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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 