of intense practice and become reasonably competent at it (those 5 weeks, btw, are like 90 hour weeks). But classroom management? Dealing with parents? Classroom organization? That takes times.

I've seen this first-hand, given my job. The few occasions I've designed my own lesson plans they've been promptly stolen by every teacher I've shown them to. But put me in a classroom and ask me to teach and I'll be locking kids in cupboards just to get some peace.

 

[nc-1701]

I majored in math at a relatively small Public University, the vast majority of the other math majors were math education majors. I've picked up a lot of whats going on with math ed from them, several of my friends are now teaching in highschools. I'm in grad school as teaching is not for me at all. Also note everything I say is in relation to highschool since I have no real knowledge of what's going on with primary school education.

The biggest thing to see immediately is that the education majors were significantly less motivated and less capable than the pure math majors at my school. I think this is a very bad thing, but may be difficult to fix.
Also it appeared to me that much of the their education coursework was pointless, they spent huge amounts of time making hundreds of pages of lesson plans to exacting standards etc. Which they generally agreed was not helpful.
As a grad student at a major public university I'm expected to TA and starting this fall teach college level classes (Precalculus and Calculus) this is with absolutely no background or knowledge other than content. When TAing I was literally told to do recitations and given zero instructions. When teaching I'll have a detailed syllabus and a mentor that watches over everyone who is teaching, but again no real preparation.
Also a Scientific American article I read not long ago cited studies that said that there is no evidence that experienced teachers are any better than teachers with just a few years of experience (complete newbies did do worse), that one of the best indicators of teacher success was their SAT scores as high school students, and finally that degrees (especially graduate degrees) in education did not correlate with being better teachers at all.

Based on these things I think the Conventional Wisdom about teaching is totally wrong. We need smart, motivated teachers, not the ones we have now who in most cases are only teachers because they couldn't cut it in their chosen degree programs (this was very prevalent in my school). Teach for America seems to be doing that, which is good for education, if bad for Unions and "Social Justice".

TFA might not be the solution, but it seems a lot closer than the nonsense espoused by the teaching establishment. "Education" as a discipline independent of what is being taught does more harm than good imo, remember no University Professor took classes on how to teach, just on content.


I will note however we do need to dramatically increase teacher salaries so that it is a competitive option for good students. As it is there is no reason any capable student in STEM would ever go into education.

 

[Zelig]

Also a Scientific American article I read not long ago cited studies that said that there is no evidence that experienced teachers are any better than teachers with just a few years of experience (complete newbies did do worse), that one of the best indicators of teacher success was their SAT scores as high school students, and finally that degrees (especially graduate degrees) in education did not correlate with being better teachers at all.

This is the case in a lot of fields though. Once you get past the initial learning phase, intelligence and aptitude is pretty much always undervalued relative to experience.

 

[Nobody]

Charlie had this idea on the west wing once, college graduates would teach for a while and get some of there loans paid off.

 

[Winston Hughes]

I've seen this first-hand, given my job. The few occasions I've designed my own lesson plans they've been promptly stolen by every teacher I've shown them to. But put me in a classroom and ask me to teach and I'll be locking kids in cupboards just to get some peace.

I'm the opposite. I'd hardly know where to start in planning a lesson (other than robbing it wholesale from someone else), but I don't have too many problems keeping most classes in good order, including ones I've heard experienced teachers describe as 'impossible'.

From what I've seen, far too many teachers are unwilling to admit that their own mistakes might be responsible for the difficulties they face in maintaining order in the classroom, becoming more and more defensive in their interactions with those children they regard as 'bad' (which, in some cases, can end up being all of them), rather than seeking to improve their own practice. Asking for help or advice shouldn't be something that anybody who works with kids is afraid to do, but I've seen numerous cases of teachers being too proud to do so even when the help on offer is something they desperately need.

There is, I think, a certain culture in parts of the profession (and amongst people who want to be supportive of public servants in general) which regards virtually all teachers as being dedicated and selfless to the point of martyrdom. Not only is this a false picture, which arouses cynicism in a broader population that knows from experience that plenty of teachers are rather less than saintly, but I think it also encourages a deeply-counterproductive sense of victimhood amongst those teachers whose difficulties are, to a great extent, self-inflicted.

(I could go on to talk about lesson planning and long hours here, but, suffice to say, it is clear from what I've seen that a well-rested, unstressed teacher with a half-arsed lesson plan will always beat a tired, stressed teacher, no matter how much planning the latter has put in.)

 

[Formaldehyde]

What could possibly be more important to an already academically behind 4th grader than mathematically literacy and the fundamentals of reading comprehension?

"What could possibly be more important" than an obvious strawman? Please point out where I stated or insinuated anything of the sort.

The knee-jerk reaction against testing is so stupid, since virtually nobody ever follows up with an alternative.

This one is even worse! I didn't say I was "against testing". But what we now have is literally a joke. Even you have admitted in other threads that the system is hopelessly broken because teachers now teach how to take the standardized tests instead of actually teaching the subject matter.

I think it would be fair to argue that the technocratic-consensus for education reform, in an effort to try to measure and analyze instructional data, is pushing too much decision-making emphasis on the wrong kinds of testing.

Well, duh. And it is exactly those sorts of tests that supposedly claimed that you were slightly superior to other newbie teachers.

But saying that current testing has no predictive value, or that the content is irrelevant, is ignorant.

I think I have already conclusively shown what is "ignorant" here. No college accepts students solely on the basis of SAT scores. It is only part of the admission criteria. Florida is a classic example of how hopelessly broken the current standardized testing system actually is. The public school system has literally become a standardized testing nightmare:

Washington Post: How standardized tests are affecting public schools

Florida’s standardized testing program is being misused and has “severely impacted student learning,” according to a new white paper that says that school districts in the state are required to give as many as 62 tests a year to students.

The white paper, called “The Ramifications of Standardized Testing on our Public Schools,” was just released by the Central Florida School Board Coalition, a group of top officials from 10 school districts.

While the specifics are about Florida, the general conclusions about the negative impact of state standardized programs are relevant across the country — not only because other states have their own version but because some looked to Florida as a model as they developed their own school accountability systems.

The white paper that follows is long but worth your time. It points out in great detail the negative effects on students and teachers of Florida’s testing program, and shows convincingly that the testing program is being used in ways that it was never intended.

Here’s the white paper. Read it.

The testing, preparation, and response to the outcomes of these tests, lead up to large costs to the whole system. Whether these costs be fiscal, in personnel changes and losses, reduced school services, facility/environment losses, decision postponements, or most importantly, losses in actual classroom instructional time, the system incurs too many to not be harmful to the whole.

Ultimately, reading comprehension and mastery of standards are not assessed, for the ability of one to interpret the intentions of test-writers are assessed

In teaching, you're right, I wasn't more accomplished or prepared. TFA doesn't really care about that though, their recruitment method is centered around a general record of accomplishment, especially under duress. In that department, yes, I (and just about all of my TFA peers) were more accomplished than a typical 22 year old education major.

But the solution obviously isn't to continue to get unqualified college grads to teach for two years and then leave. It isn't to literally try to destroy the public school system through charter schools and the destruction of unions. This is nothing but a devious propaganda effort by right-wing corporate America to accomplish their own political agenda, and you were a willing part of it.

It wasn't just one blog post, it mentioned like, 7 different peer reviewed studies over the last year. Can you find an actual study, other than the Darling-Hammond one, that shows that TFA causes educational harm, or lags behind other rookies?

Again, that is not even close to what I stated. I said the results were mixed.

1. We’re inexperienced, ineffective educators.

Inexperienced? Yes. Ineffective? Too often. When I accepted the offer to join the corps, Teach for America inundated me with materials and videos that showed its teachers as miracle workers. I drank the Kool-Aid, honestly shocked during my summer institute training to see data that showed not all corps members were making significant gains with their students. I wish I had links to studies that clearly showed corps members’ effectiveness. While a smattering of research does exist, corps members are not conclusively more effective than other teachers. Teach for America’s rigorous recruitment and training process is about as effective as it could possibly be—there is only so much progress that can be made in five weeks of preparation and the occasional follow-up visit.

I'm bolding the important part here. A really key part of this entire debate is that traditional undergraduate teaching education is TERRIBLE.

It does not have any predictive power for teaching success, it isn't selective, and it doesn't attract a high caliber of student. The fact that somebody like me can sit down with almost no classroom experience, ace a state certification exam, and produce results that are *at least comparable* to somebody who went through the traditional method says less about me, and more about how much the traditional method sucks.

Indeed. And didn't I just state the same thing?

What I clearly object to here is a deliberate attempt to literally destroy the public education system in this country and to privatize it. Even far more competent and motivated teachers still need a union. This is clearly a band-aid solution that was intentionally designed to accomplish the same goals that those who continue to try to turn the public education system into a 12-year exercise to teach how to take the standardized tests.

The public education system in this country clearly needs reform. Education is traditionally one of the softest fields of study in college. While it does attract some quite intelligent and motivated individuals, it also attracts those who are just the opposite as you clearly admit.

 

[downtown]

Another major study from the US Department of ED just came out, and like most of the other recent literature on the subject, confirms that TFA teachers *are* in fact, more effective, on the balance. This is probably the most rigorous study done on the effectiveness of the program yet.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...a-is-a-deeply-divisive-program-it-also-works/

The data indicates that TFA teachers do a better job at teaching high school math *than even experienced* teachers, and to say nothing of fellow rookies. Other prestigious alt-cert programs did better than other inexperienced teachers, but worse than experienced teachers.

The question now appears to be: "is it worth it?" rather than, "does it work?"