Editor’s note: While Diane is on a somewhat reduced blogging schedule, she has invited members of the Education Bloggers Network, a consortium of people who blog about education issues on the national, state or local level to contribute to her blog. If you are a blogger who supports public education and would like to join the Education Bloggers Network, contact Jonathan Pelto Jonpelto@gmail.com.
This guest blog is written by Rachel Levy
With a vote of 5-2 (with two members absent) the Richmond School Board has decided to contract with Teach for Americato hire up to 30 teachers. I’ve already written in great detail about how the Teach for America model is problematic hereand then here and about why TFA is not right for the K-12 public school students of Virginia here, so I won’t repeat what I said there.
In the meantime, here is the reporting out of RPS leadership:
“It’s another tool in our recruitment tool box,” said Kristen Larson, 4th District, who voted in favor of the program during a School Board work session Monday. “We know we have a hard time hiring, and we need to look at all paths.”
In Richmond, they will fill as-yet-determined hard-to-staff positions.
The school system typically has to fill 200 to 300 teacher positions a year, but in recent years it has had a hard time finding enough qualified candidates. This school year began with about three dozen positions open. Some have been filled by long-term substitutes while others remain unfilled.
“We have a lot of work to do in how we attract and retain teachers,” said School Board Chairman Jeffrey Bourne, 3rd District. “Teach for America is injecting some creativity and some new thinking into the hiring process.
“I don’t think this is an ‘either/or’ situation. It’s an all of the above. There’s room here for different approaches.”
This is very disappointing, especially after the RPS School Board has seemed to be on the right track in so many other ways. They are trying to strengthen and diversify opportunities for Richmond children while staying under the umbrella of the public, democratic system and while involving leaders with expertise in education. Unfortunately, in this case a majority of the School Board has decided come out from under the umbrella and fork over $150,000 ($5,000 per corps member = $150,000) to TFA to hire inexperienced and untrained people to be teachers.
However, this is not surprising since TFA’s chief lobbyist in Richmond has been diligently working the RPS School Boardas well as Governor McDonnell’s administration for quite a while. Furthermore, at least one School Board member in particular has been eager to hire TFA. And I don’t live in Richmond proper and can’t say how many residents have protested the idea of having TFA corps members teaching in Richmond. Perhaps parents have stood up and asked for them.
I do question, however, the nature of their recruitment problem and the extent to which TFA can aid that or ameliorate their retention problems. RPS should really find out how and why they have a recruitment and retention problem first and then propose solutions. If your car is not working for some reason, bringing in a rental car for a few weeks is not going to fix it. If the School Board wants help with retention, TFA is not the organization to turn to. TFA leadership states unabashedly that they are fine with their corps members only staying two or three years, that getting them exposure to challenging classrooms is step one on a ladder to working in the education reform industry. And according to TFA watchdog and former corps member Gary Rubinstein, about 10% of TFAers don’t even make it through their very first year of teaching.
There also have been questions raised about the process by which this decision has been made. According to RPS parent and Alliance for Progressive Values member Kirsten Gray, there was no public hearing on the matter, almost no effort to publicize the matter, no review of research on TFA’s effectiveness or lack thereof, and no evidence that there is a shortage and no positions open on the website. However also according to Gray, TFA was voted in with an amendment that caps the TFAers to 10% of the hard to staff schools and the amendment also requires the Richmond School Board to come up with a policy on how to use and place corps members. The way I see it, that’s at least one way to pilot TFA and to minimize potential damage at least. But two School Board members, Kristen Larson and Glen Sturtevant, voted against the amendment and perhaps they’ll work to remove it.
Finally, I also have my own personal experience to share which makes me question if there’s a true shortage and how TFA will help with RPS’s human resources issues. In Spring 2011, I was at a social function and I happened to be seated at the same table with a very high ranking RPS administrator. When I mentioned that I was a Social Studies and ESOL teacher and that I would be applying to area school systems including RPS, they told me the market was fairly tight and that my best bet, if anything, was to apply for an ESOL positions. I did, in fact, apply to RPS later that spring. However, I never heard anything back, not even to receive an e-mail confirming my application had been received, until September 19th when I got an e-mail letting me know they might need an ESOL teacher. Well, by then, I had already taken another job (and I had been contacted by two other area school systems with no shortages)–it was nearly a month after school had started.
Now, I’m no super star of a teacher but I do have a B.A. from a highly-ranked liberal arts college, I have a master’s degree in education, and a current Virginia license. I am dual-certified including in a hard-to-staff area, I have strong references, and several years of teaching experience, including five in ESOL in Virginia. I wonder how many other people with qualifications such as mine have applied to RPS in recent years. The problem there is not lack of “creativity” or lack of qualified applicants; it’s lack of competence, disorder, and a lack of, um, hiring. TFA’s presence won’t change that.
Those concerned about the impending contract between TFA and RPS should ask for information and for more transparency about the contracting process. They should also ask that citizens get the same access to public officials that TFA has had. They should also ask for a hearing where evidence both of the shortage and rationale behind hiring TFA would be presented. Finally, they should sign this petition which states opposition RPS’s contracting with TFA (and make sure you read the comments there, too).
This blog has been cross-posted from: http://allthingsedu.blogspot.com/2013/11/tfa-comes-to-rva.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
TFA has a cadre of highly skilled people who are hired to lobby local and state governments to promote the hiring of TFA teachers. Those of us working to train our own local young people to be career teachers are often too busy to be able to do much in opposition. When I heard about the RPS school board meeting through the Richmond Teachers for Social Justice network, I mobilized my colleagues in teacher preparation at Virginia Commonwealth University to go down to City Hall and speak out FOR the longstanding commitment we have made to train teachers who will be successful in RPS and other area school districts. That call was heeded, and that is why the modest changes, such as capping TFA to 10% of new hires, were made. We need to be diligent, but we often find ourselves fighting a rear-guard action against much more well organized opponents. I was unable to make that meeting personally, but I am gratified that so many of my colleagues did, including our Dean Christine Walther Thomas.
TFA makes many claims and promises, many of which fail to hold up under scrutiny, but some of which do hold up. We must present a counter argument, but we also have to offer something better. I think we did that by making the case that TFA’s presence undermines these long-term efforts.
Finally, I can corroborate the anecdotal information provided by Ms. Levy about how difficult it is to get hired in RPS. I would just add that this is, in part, due to the actions of a state government that starve the system of funds. When the school system does not know how much funding it will get for the following year until the summer, it is very hard to make decisions about hiring in time.
This is a great comment, Gabriel–thanks for taking the time to leave it. Although I didn’t mention it in the post, I think many of us were heartened that VCU SOE showed up and testified at the hearing.
I also want to acknowledge this:
“I would just add that this is, in part, due to the actions of a state government that starve the system of funds. When the school system does not know how much funding it will get for the following year until the summer, it is very hard to make decisions about hiring in time.”
This is definitely part of what’s been happening in the hiring process–it’s been happening to many RVA-area school systems as budgets have been cut. I was sloppy in that part of my piece to not include that.
Another thing I didn’t include (because I didn’t know about until after I published the post on my own blog) is that VCU in partnership with RPS has a program that is a much better alternative to TFA: The Richmond Teacher Residency Program.
Bringing in a rental car will not get your car fixed, but it will allow you to give rides to people who need them. Hiring a TFA teachers for positions that would not otherwise be filled will give students more resources.
No, it does not “give students more resources”. It sucks $5,000 per hire out of the district and directly into TFA’s coffers. How that can be construed to “give students more resources” is beyond me and logical thought. And those TFAers are nothing more than long term subs themselves not only by definition (usually not having valid specific subject area expertise not subject area certification) but in practice where 80% are gone after three years.
nor not not
I see no evidence that this district has a teacher shortage, and even if it did, as Ms. Levy points out, they should identify the problem in hire/retaining teachers (especially around work load expectations, class sizes, negative school culture, lack of in-school support services etc or budgeting practices that do not allow schools to hire in a timely manner) and fix those problms. Programs like Teach For America let districts off the hook. Districts and programs like TFA must be held accountable for the shoddy services they provide to certain children. Most places in the US do not have true teacher shortages, they simply have schools that are (often purposefully) horrible work environments. Plus, TFA is being used in more and more places like my city of Chicago as a union-busting organization and charter school pipeline, not even to fill teacher shortages.
TFA, and most fast-track alt cert programs, represent a gross inequality in the types of educational opportunity offered primarily to low-income children of color and low-income children from rural areas. Giving under-prepared, uncertified novices to our neediest children, especially children with special needs, children from deep poverty, or English Language Learners is a crime. There is no excuse for allowing these fast-track programs to exist. None.
Once again, TFA is expanding for their own benfit at the expense of children. Shame, TFA, shame.
For an economist, the notion of shortage or surplus must always be connected to a price. At some prices there may be a surplus, at others a shortage.
Your pointing out the various unpleasant aspects of teaching suggest that the total compensation for teachers in the Richmond School District (both pecuniary and non-pecuniary) are insufficient to attract qualified applicants. You suggest increasing the non-pecuniary benefits of the job, and that will likely help attract more folks interested in the positions they have available.
I am a little concerned that you suggest you think districts should remain on the hook, so to speak. It is not districts that are potentially harmed by having an unqualified long term substitute teacher, it is the students in the class. Once that year of instruction is lost, it is lost forever. A TFA teacher with deep knowledge of, say, mathematics, might well be able to make it a productive year for some students. I know that after my middle son’s junior year in high school, he believed that the graduate math student who taught him calculus was the best math teacher he had ever had, though by public school standards the graduate student was completely unqualified to teach.
You want to talk about kids, lets talk about kids. How about the students with special needs found in nearly every classroom in public schools today being given someone who has taken ONE DAY (at best) of “training” around working with students with special needs as their dedicated special ed teacher? Someone who has never seen an IEP, who knows literally nothing about appropriate academic or behavioral interventions placed in charge fo theses kids’ education? How about the students who suffer mental health issues as a result of the traumas of growing up in poverty being given a “teacher” briefly taught in low-quality behaviorist classroom management but completely unprepared for the serious needs of these kids? How about the kids who are losing their qualified teachers who know and understand their communities as districts make space TFA?
Districts should not be allowed to let completely unprepared novices take on an entire class. That practice needs to be illegal. Period. TFA places very few recruits in higher mathematics (not that I agree with anyone being placed in high-poverty classrooms untrained)-but many more are in elementary schools including special education, bilingual, or early childhood classrooms. NCLB was supposed to address these inequalities of giving the neediest students the least prepared and experienced teachers, but TFA used its political influence to warp the law (done most recently by quietly slipping their “highly qualified teacher” language into the spending bill to re-open the government after the shutdown. Ridiculously self-serving, as TFA always is.)
The “long-term sub” argument is often not true, or it’s a result of the purposeful attacks on teachers. Most places simply do not have true teacher shortages. Some places may burn through teachers purposefully which is all the more reason not to allow the option of alt certs. Districts should be held accountable for these disgusting practices, just as lawmakers should be held accountable for defunding the schools and imposing soul-crushing “reforms” driving teachers away.
TFA is not needed in the vast majority of the areas where they operate and are expanding, but they carefully orchestrate special contracts, done behind closed doors without public input like done to Richmond, to place their recruits regardless of need. TFA wishes to grow at all costs, while refusing to improve their piss-poor training program despite having amassed hundreds of millions in reserves. And still they have the audacity to charge districts for their recruits on top of forcing them to pay a full teacher salary.
TFA represents one more inequality in the lives of children already being crushed by inequality.
Let us think of the students with IEPs. My foster son and my middle son both had had them. Here is my middle son’s evaluation of mathematics education in the public schools he attended written in the summer after he graduated from high school:
“I apologize if this seems like an offensive and long-winded diatribe. I don’t mean to say that mathematics is something most people cannot grasp, but simply something they were never taught. If I seem angry, it is because the material that passes for math in public schools nearly turned me off mathematics forever, and had it done so I would never have realized the sublime beauty of the subject and never felt the peace and joy that has come with understanding it.”
The best mathematics teachers he had while in high school were “unqualified” to teach in public schools, though would be hired by private schools and qualified to teach in post secondary education. I suspect an “unqualified” math major in college would have been better than a “qualified” long term substitute for that student with an IEP.
Love the author’s car analogy. I do wonder about the 10% first year TFAers statistic and how it matches certified first year teachers’ retention rates. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first year wasn’t some sort of eye opening “this isn’t right for me” rite of passage for all newbies.
A couple comments:
1. The rationale of hiring TFA teachers for hard to staff positions being currently filled by long term substitutes or not at all seems supported by Dr. Julian Vasquez Heilig’s recommendations in his 2010 “TFA study of studies”. In this study, he recommended:
“Support TFA staffing only when the alternative hiring pool consists of uncertified and emergency teachers or substitutes.”
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/teach-for-america
It may be that the Richmond School Board is actually following the advice of Dr. Ravitch and Dr. Heilig by using discernment when hiring from TFA. Ms. Levy’s call for “evidence both of the shortage and rationale behind hiring TFA” seems reasonable and necessary, and should give the Richmond public either comfort that their school board acted in the best interest of the students, or information necessary to vote out TFA-supporting school board members at the next election.
2. Lots of TFA studies out there, some complimentary and some not-so-complimentary. A very recent study (November 2013) which compares TFA in Tennessee to 40 other traditional education programs in Tennessee, and compares TFA teachers to other traditionally educated beginning and veteran teachers, shows TFA in a pretty decent light. Good reading:
http://www.tn.gov/thec/Divisions/fttt/13report_card.shtml
Alharris161: The message of TFA is that education is not a profession. Five weeks of training is good enough. Would you go to a surgeon who had five weeks of training? Would you want something you care about handled by a lawyer with five weeks of training?
In a perfect world where we don’t spend trillions on wars of choice, our population keeps itself healthy and we have a single payer system to reduce overall health care costs, we eliminate corporate subsidies, and where adequate resources are dedicated to education and social programs, I would love to have a more Finlandian style education system. I’d also like a money tree in my backyard. 🙂
We’re not starting from a blank piece of paper, it’s not 1776 but rather 2013, we are where we are. And in this blog post (in lieu of more transparency from Richmond BOE), Richmond can’t find enough qualified teachers for hard to staff positions. They’re filling these positions with long term substitutes or not at all. In this specific circumstance I support alternatively certified teachers (including TFA) to fill these positions.
Would I prefer my son/daughter have a 20+ year highly qualified veteran teacher for every class, yep. But… If I had to choose between my son taking high school biology from a permanent substitute or an alternatively certified teacher with a B.A. and M.A. in Biology and who had worked 8 years at the Mayo Clinic brain bank, I’d take the alternatively certified teacher. If I had to choose between my son taking high school physics from a permanent substitute or an alternatively certified teacher with a B.A. in Physics and 5 years experience operating nuclear power plants aboard a U.S. Navy submarine, I’d take the alternatively certified teacher. If I had to choose between my son taking high school mathematics from a permanent substitute or a TFA teacher with a 3.85 GPA and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics, I’d take the TFA teacher.
You and Dr. Heilig can’t have it both ways — you seem to want to have your cake and eat it too. Dr. Heilig specifically recommended “Support TFA staffing only when the alternative hiring pool consists of uncertified and emergency teachers or substitutes.” If Richmond (and Pittsburgh) are following yall’s advice, exercising discernment as to when to hire TFA (and also cap TFA quantities in the future), what else do you want? If yall’s stance is zero tolerance for any alternative certification, then just say it. Don’t give advice to school boards and superintendents via peer-reviewed papers as to when TFA hiring is acceptable, then renege when they actually follow yall’s advice.
I’d also like to see a blog post from you and/or Dr. Heilig on the recent “2013 Tennessee Report Card on the Effectiveness of Teacher Training Programs” — your and Dr. Heilig’s prior analysis has been very thorough and eye opening regarding some past TFA studies, but loses validity if you only comment on studies which support your position.
@alharris Thanks for reading and commenting. I think at least part of the point is that there are more qualified candidates applying for RPS jobs; they’re just not getting hired. Another article in a Richmond publication called Style Weekly on TFA in RVA discusses this: ,a href+”http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/teach-for-richmond/Content?oid=1988322″.here
Sorry, the link didn’t go through. Trying again: here
If the Richmond school district has not been hiring the most qualified teachers, the problems in that school district are much deeper than simply hiring TFA teachers no matter what you think about their ability to teach.
You are correct and so hiring TFA teachers will not solve the problems that supportive SB members and TFA as an organization is professing that it will, and in fact may make the problems worse. At an extra $5K per corps member, it certainly won’t help them with their financial woes.
And not hiring these teachers would also not solve the fundamental problems of the district, but I have a hard time ignoring my middle son’s evaluation that his best math teachers while in high school were unqualified to teach in K-12 education.
I’m glad your son had good experiences with those math teachers–that’s great. But I can’t advocate that School Boards make major policy decisions and expenditures based on your son’s experience.
But do you discount this experience?
He would have preferred an “unqualified” MIT math major to the “qualified” highly experienced high school teacher that he had in precalculus. It would seem to me to be a mistake for the school board to make decisions based on the categories rather than individual attributes and the individual needs of the students.
Sorry, I meant, “school boards” and “only based on your son’s experience.”