Nancy E. Bailey warns here that Teach for America has been not only a disservice but a disaster for children in special education. They are not appropriately prepared to teach the children with the greatest needs.
She writes:
Since 1990, America has put many school children, usually poor, in classrooms with Teach for America Corps Members (CMs) who get five weeks of training. They’ve also placed novices in special education classrooms.
There’s no evidence that TFA CMs teach better than professional teachers, but today I focus on how TFA has failed k-12 students in special education.
The ultimate goal for TFA is not to create a teaching service to fill the need for a teaching shortage, as advertised. Their objective is to privatize public education and end the teaching profession…
In Matthew A. M. Thomas’s 2018 study “‘Good Intentions Can Only Get You So Far’: Critical Reflections From Teach For America Corps Members Placed in Special Education,” we learn that TFA CMs receive minimal preparation to work with students with a variety of disabilities.
They lack the groundwork of a professional teacher in the following areas:
Inclusive Pedagogy. They don’t learn how to help students adjust in general classrooms
Diagnostic Tools. They don’t understand the kinds of diagnostic assessment to pinpoint academic and social difficulties.
Instructional Strategies. They aren’t sure how to teach students with disabilities.
Self-Contained Classrooms. They can’t manage a classroom with students who have disabilities.
Upholding Federal and State Requirements. They know little about IDEA and its mandates.
Writing IEPs. They don’t understand the logistics of how to plan with staff, parents, and students, to carry out objectives, and evaluate outcomes.
Legal and Liability Issues. They lack a basic understanding concerning what is and is not acceptable while working with students.
Assisting With Critical Transitions. Helping students with disabilities make positive transitions from school to college or career, for example, is not something TFA do well.
TFA training is mysterious, but it seems to center around instructional texts and “boot camp” instruction that takes place within five weeks.
CMs are cultishly inducted into the core. They work with other TFA CMs, and practice on students in summer school. They write lesson plans and make teaching materials while they learn about TFA and its mission.
Thomas found that many TFA CMs don’t want a special education placement, but the TFA organization places them in those spots anyway, especially if they check “interested” on the application form. Compare that to well-prepared, career teachers who choose teaching and special education as a vocation, a calling that is a personal challenge and commitment.
Bailey adds:
TFA alum Penny Schwinn became known in Texas for trying to give a special education no-bid contract to another TFA alum, Richard Nyankori’s (see Mercedes Schneider’s Deutsch29, SPEDx: State SPED Data in the Hands of a Former TFAer?), for-profit data mining company known as SPEDx. I could no longer find SPEDx online. Fortunately, parents caught it and the plan was foiled, despite Texans losing $2.2 million of the $4.4 million that was supposed to go to the company. Schwinn is also a graduate of The Broad Academy.
Schwinn was hired by Mike Morath, the commissioner of education for the Texas Education Agency. Eyes are on Texas for the harmful privatization reforms. Morath is a software developer and investor. It is well-known that he is transforming the TEA with TFA alums.
Texas is seen as a Lonestar Turnaround State by TFA.
The other TFA alum I’d like to highlight is Louisiana’s John White who is state superintendent. White likes to brag about the success of New Orleans’ controversial charter schools. But that city has failed its special education students for years.
Until the American public becomes aware of how public education has been infiltrated by this group, we will continue to see Teach for America badly influence how students learn, and that is especially unsettling when it concerns our most vulnerable students.
Please read the full post.
It is alarming that the neediest students are given the least qualified teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It amazes me that I, as a permanently certified teacher in NYS with many years rof experience as a gen ed classroom teacher in inclusive classrooms as well as a Masters degree in literacy and years of experience in teaching remedial r3ading and writing, cannot legally assume responsibility for teaching special education students, yet TFA recruits can! Something is wrong here…
Imagine the outcry that would exist if the government stepped in and told people if they take a quick course in anatomy and surgical procedures, they could become a doctor. TFA is the result of our government colluding with the wealthy to undermine our profession and our public schools. The oligarchs and corporations are pulling the strings of representatives, not we the people.
TFA associates are under prepared to step into a classroom in general, not only in special education. Bailey accurately pinpoints the areas of deficiencies of these associates. Many of these same deficiencies are apparent in other instructional disciplines as well. The high attrition rates of many charter schools may be due in part to the inability of TFA associates to cope with the demands of diverse learners. Charters often avoid accepting ELLs as well because these students are generally poor and academically deficient. It also takes three plus years for these students to cope with the language and curricula. Charters are unwilling to wait for “miracles.” They seek out the compliant and easy to teach, and leave most of the challenges to the underfunded public schools.
“Charters are unwilling to wait for “miracles.” They seek out the compliant and easy to teach” — and, each year, locate, kick out and thus send their less able students off to actual PUBLIC SCHOOLS before testing season…so that the public schools which take them in can then be heavily blamed.
The Harm that TFA Recruits Do to Students
Enough said.
BACK TO THE DAZE of SLAVERY.
Are people DRUNK?
In my second posting while employed in the New York City Department of Education, I worked in a middle school co-located with four others in the Frank Whalen campus at the corner of Wallace and Mace Avenues in the North Bronx. The principal was a neophyte (he was actually in my NYC Teaching Fellows Cohort and had become, somehow, a principal after only three years of teaching, two of which he apparently spent the the DOE’s dismal “Leadership Academy”) who had persuaded himself that his best bet for creating a strong school was to hire only TFA recruits.
Do I need to belabor the point that this was a disaster? The faculty was larded with self-appointed saviors, none of whom knew a damn thing about what he or she was doing. These 22-year-olds had no experience working with kids, and no experience working with challenged and challenging kids. Absenteeism and attrition was exceptionally high; instructional quality and respect for children was exceptionally low.
To make a long story short, I left after two years. A couple of years later, the DOE closed the school after a series of crises led to its receiving a grade of F.
The TFA-recruited teachers, it was clear to me, did not intend to make a career of teaching. Most if not all of them were, to paraphrase a hilarious squib from “The Onion” on TFA, padding middling liberal arts transcripts with an eye toward graduate or professional school of some kind. My co-teacher never wearied (as I did of hearing it) of boasting of his Amherst College degree.
Ironically, before this experience, TFA enjoyed my esteem–in fact, I almost joined the program in 2003 when I entered teaching, but decided to join the NYC Teaching Fellows (a program with its own problems of its own, but that is a horse of another color, as an old apple grower I worked for in Vermont liked to say) instead. Now, after watching TFA in action, and hearing the incredibly stupid things Wendy Kopp has said over the years, I am a foe of TFA.
And I thank Nancy Bailey and Diane for bringing this out into the open. It’s something parents and teachers–taxpayers all, incidentally–really need to know.
Seems as though the problem with the middle school in the north bronx is that the nycdoe decided to hire this man for principal even though the chap only was a teacher for two years.
Then the so called principal goes ahead and hires the wrong people for the jobs. Is anyone surprised that the guy went ahead and hired all TFA teachers? This seems to be a problem in many schools these days as schools find themselves in turmoil but then we all find out that the principal is a neophyte with very little experience.
Most TFAers are “trained” by the Relay Graduate School of Education. What that school requires for special education certification is minimal, and ultimately decided by the state in which they may seek certification. My impression is that TFAers do not have many requirements to claim they are qualified in special education. Here is the indication. https://relay.edu/teachers/special-education-certification/apply-special-education
I knew a girl about 20 years ago who taught elementary school for two years in an inner city school. She saw it as a sort of stint in the peace corps, and it was sold to her that way. If you had told her she was helping corporate types ruin American education, she would have been puzzled.
Are all of us engaged in processes that are bigger than we think they are? How often do our best intentions become maglinant on society?
When researchers like Nancy show us the effect of policies and organizations, it points out the importance of critics, of good journalism, and of the give and take in a free society. I would never have dreamed TFA had such a negative affect on education, because I have never encountered a TFA person. Thanks, Nancy.
Many TFAers end up at “no excuses” charter schools, where they want all kids to conform to their developmentally inappropriate behavioral and academic expectations, which are the same for all students, so differentiation is virtually impossible for any child, let alone Special Ed students, many of whom need that most –and individualization is mandated by law. TFA + Special Ed students = TERRIBLE MATCH.
The same can be said for TFA and students in Early Childhood Education (ECE), because young children typically develop at their own rates, so they should not be expected to all be alike, do the same exact things and have the very same needs. Well-trained, astute ECE and SpEd teachers know that equity is what is critical in education, so they don’t ever think, “I can’t do that because, if I do it for one child, I have to do it for every child.” They know that fair does not mean everyone gets the same thing. It means that everyone gets what they need –and in my experience, when it’s explained to them, young children can readily understand this, too.
There was a point a few years ago when all the enlightening articles about TFA led to it losing a lot of credibility on the so-called elite college campuses where it loved to recruit students. Suddenly, saying you were working for TFA after graduation meant your classmates understood you wanted to undermine public education and hurt the students in the poorest public schools. TFA wasn’t recruiting those students in the numbers it had in the past. Sure some students still signed up, but it was understood that it was because they embraced the right wing philosophy of privatizing public schools and undermining all unions.
Unfortunately, the turnover on college campuses is swift, and I think that the students now are being bombarded with pro-TFA propaganda again and many don’t know what the students just a few years older did — that you should only join TFA if your goal is to destroy public schools and if you believe that some at-risk 5 year olds are worthy of a good education and the rest can be thrown out with the trash.
Argghhh! Five weeks of training- vs my 4 years in an accredited education program that resulted in certification (which I then added to with Masters plus 45 and more, and then added national board certification) How could these possibly be considered equal??