Steven Singer considers the trajectory of Teach for America and concludes that it failed. Enrollment in the program is down. No one believes any more that TFA newcomers are “better” than experienced teachers. What’s the point of hiring a newby instead of someone who wants to make teaching their career?
Steven Singer writes:
Teach for America (TFA) was a solution to a problem it helped create.
Educators have been leaving the profession for decades due to poor salary, poor working conditions, heavy expectations and lack of tools or respect.
So Wendy Kopp, when in Princeton, created a program to fast track non-education majors into the classroom where they would teach for a few years and then enter the private sector as “experts” to drive public policy.
These college graduates would take a five week crash course in education and commit to at least two years in the classroom thereby filling any vacant teaching positions.
Surprise! It didn’t work.
In fact, it made things worse. Apparently deprofessionalizing education isn’t an incentive to dive into the field.
That isn’t to say everyone who went through the program became a bad teacher. But the few good and committed educators that did come through the program could have done so even more successfully by graduating with a degree in education.
Now the organization created in 1990 is expecting its lowest enrollment in 15 years. TFA anticipates placing slightly less than 2,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall. That’s two-thirds of the number of first-year teachers TFA placed in schools in fall 2019, and just one-third of the number it sent into the field at its height in 2013.
Apparently fewer people than ever don’t want to train for four to five years to become lifelong teachers – and neither do they want to be lightly trained for a few years as TFA recruits, either – even if that means they can pass themselves off as education experts afterwards and get high paying policy positions at think tanks and government.
On the one hand, this is good news.
Watering down what it means to be a teacher is even less popular than actually being an educator.
On the other hand, we have a major crisis that few people are prepared to handle.
The US is losing teachers at an alarming rate.
After decades of neglect only made worse by the Covid-19 pandemic, we’re missing almost a million teachers.
Nationwide, we only have about 3.2 million teachers left!
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 567,000 fewer educators in our public schools today than there were before the pandemic. And that’s on top of already losing 250,000 school employees during the recession of 2008-09 most of whom were never replaced. All while enrollment increased by 800,000 students.
Meanwhile, finding replacements has been difficult. Across the country, an average of one educator is hired for every two jobs available.
Not only are teachers paid 20% less than other college-educated workers with similar experience, but a 2020 survey found that 67% of teachers have or had a second job to make ends meet.
It’s no wonder then that few college students want to enter the profession.
Over the past decade, there’s been a major decline in enrollment in bachelor’s degree programs in education.
Beginning in 2011, enrollment in such programs and new education certifications in Pennsylvania — my home state— started to decline. Today, only about a third as many students are enrolled in teacher prep programs in the Commonwealth as there were 10 years ago. And state records show new certifications are down by two-thirds over that period.
To put that more concretely, a decade ago roughly 20,000 new teachers entered the workforce each year in the Commonwealth, while last year only 6,000 did so, according to the state Department of Education (PDE).
But don’t look to most of the so-called experts to solve the problem. A great deal of them are former TFA recruits!
Through programs like TFA’s Capitol Hill Fellows Program, alumni are placed in full-time, paid staff positions with legislators so they can “gain insights into the legislative process by working in a Congressional office” and work “on projects that impact education and opportunities for youth.”
Why do so many lawmakers hire them? Because they don’t cost anything.
Their salaries are paid in full by TFA through a fund established by Arthur Rock, a California tech billionaire who hands the organization bags of cash to pay these educational aides’ salaries. From 2006 to 2008, alone, Rock – who also sits on TFA’s board – contributed $16.5 million for this purpose.
This isn’t about helping lawmakers understand the issues. It’s about framing the issues to meet the policy initiatives of the elite and wealthy donors.
It’s about selling school privatization, high stakes testing and ed-tech solutions.
Please open the link and keep reading.
THIS:
Don’t look to most of the
so-called experts to solve
the problem.
Most of the shit over the
dam came about under the
watch of the “experts”.
If they were all that
then, why didn’t they
stop the shit?
NOW they act like
a coach, empowered to
undo what they couldn’t
undo before.
Blather, wince, rebleat…
“[Teach for] America” (with apologies to Simon and Garfunkel)
“Let us be teachers, we’re twenty and white and so saviors.”
“We’ll make up some lesson plans based on TikToks.”
So we bought a case of PBR and Mrs. Wagner’s edibles,
and went off to Teach for America.
“Kathy,” I said as we sat in the TFA training.
“High school seems like a dream to me now.”
It took just two weeks to learn all we need to know,
we proud recruits of Teach for America.
[Six months later:]
“Kathy, I’m sick,” I said, though I knew she was splitsville.
I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.
I’m headed up the New Jersey Turnpike.
Where I’ll proudly say, “I taught for America.
Before this real job,
I taught for America.”
cx: five weeks
TFA is simply another grift for the 1%. Most of the motivation to participate is to set up the resume for professional networks. A naive graduate student starts this program thinking she might save the world while the parasitic privatizers around her see the benefits for another pyramid scheme. TFA may be losing it’s participants, but regretfully it served its purpose. Wendy Kopp turned out to be no more than a willing cog in the machine.
TFA has failed to transform American education. Their teaching initiative has been shown to be largely exploitative to both teachers and students. Fewer young people are willing to subject themselves to TFA’s regimented, inadequate training, and fewer districts want these non-professional, non-career teachers on their campuses. TFA now remains largely a lobbying organization with a goal to promote more anti-democratic privatization. It remains funded by billionaire and corporate interests that pay TFA to lobby for more privatization in education and keep public funds flowing into private pockets.
I believe the education problem is very fixable but there is a vacuum within educational leadership willing to make the changes necessary to make the improvements. Charter schools, TFA, voucher programs, and book publishers all feed off taxpayer education funds. Change is gradual and involves patience. There is no quick fix. Although TFA thinks teachers could be ready in 90 days my experience revealed about 5 years to become an effective and efficient classroom teacher. We train principals to lead schools but their Achilles heel is not managing an improvement process but neglecting the financial responsibility to maintain the process.
“I solved the education problem on my first day in office.”
–George Bush, Jr.
yeah, the same guy with the “Mission Accomplished” sign
The greatest threat to our future is that few in government act as a check on corporate power. Most politicians are fully immersed in service as a venue to wealth. Until the public realizes this and starts to elect representatives who see a value in government, public education will continue to decline. Right now an entire party believes government is a hinderance and the other party is too busy playing nice.
Vivek Ramaswamy wants to eliminate the FBI, the IRS, and as many federal functions as possible. He’s very rich and lacks any sense of social responsibility
Like Elon Musk and so many other ultra wealthy individuals in the US, Ramaswamy believes that everything he has he attained purely through his own talent and efforts.
He doesn’t acknowledge that the society he lives in played any role whatsoever in his success.
These folks are not simply pompous asses but they are actually delusional.
I have met some of the most arrogant, thoughtless people who are/were TFAers, who thought they were saviors. OY!
I totally agree. As you have identified, you can’t be arrogant and thoughtless at anytime especially when dealing with children.
I develop more as a professional by reading the comments of retired educators here on this blog than I do in the hour a week I endure of professional development meetings put on by school officials with less teaching experience than I have. I have an idea. Hire back retired teachers part time to lead professional development. Do it before generations of evolved teaching knowledge disappears, buried under a mountain of experimental apps and meaningless test prep. What we’re doing now is like replacing libraries with ChatGPT.
This is Bill Gates’s next big idea for education. God help us.
When Gates $neeze$, all public schools catch the cold.
It’s been that way for a long, long time. And the fool has no idea, none whatsoever, how much damage he has done.
Bob, you’ve made all the salient points. Honestly, there exist enough ideas at the teacher level to solve the problems.
Great idea! I returned after being retired for 7 years. Along those same lines, why not offer retired teachers contracts to teach one or two periods of a subject instead of having them carry a full class load? I am certain the district’s benefit and the retiree could also serve as a mentor if necessary. I attempted but no one was hearing.
Districts and school-level administrators these days are not interested in teachers with experience and knowledge. It’s all about power for them. They want compliant newbies whom they can order around. Do this test prep. Don’t ask questions. It’s really freaking sad.
It takes YEARS to become a decent teacher. Literally decades to become a master teacher. But all of that acquired ability and knowledge is not respected anymore. Things have really, really changed from when I first entered the profession. In those days, teachers actually had authority, and elder teachers were respected for their knowledge. No more.
If they were interested, then they would jump at the chance. OMG. I can have this incredibly experienced and knowledgeable person come in and mentor. Wow.
In a better world, . . .
I returned to teaching after 30 years in the textbook publishing industry at very high levels. Every English teacher (and speech teacher) in the country, just about, has used a bunch of the textbooks that I planned, wrote, or edited. I have literally spent a lifetime studying the teaching of English assiduously. When I took my last teaching job, I took in and showed the principal a stack of my books, from major educational publishing houses, on writing, grammar, literature, speech, the research paper, journalism, etc. She was impressed. The AP, however, who had taught for two years, made it her business to micromanage me–to tell me what to do about everything–as did the “reading coordinator” who thought that The Odyssey was a novel. Both were in their late twenties. NO SENSE of our relative expertise. It was like having Matt Gaetz consulting on quantum mechanics.
George Lyman Kittridge was one of the great scholars of the early twentieth century, known for his masterful edition of the works of Shakespeare, for his Shakespeare scholarship, and for his scholarship on medieval literature and balladry. He never got a PhD. A very great professor of English at Indiana University, Donald Grey, told me this story: Once, Kittridge came to Indiana to give some lectures, and one of the professors there suggested that he should sit for the PhD exam because ofc he would fly right through it, to which Kittridge replied, “Which of YOU is going to examine ME?”
That’s what I thought every time this AP sat in my classroom doing an evaluation. It was like asking Donald Trump–the guy who thought that Denmark would sell Greenland to us and that stealth airplanes were actually invisible and had no idea what the nuclear triad is–to sit on a dissertation committee for PhD candidates in Political Science.
Come out of retirement and teach. For America.
Fat chance. A person would have to be crazy to teach, today, in Florida.
Fat chance…
Show ’em the
teacher prerogative card.
Mission Accomplished!
Mission Accomplished
Send in computers
Teachers are vanquished
Bots are our suitors
Contracts were written
For software and hard-
Teachers were bitten
By Gates and his guard
A person would have to be crazy to
teachlive, today, in Florida.Fixed.
When GPT takes over”
When GPT’s a teacher
And GPTs physician
And GPT’s a preacher
And every DAM position
Then GPT’s displacing
The former human role
And humans are forsaking
The essence of their soul
TFA is not gone. I am still trying to figure out what this Ed.Xtraordinary (powered by TFA) is.
Suzanne,
Just look at the members of the TFA board. They think they are doing a great public service. Not.