Cue “Oh, so you know better than other people how to run their lives?”
I figured at some point TFA would come up. In fairness and full disclosure, I am an alumnus of the program, I have worked at the Summer Institute overseeing 64 new teachers, and I’m pretty involved in recruitment at my university. I also have a substantial involvement in the training model TFA uses; if you’ve seen the book Teaching as Leadership written by my good friend Steven Farr, you’ll see my blurb about how great the book is on the inside cover. 
Providing prestige is an important lever to improve the motivation and desire for talented folks to go into teaching. Along with TFA, which leverages success in undergraduate studies as a way to develop competencies to create not just average, but good to great teachers, there’s national board certification - an extremely rigorous, competitive certification process that is both incentive-driven and permits board certified teachers to teach in a number of states without the typical red tape. One prestige mark is at the start of the career and one is midway or later (I believe you have to teach at least 4-5 years to begin the process of national board certification).
Susan Moore Johnson and the Harvard Project on the Next Generation of Teachers have identified a few challenges to improving teacher quality. One is that many new teachers - in fact, the majority - do not stay in the profession very long. Teaching is much like law, medicine, and university teaching in the regard that generally, time in the profession correlates to greater mastery of the skills needed to succeed. (And yes, there are a number of teachers who are mediocre and don’t get better - but those with some motivation and drive learn classroom management, pedagogy, and navigating bureaucracy over time.) But the other professions are laden with incentives to keep you in that line of work until you start getting really good at it - money, tenure, flexible schedules, etc. Teaching doesn’t offer these opportunities, to the same degree that other fields do. And before someone says “teachers get tenure!” it is nothing like tenure in the university setting. If I get tenure I am entrusted to teach and research pretty much any way I please (with some safeguards). A tenured teacher still has to teach to whatever state standards are in existence, and often don’t have much say over curriculum, textbooks, and pedagogical methods.
Teachers leave the profession at an alarming rate. In some ways, that’s a good thing - maybe a generation or two ago, women stayed in teaching because there were few opportunities for them outside of education. The flatness of teaching as a profession - a first year teacher can have the exact same responsibilities as a 30 year veteran - meant that women could work as teachers, take years off to raise children, and return to the profession without much penalty. Gender equity (or the movement towards it) means that there are many occupations that women and men can pursue - and mobility is one advantage. Lots of jobs have family-friendly policies today. So like many professions, turnover is a result of having options. But of course, some of the departure from the profession has to do with poor working conditions, low pay, low morale, and dissatisfaction.
In my experience teachers don’t get enough credit when things go well, and get way too much blame when they don’t. It’s absolutely true that schools are sites of social reproduction - rich, smart parents typically have smart kids that do well in school. That’s how American schooling was designed. It isn’t a coincidence that public schooling emerged at the same time as asylums and prisons - there was a need to sort people, and have a large menial working class to fuel the American economy.
We’ve now decided we want schools to perform a much more democratic function - to provide social mobility, to educate those with no or few resources in the home and the family. So schools that do this well don’t look like typical schools. I don’t think they’re perfect, but look at school systems like KIPP that essentially envelop the kid’s (and parents’) lives. That’s what it requires to make this fairly miraculous process of education work for a lot of people.
Lots of folks have discussed the challenge of dealing with kids who seemingly don’t want to learn. Making them want to learn is what teachers must do. You have to be pretty far along the developmental path to be able to make a cogent decision not to learn and live with the consequences. Good teachers can’t give up on the hardest kids because they know in a year, five years, ten years that those kids will regret not taking advantage of the opportunity they had. I went through a period of “I’ll teach the kids who want to learn” and I quickly realized how ridiculous that was. Preteenagers have no idea what they want, or what’s best for them, and you as a teacher have to take on the responsibility (sometimes without much help from home or society) to turn that light on. A lot of the kids are hard cases because their parents/guardians have already told them that they won’t amount to much, and their peers are similarly situated.
Schools are in many cases the entire social safety net for kids - where they get food, shelter, a sense of feeling (fairly) safe, people who care about them. The way I see it, we are going to pay both financially and societally for not doing all we absolutely can to get kids, especially poor, disaffected, minority kids, to learn all they can and become productive citizens. We can only build so many prisons and gated communities… I look at these kids as potential law-abiding taxpayers. I think if that was the mindset, and it wasn’t just “I gotta make sure my kids get a good education, and the hell with everyone else,” as a majority of middle-class voters think (my evidence is in how we have prioritized and mismanaged education in this country since A Nation at Risk) - and we resolved to make every kid successful in school so that a diploma actually meant that they can do everything that an 18 year old adult needs to do to survive in society, we’d provide not just the salaries, but the support services for kids and teachers to make that happen.
Just my $.02.
Great post, but nitpick: you can apply for NBPTS certification after three full years of teaching (having gone through it last year I’m painfully familiar with its requirements). I’ve said before, I’d be okay with requiring all teachers to apply for NBPTS sometime between their third and sixth (or so) years. Teachers that don’t make it immediately could have up to three years to retry, but after that, they’d lose certification.
I also, unlike the current legislature, like the idea of the employer, rather than the employee, picking up the $2,500 price tag for the application.
My bad… thanks for clearing that up, and props for going for it - I had a number of friends in grad school that did it. It’s an asskicker.
Hippy, I like what you have to say, but what makes TFA different than me? I mean, seriously. I’ve seen TFA staff and they’re no different than any other inexperienced kid who walks in the door. (I at least had a leg-up in my student teaching: I’d worked previously in very tough special ed school as a teaching assistant…still, I had shit to learn!)
I don’t understand the logic of recruiting ‘the smartest’ from top colleges (which in itself is a bit elitist) and throwing them into the lion’s den after a few weeks of training. TFA results seem to be mixed and unconvincing.
Thanks for letting me clarify this… I don’t. The “key” that TFA looks for is demonstrating that one has a certain stick-to-it-iveness, that they have the smarts and the backbone to see something difficult through the end. And there should be a considerable amount of humility in there, as well.
That’s not just the domain of the few thousand teachers TFA recruits. I meet alt cert and traditional teacher ed teachers who have the same motivations all the time. And worse yet, I’ve trained TFA teachers who thought they were special, and my job was to remind them that nobody gave a shit about their Middlebury education in South Central or in Detroit. They’d better get their ego in check and start trying to make allies in their school rather than pissing off everyone with their elitist attitude.
Keep in mind that a lot of TFA teachers have some experiences in schools. It’s not required, but considering how competitive it is, I think most have spent some time in underresourced school settings. They do observations before institute. They teach during institute. They are continuing training and courses throughout their first year, if not their second. So it’s more of an ongoing training rather than “summer and you’re done.”
I also don’t think the TFA model is “the solution.” It’s one approach that has had some success, but it points to the need for additional approaches to improving teacher recruitment. Something like 75% of TFA alums remain involved in educational reform in some capacity after their commitment is over - some keep teaching, others get involved in policy work, serve on school boards, etc.
Hell yes, I do.
“Previous school/child experience” and the institute is still throwing them on the job without student teaching. Sure, you have ongoing education (like with most new teachers), but that’s not the same. I’m willing to bet that students with a year of student teaching do better than those who don’t.
And what exactly is the retention rate of TFA alum that stay classroom teachers? It is my understanding that it is very low. Going into ‘policy’ or ‘admin’ work doesn’t do anything for the bottom line. I don’t care if you found Kipp or become a policy admin at this or that institute or school district. You’re not in a classroom. Basically you have something nice to add to your resume + your college education. At best, TFA is like the Peace Corps of teaching. At worst, it’s a resume builder and a surefire way to get a decent job fresh out of college before you move on to something else. IMO it’s a waste of money.
The point is that, even without all this supposedly necessary training and certification, these kids do just as well as their traditional teacher peers. This certainly suggests that requiring more certification will do little more than erect higher barriers to entry.
I suspect that part of the retention rate problem is that the TFAers have a wide range of other careers available to them that pay a lot better, whereas many traditional teachers do not.
@Hippy Hollow
One of my best friend went to college at Middlebury and went into TFA. Maybe you were referring to him! (He always thought he was really special). In his 2 years in TFA he got amazing results with his students, he was a phenomenal teacher. One of the best in his school by almost any standard. He’s still teaching after his initial committment, but he hates it and quickly wants to move out of the classroom and into administration. That’s definitely not a bad thing, in my opinion. But it raises the question, how do we keep highly qualified teachers in the profession? I really don’t believe pay increasing is the best solution. If these qualified people didn’t think the wage was fair, they probably wouldn’t have gotten into teaching in the first place. I definitely fall into this position. It was only AFTER teaching a few years, that the pay didn’t seem like enough because of all the lack of support from every direction. Pressure for teachers to give grades students don’t deserve is a huge problem, don’t you think? College admissions staff I have talked to say that grade inflation is a huge problem these days. That’s one of the main reasons I left. Being completely ignored by parents and administrators when you have laid out everything you have done to help a student pass is also a big reason I got out. I would have gladly stayed teaching making the money that I made if I had felt truly happy doing it. Now I wouldn’t consider teaching for anything less than maybe 80k a year… and even then it would be a really hard decision. Obviously I won’t ever be teaching again.
The literature is a mixed bag. Vasquez Heilig, Darling-Hammond, and others found that TFA teachers in Houston had lower outcomes for students when compared to traditionally prepared and alternative certification teachers. (Not sure if they controlled for the initial scores of students, and the data is from my era, the early 90s.) However, there are a number of studies by Mathematica that say exactly the opposite. There are studies that find that principals express more confidence and support for TFA teachers compared to other novice teachers as well.
Keep in mind TFA was not intending to solve the issue of teacher retention. Rather, it was addressing the need to fill critical teacher shortages. I don’t know how much this has changed over the years. Retaining teachers is a nice by-product of the program but it isn’t the goal. I do know that in Houston in the mid 90s, about 2/3rds of TFA teachers went on to teach beyond their two year commitment.
And I disagree with your statement that working in policy or administration, or serving on boards doesn’t affect the bottom line. These folks will (and are) influence and direct policies that will affect teacher hiring, reward structures, curriculum… the list goes on. And they have classroom experience to augment their decision making.. That beats the hell out of what we’ve had before, where education policy tended to be dictated by those who had never set foot in a classroom.
TFA recruiters are aware that the program has acquired some prestige and many are attracted to apply for that reason. It’s competitive and the goal is to select teachers who will be successful in underresourced schools. A lot of people teach for a limited time to pad their resumes, not just in TFA. And seeing how TFA is able to obtain obscene amounts of funding from philanthropic organizations, I don’t think that there is much concern about wasting money at this point.
I don’t know, how much does it pay? You’re the one who wants to be paid as such. Do you not know how much that is? What if it’s less?
Indeed you don’t, thus the stats you’re offering are irrelevant. I’ve seen stats before showing that teachers in NC are paid something like 8-14% less than professions that require similar educational background. If these stats are wrong, then of course my point is much weakened. No, I don’t have them handy.
This document is interesting. It recommends doing away with the Board Certification bump to salary, which is horribly painful to me given the total suck of the last year (yes, RR, lap 'em up, glad you can contribute to the discussion), but I understand their reasoning. It suggests raising initial teacher salaries and then providing significant raises during the first several years, recognizing both that teacher ability improves most dramatically during these years and also that it’s during these years that the most teachers leave for greener (i.e., more green) pastures.
It also proposes an annual bonus for people in the top 13% of scorers on the Praxis–a test of academic ability. Again, this would recruit folks with strong academics to the profession.
They propose eliminating the master’s degree bonus for everyone except folks with math and science degrees who teach math and science. Seems reasonable to me, assuming their evidence is strong.
I encourage folks who are genuinely interested in this discussion to give it a look. If all you want to do is drink your scotch and relive your third grade years, though, you might want to pass.
This morning I had to press assault charges against a six year old boy for kicking my daughter so hard she has a bruised pubic bone. I had to take my sweet little baby girl to the ER and have her examined by someone she’s never met before and let strangers take pictures of the bruise. Then I had to withdraw her from her school, away from her friends of two years, because I know without a doubt that the teachers are not paying enough attention to their students. This is the third time this year she’s been hurt by another student and all three times she’s told a teacher but the teacher didn’t do a thing about it. I wish I could have filed the charge against her instead.
That’s horrifying, Rushgeekgirl–I’m so sorry. Teaching may be the reasons teachers are employed, but it should go without saying that creating a safe environment must always be top priority. It’s sometimes harder than other times (there are mental illnesses among kids that I didn’t know could be diagnosed in kids, and the current idea is to mainstream them), but a teacher who doesn’t make all efforts needs to find a new career.
Oh. My. God.
Can’t you file against the parents?? The teacher probably isn’t allowed to do anything, but the parents should!!
In NY state, year 2 is when you are told you very likely will not be offered tenure at the end of year three. By the end of three years, you get tenure or you get fired.
I know. Don’t tell me I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. My then wife went through this process, I lived every step of it.
Excuse me? I went through a teaching licensing program. My degree and experience wasn’t in education. Some of us paid our dues and had an idea of how it goes when the state finally gave us licensure.
If you aren’t retaining teachers, you’re not hitting the bottom line. You’re just going to have the same damned shortages in math and special ed in a couple of years. It is in no way cost effective or good for the system to have teachers cycling in and out of buildings. It hurts education, actually.
Kipp isn’t impressive: cherry pick your students and make your employees work 12-16 hour days so that they too will quit after a few years.
People who go through legit teacher ed programs are not padding their resume. Some of us are giving more than a two-year commitment.
It wastes district money. Who do you think contracts with and pays TFA? And are you of the opinion that private money wasted is not money wasted? Yikes.
My only option was to file the charge against the boy and hope his parents feel the effect more than he does. I mean he needs to learn it’s wrong and who knows why he did it? He could be a violent little brat or he could have thought he was being a Transformer. Or whatever it is little boys think they are these days.
The teacher wasn’t watching them at recess. This is the third complaint in two weeks I’ve made about my daughter getting hurt at recess. Another girl slapped and pinched her. I don’t know what’s going on. Last year she had a great teacher.
I know my daughter isn’t a perfect little angel, but I know her well enough to know she’s not hitting other children. With her having autism she tends to be a lot more honest than other kids. If she says she didn’t hit anyone, I believe her. She said she didn’t know why he did it. She was standing against the wall and he just came up and kicked her and then some other kids laughed. She told the teacher. She told the TA when it hurt when she went to the bathroom. Nobody told me until she did. I should have been called right away for something like that.