This professor urges her colleagues not to write letters of recommendation for TFA. In this post, she explains why.
Ironically, she is a TFA alum, yet she thinks that TFA has become part of the neoliberal attack on the public sector.
She writes to her colleagues in higher education:
“I encourage each of you to stand with me in refusing to write letters of recommendation for students who are applying to TFA. With this collective action, we can begin to undo some of the damage on the millions of children whose lives are harmed not only by the never-ending cycle of first- and second-year teachers that now populates disadvantaged schools, but also by the militarized, corporate, and data-obsessed approach to education that this army of under-trained, inexperienced teachers enables. Equally importantly, we can communicate to our college students how they will be negatively impacted and possibly even psychologically damaged by this system. Our collective action might eventually cause TFA to have to rethink its insistence that an army of naive and un-trained recent college graduates can form the solution to education inequities in this country.”
There is much, much more about how these idealistic young people are used and misled. Read it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Great post which goes right to the heart of the situation. Stop it before it starts. This saves energy for other fights. Why promote a failed operation without any ethics whatsoever anymore. In the beginning when there were not enough teachers, very long ago, my friend was one of the first trainer teachers. It was a good thing at the time and then the, as usual, big money got an opportunity and since they have no morals or ethics and money is everything to them they sold to the devil for some silver not even gold, just like Judas.
In Arizona, we have an excellent program called “Teach Arizona,” which is a one-year masters’ level program for those interested in becoming teachers. Applicants must have a bachelor’s in a specific field of study (not education) and they spend a year shadowing a teacher while also taking ed classes at the University. During the second semester, they will teach two of the teacher’s classes, developing a syllabus, lesson plans, etc. The student teachers I’ve mentored through this program have become splendid teachers, and did not have the first-year jitters we often see in the breed.
What an excellent post!
She should ignore the naysayers. Anyone who promotes subjecting our neediest students to minimally trained, inexperienced “teachers,” let alone in boot camps for poor children of color, needs to grow a conscience.
I do not write letters of recommendation for students when I think they are unqualified for the position or when they will be engaging in activities that I believe are harmful to others, which includes TFA and jobs at no-excuses schools. I would be thrilled if more professors did the same.
This is a great idea. What can we do to make it the policy of departments not to write letters of recommendation for TFA and to decline on-campus recruiting by TFA? Also, Diane’s book needs to be on syllabi, and not just in colleges of education.
Next, can professors all stop writing letters of recommendation for graduate school in education, since that does even less good than TFA (funny how this “army of under-trained, inexperienced teachers” keeps outdoing comparison teachers in study after study)?
Or can we agree that it is disturbingly patronizing for professors to take it upon themselves to deny a student access to the job that the student wants?
Study after study! The studies Wendy posts? Selective reading much?
Ok. You have made a fair point. However, speaking as someone who was at least intrigued by doing TFA at one point…I certainly would have benefitted from a trusted professor offering me a more critical perspective on it. From my vantage point now, I can see that TFA preys on the good intentions of idealistic grads like I was at one time. As a (real) adult now, however, I see that the story is more complicated and that I would have lasted no longer than the median number of years for TFA alumni. I value professional autonomy too much and so I went seeking a career path that would offer that.
Perhaps the answer is to write sample syllabi featuring Reign of Error.
What story is not more complicated than perceived by college seniors?
TE,
True. But I liked what the blogger said about her role. She teaches American Studies so, presumably, she helps educate young minds about the history of the US labor movement, about institutional racism and things like that. She is viewed by her students as a progressive and someone who knows something about social justice. TFA effectively targets idealistic young men and women with BAs in political science, women’s studies, american studies, and art history (to name a few). These are good students from fine universities who may not know what they want to do other than being in a field that “gives back.” She feels, and I agree with her, that it would be a dereliction of her duty to stay silent on this organization precisely because these students are looking to her for insight and guidance on social justice issues. Presumably she wouldn’t completely block a determined student who listened but then disagreed with her but I think her whole point is that the conversation needs to be had. She never got it because she was in one of the first TFA cohorts but now that the program has been around for a long time and there is a scholarly literature about it, why shouldn’t these concerns be out in the open? If she, as a TFA alumna and an American studies scholar doesn’t do it, who will?
As an atheist and firm believer in an individual’s right to control their own bodies, I might easily think that catholic colleges and universities (among many other religiously affiliated institutions) are perpetuating great social injustices. Should I refuse to write a recommendation for any student wishing to attend or work for a catholic college or university and, in the words of the original post, “urge my colleagues not to write letters of recommendation” for these schools as well? If I were successful in my efforts, I might be able to prevent any student from my institution ever attending or working for these schools.
This would seem to be a dangerous road to be heading down.
TE, she is an alumna of TFA. That makes this different from just any old place she doesn’t like. I see your point but not everything is a slippery slope. If she is not going to take a stand then who will? Not being TFA alumni myself, I would probably not take such a bold and public stance. On the other hand, I would counsel my students on this decision just like I would with any other life decision. I agree with her implicit point that faculty members are overlooking the influence they hold in the TFA pipeline.
I think that counseling students about choices and leading a boycot of faculty in order to prevent students from making a choice are different things.
Please post links to these studies showing the amazing efficacy of TFAers.
Thank you
“…studies indicate that the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers.”
Click to access PB-TeachAmerica-Heilig.pdf
TFA: a review of the evidence:
Click to access PB-TeachAmerica-Heilig.pdf
A good review of all the studies is here: teachforamerica.org/sites/default/files/what_the_research_says_0.pdf
The only two randomized evaluations are:
1. Recent study of secondary math teachers (TFA is better): ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20134015/pdf/20134015.pdf
2. 2004 study of TFA generally (TFA teachers better than the entire group of control teachers in math but the same in reading): http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/teach.pdf
There are half a dozen other studies that also show TFA to be at least as good or better than other teachers, but TFA’s own website (correctly) says those studies are of lower quality.
In any event, if TFA’s training is so palpably inadequate, there shouldn’t be 6 or 8 studies showing TFA to be slightly better than regular teachers, with 1 or 2 coming to the opposite conclusion. The literature should be overwhelming and conclusively negative, which is most certainly not the case.
So again, if TFA training is so bad, why are all the other teachers, at best, barely able to keep ahead of TFA (if not falling behind)?
I often write recommendation letters for students. Which organizations should be on the banned list? Should I announce that list before students take my class so that they can transfer to another economics instructor who has a border list?
I respect my students and respect their right to make what I might think to be good or bad decisions. If they have worked hard and learned well, they earn my respect and I write a strong recommendation without judging their ambitions.
Writing references letters for students is not a job requirement, it’s a personal decision. Students may choose to do whatever they want with their lives. Professors are under no obligation to provide their names in support of anything they believe to be unethical.
That is true. Not long ago a biology professor got into a bit of hot water for requiring any student who asked for a recommendation to sign a statement that the student believed in the process of evolution by natural selection. It seems to me that this is a reasonable requirement as it speaks to the student’s understanding of science, which, of course, is what a recommendation is all about.
On the other hand, refusing to write a recommendation for a student based not on the student’s understanding of science but the faculty members evaluation of the worthiness of the position seems like a very different matter to me. At best I would argue that the faculty member should post a list of objectionable organizations that the faculty member would not be willing to write a recommendation for any student. Wouldn’t you agree that we would owe our students this curtesy if we were unwilling to write a recommendation for a student that wished to be hired on a democratic senators staff or a student that wished to work for a labor union?
No one is obligated to write letters of recommendation nor explain when and why they will and won’t do so. That’s an ethical position that I take, as well as an academic freedom that I claim, even though I have no union or tenure to protect me from doing so if that rubs others the wrong way, because I have to be able to live with myself.
If you actually read the article, you would note that she’s not entirely opposed to TFA. She simply won’t write recommendations for students who aren’t education majors – they’re not qualified for the position. Do you write recommendations for students you feel are unqualified for the position they seek?
My comment was more of a reaction to the other commentators than to the original post. As you can see, CT argues that a faculty member is never obligated to write a letter supporting a student’s application to any institution, no matter the student’s qualifications.
As a practical matter I hesitate to substitute my judgement for who is qualified and who is not. I am in the middle of writing some letters for Ph.D. students who are going out on the market. Some of them may well apply for jobs that I believe they are not qualified to for (perhaps the students are not really writing in the field the advertisement specifies, for example), but I trust that the search committee at each institution has a better understanding of which candidates are qualified for a position and which candidates are not qualified than I have.
I reserve the right to proffer letters of recommendation at my discretion. I am very discerning and I do not write them without a lot of deliberation.
Three letters of reference are required by my state for a teaching job in my field, so I’ve gotten many requests for them over the decades and I have written a lot of letters. However, years ago, a state official who read the recommendation letters told me he thought that requirement was silly because it’s too easy for people to obtain three reference letters. I think he was right.
As a school administrator at the time, those letters carried a lot of weight in hiring where I worked, so I was very careful about checking into the recommendation letters I received for job applicants. I discovered that what people wrote in their reference letters was not always consistent with what they said in follow-up phone interviews.
What I generally tell people when they ask me for letters is that I don’t give them out for everyone and that I’d like time to think about it. Then I give it a lot of forethought. Since I know what kinds of questions are asked in those follow-up phone interviews, if I have misgivings or feel like I would not be able to provide positive support to what I say in writing in a follow-up interview, I won’t agree to write a recommendation letter.
Here’s the future of English education as it is being designed by the Gates Foundation and its teachers’ union collaborators:
Hello, I am Literacy Design Collaborative English teacher model number CCSS.ELA.3679J.rev 2. Pull my string to begin the lesson.
And yes, you can get a pimply TFA grad to do this. In fact, what you DON’T want for this is anyone who will think for himself or herself. You need a tabula rosa. The same inclination led Pol Pot to want to murder everyone in his country over the age of 12 because those older folks couldn’t be programmed to be the perfect vehicle for implementation of the state program.
We have whole schools now where English teachers are doing nothing but performing the LDC scripts–scripted CCSS.ELA lessons. And our teachers’ unions are helping to create this. That’s their vision for their members–to turn them into devices for the readout of programs.
Who would have thought that the worst enemy of teachers would turn out to be their own unions?
As long as the public school systems choose the schools and classrooms that students attend there will be a huge incentive to make sure that it does not matter if Julia is assigned to teacher A in school B or teach K in school L. If the assignments begin to matter, the parents will revolt and demand the end to arbitrarily assigning students to schools and classes.
Forever lobbying for school choice AND classroom choice AND teacher choice, regardless of whether that’s the subject of the post… “And so it goes.”
My argument is that school choice is inextricably wound together with the sort of meaningful building and teacher level freedom of teachers to choose what and how to teach. If you have an argument that parents would be perfectly happy to have a school board decide which school to send their students to when each school follows very different approaches to education I would be very interested in reading it.
I have no interest in getting suckered into another one of your diatribes about the lack of school/class/teacher choice.
CT,
My comment was actually directed at Robert Shepherd and his position that individual schools should be given wide latitude to determine how and what is taught.
It may be that you do not think there should be that latitude, in which case making relatively arbitrary assignments of students to schools does not make much of a difference and my point is not relevant.
Catherine Michna wrote my TFA recommendation.