Thanks to Joan for pointing out this Interesting new study on the effectiveness of "Teach for America," (of Michelle Rhee fame), which recruits teac

A new look at Teach for America

Around the country today thousands of young Teach for America recruits are getting a crash course in how to teach students in low-income urban and rural schools, a job they have promised to do for the next two years.

The recruits are recent graduates from elite colleges, most of whom do not have a background in education, and they have been the subject of a running debate about how well they can serve needy schoolchildren.

Teach for America began in 1990 with 500 teachers in six communities and has grown to more than 8,200 individuals teaching in 39 rural and urban areas, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Chicago, the Mississippi Delta, and the Washington D.C. region.

Following are highlights of a new review of independent researchvidence on the program, an analysis conducted by Assistant Professor Julian Vasquez Heilig of the University of Texas at Austin and Assistant Professor Su Jin Jez of California State University at Sacramento.

They conclude:
*More than 50 percent of Teach for America teachers leave after two years and more than 80 percent leave after three years. [About half of all teachers nationwide quit after five years, according to the National Education Association.]
-Teach for America proponents say that the program is aimed not only at supplying teachers to needy schools but also improving the teacher labor supply and shaping individuals who will care about education in their future jobs on Wall Street, in Washington, or elsewhere outside the classroom.

*Studies indicate that students of novice Teach for America teachers perform significantly less well in reading and math than those of credentialed beginning teachers.

*Most studies find that those Teach for America teachers who stay long enough to become fully credentialed (typically after two years) appear to do about as well as other similarly experienced cedentialed teachers in teaching reading, and do as well as, and sometimes better than, a comparison group in teaching math.
--The study said it is difficult to know if that is a result of additional training and experience or from attrition of less effective Teach for America teachers.

*About a third of Teach for America’s operating costs are paid by the public through federal, state and local funds. For example, in 2008, the program was funded this way: 33 percent from public funds, 26 percent from foundations, 20 percent from individuals, 15 percent from corporations, and 6 percent from special events.

*Teach for America teachers make up about 0.2 percent of the country’s several million teachers.

The analysis concludes that proponents who see the prgram as providing urban and rural schools with “outstanding recent college graduates,” and opponents who see it as only a short-term remedy that “may not even be better than what it aims to fix” are both correct. It says:

“The studies reviewed in the previous section indicate that, in the short-term, when compared to other underprepared teachers hired into many high-need schools, they may compete well with similarly trained and situated non-TFA teachers (even if just marginally better and only in mathematics).

"However, TFA opponents are correct, too. TFA teachers appear less effective in both reading and mathematics than fully prepared entrants teaching similar students, at least until the TFA teachers become prepared and certified themselves.

"While the small number who stay this long are sometimes found to be more effective in mathematics than other teachers, their attrition rate of more than 80 percent means that few students receive the benefit of this greater effectiveness, while districts pay the costs of high attrition. In addition, TFA provides only a (small) fraction of America’s teachers to a small number of America’s schools, and likely has little to no impact outside of its participating schools. Unless it starts admitting larger swaths of college seniors and potentially watering down the quality of its corps members, it will not ever comprise more than a small fraction of America’s teachers.

"Finally, even in the limited cases when TFA has a positive impact, it is consistently small; other educational reforms may have more promise such as universal pre-school, mentoring programs that pair novice and expert teachers, eliminating tracking, and reducing class size in the early grades."

It recommends that policymakers and school districts:

*Support Teach for America staffing only when the alternative hiring pool consists of uncertified and emergency teachers or substitutes.

*Consider the significant recurring costs of Teach for America, estimated at over $70,000 per recruit, and press for a five-year commitment to improve achievement and reduce re-staffing.

*Invest strategically in evidence-based educational reform options that build long-term capacity in schools.


Marjorie Stamberg writes:

Thanks to Joan for pointing out this Interesting new study on the effectiveness of "Teach for America," (of Michelle Rhee fame), which recruits teachers out of the "elite" universities and sends them into troubled inner city schools for a two-year stint. See the article on one of the Washington Post education blogs, which includes a link to the actual study.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/a-new-look-at-teach-for-americ.html

This comes after a major piece on TFA by Barbara Miner in the journal "Rethinking Schools" ("Looking Past the Spin -- Teach for America," Spring 2010). Teaching for a couple of years and then going on to your "real" job -- i.e., lawyer or doctor, is becoming the hot new thing, like running your own charter school (in fact, to the extent TFA graduates stay in education, which is not much, they tend to be administrators of one sort or another). TFA's own presentation practically says that this looks good on your resume.

The new study says more than half of the Teach for America teachers leave after two years. In Houston, 85 percent of the TFA teachers were gone after three years, compared to less than half of their non-TFA colleagues. This study reports that while TFA was originally sold as a way to recruit teachers for hard-to-staff schools, now it is overwhelmingly being used to replace experienced teachers.

But look at the stats on effectiveness. Surprise, surprise, it reports that the novice TFA teachers are less effective in teaching reading and math than experienced credentialed teachers. And those TFA teachers who last more than the two years become more effective to the extent that they have more classroom experience and have taken advanced education courses. In other words, that small group of TFA teachers who stay, develop into effective teachers, in the same way as the rest of us. Like duh.

TFA by the way, has just won the right to sidestep any credentials' process that requires university credits; instead they will be certified through the programs in a direct internship.

Thus the ed "reformers" are carrying out their agenda to downgrade teaching from a profession requiring academic credit to a "skills based" vocation. They think they can more cheaply staff the classrooms with two-year recruits, most of whom will go on to their "real" professions -- lawyers, stock brokers, etc. Even if education is reduced to "test prep," this ain't going to work. And forget about critical thinking, or introduction to the world. But then, improving education was never what programs like TFA were about. It's purpose is to bust the unions and to replace experienced teachers with low cost temp labor.

HOWEVER, and this is a big however. We need to keep in mind that some very dedicated teachers come into our profession through this route, and we need to reach out to them. The UFT has to do far more to find a way to advocate for new teachers entering the school system. Otherwise, the DOE can set experienced and novice teachers against each other. Klein & Co. are already doing this and it is hurting our solidarity.

--Marjorie

What Teach for America Spends

From Leonie Haimson:

New book on TFA;

By Barbara Torre Veltri, called Learning on Other People's Kids: Becoming a Teach For America Teacher.

by Teacher Ken here: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/18/877196/-Learning-On-Other-Peoples-Kidsan-important-book-on-Teach-for-America

An eye-opening statistic:

Veltri provides a table using data from TFA, showing that in 2006-06 the 4,700 corps members were served with an operating budget of $39,500,000, while for 2009-10 the projected figures were 7,300 corps members with an operating budget of $160,000,000. Let's put those numbers on a per capita basis. In 2005-06 the cost per corps member was $8,400, while in 2009-10 it had ballooned to $21,917, or more than half what most teachers in this country make in their first year. I question whether that is money well spent. One thing is for sure; Wendy Kopp is incredibly gifted at raising money.

Teach For America: A False Promise

POSTED BY LEONIE HAIMSON:

The full report is here: Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence, on the web at: http://www.greatlakescenter.org

A Review of the Evidence

Julian Vasquez Heilig

University of Texas at Austin

Su Jin Jez, Ph.D.

California State University, Sacramento

June 2010

Excerpts:

Decker, Mayer and Glazerman12 conducted a study for Mathematica Inc. that examined the student achievement results for 41 Teach For America teachers and 57 beginning and experienced comparison teachers, all teaching grades 1-5 in the same schools across 6 districts… Whereas 100% of the TFA teachers had had some student teaching experience before entering classrooms, only 47% of other novice teachers and only 71% of the overall comparison group had prior classroom experience…. Compared with this underprepared group, overall TFA teachers’ students showed gains similar to those of comparison teachers in reading and better in mathematics, though students’ scores remained low overall, hovering around the 15^th percentile for both groups of teachers. However, the positive impact was found only for TFA teachers who had obtained training and certification in their second and later years in the classroom. First-year TFA teachers did not have a positive impact in either mathematics or reading; a negative coefficient in reading was not statistically significant….

In an Arizona study, Laczko-Kerr and Berliner13 compared the achievement test scores of primary school students taught by 110 matched pairs of recently hired under-certified and certified teachers in five low-income school districts.They found that students of certified teachers out-performed students of uncertified teachers, including TFA teachers, in reading, mathematics and language arts.

Using value-added models, Boyd, et al.14 examined the effectiveness of 3,766 new teachers who entered teaching in grades 4-8 through different pathways in New York City. The study found that, compared with the students of new teachers who graduated from teacher education programs, students of new TFA recruits scored significantly lower in reading/language arts and about the same in mathematics (worse in grades 4-5 and better in grades 6-8)…

TFA teachers’ effectiveness generally improved as they became more prepared. By the second year, when most were certified, negative effects disappeared for elementary math and middle school reading.However, TFA teachers continued to exert a significant negative influence on their students’ reading scores in the elementary grades. By their third year, the effect was still negative, but not statistically significant. Students taught by TFA teachers with more than three years of experience did show a significant increase in math achievement. However, the authors observed that achievement results for TFA beyond the third year “should be interpreted with caution due to small sample sizes.”15

Using the same New York City database, Kane, Rockoff and Staiger compared entrants into New York City schools by different categories of initial

pathway and certification status. … this study found that, in math and reading, students of first-year teachers from TFA,

the NYC Teaching Fellows, and other uncertified teachers did worse than those of first-year teachers who were “regularly certified.” They also found that the negative effects were generally reduced or eliminated in math as teachers finished their training and certification and gained experience.However, TFA teachers continued to have a negative effect on reading for two of three years, and the other uncertified

groups (Teaching Fellows and others) continued to have a negative effect on reading for all three years.

Another large-scale achievement study analyzed data from Houston, Texas, representing more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers in grades 3-5 over six years. ….This study compared TFA with non-TFA teachers and controlled for experience and certification status. Using both ordinary least squares regression and multi-level modeling, the authors found “no instance where uncertified Teach For America teachers performed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings.”18 …

Generally, the studies reviewed found that TFA teachers usually showed a positive impact on student achievement in mathematics relative to the comparison group only when they had obtained training and certification in their second and later years in the classroom. They rarely had a positive impact on reading achievement, and four peer-reviewed studies found novice TFA recruits to have significant negative effects on elementary students’ reading achievement compared with fully prepared teachers. These negative effects for TFA beginners extended to mathematics in three of the studies….

While the debate about the impact of TFA teachers on student achievement continues, there is little disagreement across the research literature regarding the attrition of TFA teachers. Reporting on TFA’s longitudinal national survey of alumni, Miner30 suggests that “all one can say with certainty is that in 2007, at least 16.6 percent of those recruited by Teach For America were teaching in a K-12 setting beyond their two-year commitment.”…

In a New York City study, teachers from traditional college teacher education program teachers were found to have the lowest short-term and long-term

turnover rates, followed by temporarily licensed teachers; attrition was “substantially” higher for TFA members.31 …By the fourth year, 85% of

TFA teachers had left the district, compared to 37% attrition for the traditionally educated teachers—alternatively phrased, only 15% of TFA teachers remained, while 67% of the college educated teachers stayed…..

Between 2000 and 2008, TFA’s operating expenditures increased from $10 million to $114.5 million. Of those expenditures, TFA annual reports show

that about a third of operating costs are currently borne by the public (See Table 3). Notably, TFA launched a campaign for a direct allocation of $50 million in federal support for 2011.44 If such an allocation were made, and if TFA’s operating expenditures in 2011 were similar to 2008, a large majority of TFA’s funding would be from the federal government and other taxpayer sources…..

As result of the TFA model, a participating district has to pay twice for new teachers—the outsourced costs of teacher recruitment and training by TFA,

costing thousands of dollars per teacher, along with the fixed costs of in-house provision of human resources for all other teachers in the district. These costs are exacerbated by the high turnover of TFA teachers, leading districts to have to replace nearly all TFA teachers after three years of service. As a result, the actual costs of TFA to the public are higher than the direct local, state, and federal allocations…

Recommendations

Based on these findings, it is recommended that policymakers and districts:

 Support TFA staffing only when the alternative hiring pool consists of

uncertified and emergency teachers or substitutes.

 Consider the significant recurring costs of TFA, estimated at over

$70,000 per recruit, and press for a five-year commitment to improve

achievement and reduce re-staffing.

 Invest strategically in evidence-based educational reform options that

build long-term capacity in schools.

Teach For America: A False Promise
June 9, 2010

Alternative teacher training program yields costly turnover while doing little to improve student achievement

Contact: Teri Battaglieri (517) 203-2940; greatlakescenter@greatlakescenter.org
Julian Vasquez Heilig (512) 471-7551; jvh@austin.utexas.edu

EAST LANSING, Mi., June 9, 2010 -- Teach For America has generated glowing press reports, but the evidence regarding whether this alternative teacher-training program works is very unclear, according to a policy brief released today by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The brief, Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence, is written by professor Julian Vasquez Heilig of the University of Texas at Austin, and professor Su Jin Jez of California State University, Sacramento. It offers a comprehensive overview of research on the Teach For America (TFA) program, which recruits graduates of elite colleges to teach for two years in hard-to-staff low-income rural and urban schools.

Overall, Jez and Heilig argue, the impact of TFA teachers on student achievement is decidedly mixed and dependent upon the experience level of the TFA teachers and the group of teachers with whom they are compared.

Studies show that TFA teachers perform fairly well when compared with one segment of the teaching population: other teachers in the same hard-to-staff schools, who are less likely to be certified or traditionally prepared. Compared with that specific group of teachers, TFA teachers "perform comparably in raising reading scores and a bit better in raising math scores," the brief's authors write.

Conversely, studies which compare TFA teachers with credentialed non-TFA teachers find that "the students of novice TFA teachers perform significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers," Heilig and Jez write. And in a large-scale Houston study, in which the researchers controlled for experience and teachers' certification status, standard certified teachers consistently outperformed uncertified TFA teachers of comparable experience levels in similar settings.

The evidence suggests that TFA teachers do get better—if they stay long enough to become fully credentialed. Those experienced, fully credentialed TFA teachers "appear to do about as well as other, similarly experienced, credentialed teachers in teaching reading ... [and] as well as, and sometimes better than, that comparison group in teaching mathematics," Heilig and Jez write.

However, more than half of TFA teachers leave after two years, and more than 80 percent after three. So it's impossible to know whether those who remain have improved because of additional training and experience—or simply because of "selection bias:" they were more effective than the four out of five TFA teachers who left. The authors note that this high turnover of TFA teachers also results in significant recurring expenses for recruiting and training replacements.

Heilig and Jez urge schools and districts to devote resources to a number of proven remedies for improving achievement, including mentoring programs that pair novice and expert teachers, universal pre-school and reduction in early grade class size.

The authors conclude, "Policymakers and stakeholders should consider TFA teachers for what they are – a slightly better alternative when the hiring pool is comprised primarily of uncertified and emergency teachers – and continue to consider a broad range of solutions to reshape our system of education to ensure that all students are completing schools with the education they need to be successful."

Find the policy brief, Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence, on the web at:http://www.greatlakescenter.org.

This policy brief was produced by the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Why I Don’t Like Teach For America

I found this link on TFA at a Brown University panel discussion

At the discussion, panelist James Campbell from the Africana Studies Dept. read a few excerpts from Bil Johnson’s sharply critical opinion piece “Why I Don’t Like TFA.” Professor Johnson was a professor in the Education Department at Brown, and now he’s at Yale. We invited him to come down to see the panel, but he had to attend another conference that night (although he did say that he heard about how the discussion went, and was sorry to have missed it. But I digress). However, below I’ve pasted the entirety of “Why I Don’t Like Teach for America.” It’s funny, but it’s also very incisive. He raises some excellent points and asks very important questions.

Why I Don’t Like TFA, Version 1.1 - By Bil Johnson

#1) As a professional teacher/educator, I find it denigrating to the Profession of Teaching to say that people can be prepared to teach in 5 to 6 weeks. Simply b/c people have attended Brown or Yale or wherever may mean they are intelligent, it does not mean they have some innate understanding of the complexity of teaching and learning that genuine teacher preparation programs instill in their candidates. It is offensive and pretentious to think otherwise.

#2) Equally denigrating to the profession is the notion that teaching is something you can “dabble in.” Oh, do it for a couple of years, assuage your (usually white/suburban/privileged) guilt and then get on with your “real life” in law school or business school or wherever. Teaching, you see, isn’t all that important and anybody can do it for a couple of years (which, by the way, their own statistics don’t particularly bear out — check out what their attrition rate is in the first year – and consider it’s their statistics, so adjust for reality). How do we feel about “Nurses for America?” Or, better, “Doctors for America?” The lack of respect for teaching as a profession is historic — based on seeing it as a “feminine” profession and one that does not pay what “real” jobs pay. Teach for America continues to support that historic disrespect for the profession by treating it as something one can do until something “better” (read high paying, more prestigious, etc.) comes along.

#3) I find TFA patronizing, patriarchal, and colonialist. It continues a “wonderful” tradition of upper class noblesse oblige which says, essentially, “Well, we will take a little time out of our (important) lives to help you poor children of color (briefly) and then we’ll leave (because we can!).”

#4) Little or no decent support is supplied to the Novice Teachers who go out into some of the most difficult and stressful schools in our cities. Anyone who knows teaching will tell you that support and genuine mentoring are essential in the first few years of teaching.

#5) Many districts see TFA “volunteers” as fodder (there’s a wonderful piece in The Onion, online, about this) and shift them around willy-nilly to “fill in” gaps they have in staffing. How does that help anyone — and, particularly, how does it help the students these “volunteers” are supposed to be serving?

#6) TFA perpetuates the miserable conditions in urban schools. It allows politicians to claim, “Look, something’s being done” when, in fact, no significant change is occurring. In all its time in existence TFA has NEVER made a policy statement that their real goal is to improve urban schools to the point of making TFA unnecessary. Their motto, if they were sincere in improving schools, should be “Put us out of business.” But that’s not their goal. TFA has become a cottage industry, and a self-perpetuating one at that, which allows the mass of society to look the other way and essentially say, “See, there’s really no hope for those urban schools (and those children who are, clearly, “unteachable”). Teach for America keeps trying and there’s no progress.” TFA is, at best, a medicated band-aid but a band-aid nonetheless. Our urban schools are hemorrhaging and TFA is a band-aid — and that’s fine because in the world of Fox News, that looks as if an effort is being made. It’s clearly the fault of the children and their families if there’s no decrease in the “achievement gap.”

#7) For those who survive TFA and then join their ranks as recruiters or “Executive Directors” or whatever, their allegiance to the organization is cult-like. It is not a Learning Organization whose goal is to better the schools. Like some evangelical sect, their goal is to recruit more members, receive more recognition (usually from right-wing “do away with public schools” types), and continue to sing their own praises as saviors of some sort (“If we weren’t there, who would be?” Which begs the deeper questions about “How can we actually fix the system instead of putting our TFA finger in the dyke?”).

Please feel free to share this with anyone who expresses an interest in joining Teach for America.

=====

Can you really “dabble” in teaching? Is TFA denigrating to the teaching profession? Has TFA become a cult-like non-profit whose goal is self-perpetuation rather than the eradication of those structural equality it claims to address?

In her paper on Teach for America (which we published in the Spring ‘07 BPR), panelist Erin Brown said it best when she argued that TFA should try to reform itself out of existence.

Oh, and finally, here’s a link to that Onion article Professor Johnson mentioned (it’s hilarious): http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30911