Emma Lind is in her fourth year of teaching. She entered teaching through Teach for America and started teaching in the Mississippi Delta. She now teaches in an inner-city school in Brooklyn.
In this article, she warns Harvard seniors not to apply. She discovered the job of teaching is much harder than her TFA recruiters described.
Emma is one of the few TFA who stayed in teaching more than three years. She came to realize that she and other TFA teachers were not producing dramatic change. Students need teachers who stay in it for the long haul.
Her advice:
“There is some limited statistical evidence that TFA can be at least marginally impactful. But so few TFA teachers stay in the classroom beyond three years (more than 50 percent leave after two years and more than 80 percent leave after three), that the potential positive impact of TFA is rarely felt by the people who matter most—the students. In short, TFA may be pumping alumni who “understand” the achievement gap firsthand into various professions and fields outside of direct instruction, but it is doing so at the academic expense of the highest-risk kids who have the greatest need for effective teachers
“If you feel inspired to teach, I beg you: teach! There are young people who need “lifers” committed to powering through the inevitable first three years of being terrible at teaching sinusoidal curves to hormonal 17 year-olds. I encourage you to pursue an alternative route to licensure and placement: one that encourages and actively supports longevity in the classroom and does not facilitate teacher turnover by encouraging its alumni to move into policy or other professions. If you feel compelled to Teach For America instead of teaching for America, please preference a region that has demonstrated a high need for novice teachers due to verifiable teacher shortages. And then stay in the classroom. For a long time. Feel at home teaching, and feel even more at home learning how to get better. Sit. Stay a while. Then stand and deliver.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo, Emma! Thank you!
Emma, Please read my stuff on TFA. ( http://dcgmentor.com) I worked with corps members while a field specialist at Fordham and have talked about the ISSUE both at the 2011 SOS Conference at American University and OCCUPY DOE 1 last April. I would love to chat as I am still working with NYC schools, but with another 501c3 that really does care about students’ passions.
How refreshing! You discuss your committment the way ‘lifers’ talk about teaching. Be careful, it will sneak up on you and one day you look back on 30+ years in a wonderful profession. I can relate. The rate of seasoned teachers leaving teaching due to retirement, quitting or being forced out, we are facing a crisis of losing a huge knowledge base necessary to support new teachers and providing a balance of maturity, experience, knowledge and vision. As you well know, not everyone can teach. Although, we hear it all the time.
Carry on and continue to love what you do. Kids are always worth it.
Yet…the TFA cheerleaders have come out if the woodwork to promote 12 year-old “studies” sponsored by conservative think tanks showing “statistics” that seem to refute her claims.
The problem with “studies” such as those promoted by the TFA cheer squad is they are narrow in their scope. Anyone can prove a point using invalid criteria of success such as “student achievement in math and reading” as if testing those subjects are the only way to measure achievement. Any monkey can force children to regurgitate anything if they spend countless extra hours drilling it into their heads. TFA is not promoting teaching as a long-term and practical career–it’s promoting the devotion of countless personal hours to force children to be able to perform like circus animals on tests that measure a specific kind of skill and a narrow curricular knowledge base. No wonder so many TFAers leave when they satisfy their service requirements. They have no lives outside of the daily grind while they’re trying to “save” children from their own “apparent” ignorance.
While I do not doubt that there are many TFAers with their hearts in the right place, I doubt the effectiveness of a training program that recruits people with the incentive that they can get out of the program after their trial requisite years have passed.
When will we see a DFA (Doctor For America) program? Perhaps that one will take 15 months of training, and the young DFAers can get out after they’ve successfully created healthy patients out of the unhealthiest ones in the few years they are required to doctor–or they can take chief medical positions at hospitals and medical facilities since they will be such experts in the field.
LG: Pearls of wisdom, (and you know what they say about where one must not cast them…brings to mind some “reformers” spouting poppy cock). You address reality, not TFA hype. “In the trenches” would not be too harsh a statement of where many of these well meaning, but innocents end up. Teaching is not what is portrayed in so many of the Hollywood fairy tales of “dedicated” YOUNG ones who have a passion for the classroom and that ALONE makes them turn,near or actual juvenile delinquents into Shakespeare spouting geniuses! I’m sure many of the TFAers have these fantasies dancing in their heads when they hit the classroom door…I hear of their tear filled days
from far too many fellow teachers who console these victims of a system that basically sees them as a K Mart, blue light special: pay ’em peanuts, forget benefits and grind them into the ground with demands that, as you so aptly put it, leave them little to no
life. I know of what I speak as far as administrations view them because they
literally salivate about the “deal” that TFAers are. Your comparison with prep time before these starry eyed ones enter the fray and the sense of doing the same thing with doctors is so apropos! The reason that the public buys this farce at all is the premise that TFA is based on: 5 weeks of prep time and one new teacher is ready to hit the blackboard. The genesis of this illogical theory is because of the low regard the public holds teachers in; ANYONE CAN TEACH! Not so with secretaries, plumbers, even checkers at Sears, but teaching is simple, who needs
degrees?
My advice to well meaning people who are considering the TFA option would be to volunteer in a hard to serve school. See what the whole deal is before you affix your
signature to a term of what well may be a disheartening ordeal.
I went through an “alternative” teacher licensing program myself… It consisted of saving my money, quitting my corporate job, and doing what is actually required to become a professional teacher. It was not easy, there were no shortcuts, and it required sacrifices.
I admire this woman for encouraging people to become teachers only if they’re truly interested in teaching, but why not major in education during one’s undergraduate years to begin with if one wants to become a teacher? Or if one finds him or herself at the end of a senior year and wanting to teach, how about going back to complete a double major?
If you want to be a teacher (or go into any other profession for that matter), do what’s required instead of trying to circumvent the process, and make a real commitment to the profession. No excuses!
My licensing story is the same as yours, Joe and my sentiments are yours, exactly. Well put!
Well, well put!
Reblogged this on Dhasty01's Blog and commented:
This is a shame but I’m so glad that the practices of the products of a well known teacher alternative program are brought to light.
Thanks Diane!