For those who have never heard of Teach for America (TFA) before, it is a non-profit organization that places college graduates, regardless of major, in low-income classrooms in an effort to balance out the equity gap that exists in the education system. At first glance, this sounds like a great idea. This nation needs more teachers! However, is this really the way to do it?

The mission of TFA is "to enlist, develop and mobilize as many as possible of our nation’s most promising future leaders to grow and strengthen the movement for educational equity and excellence.” Only 6% of the participants in TFA were education majors in college. For the rest, the training they have in education occurs the summer before they begin teaching in a “multi-week program.”

As an education major, I find this to be completely frustrating and quite frankly insulting. No one can learn the proper skills to take the lead in a classroom, high-need or not, in one summer. I have just finished my sophomore year in Boston University’s School of Education and despite two years of rigorous classes, I still am not ready to take the lead in a classroom. While TFA provides the teachers with extra professional development and resources, is this really enough?

After spending multiple semesters in classrooms observing and learning from well-versed teachers, I simply do not trust someone who has not been formally trained to teach, even if they have a neuroscience degree from Harvard. As a college student, I have learned the least from professors with little or no education experience, as they do not tailor the information to students.

This year, I took a class called Mathematical Reasoning in the Elementary Grades where we learned how to explain mathematical concepts. Knowing how to do add, subtract, multiply and divide is not nearly enough to get by as a teacher. Do you know how to explain what multiplication actually is? Or, why we use the base 10 system? Or, what does the equal sign really mean? These are a few of the many mathematical questions we addressed over two full semesters of class. And this is just math!

How could one possibly learn to teach students to read, write, apply math and present other subjects appropriately from a multi-week program, and learn strategies for classroom management, and how to accommodate for students who are English language learner (ELL) students or have IEPs (and know what an Individualized Education Plan actually is) and how to write lesson plans?

The small amount of training provided to the TFA participants cannot possibly equip them for the classroom they are about to have full responsibility for. As a result, many TFA teachers do not continue to teach after their two-year contract is up because they have burned out from the stress because they were not ready for the challenge.

Not only are the TFA teachers going to be ill-equipped, but they will be working with the highest-need populations. Essentially you are asking the least qualified teachers to teach the students who need the best. This is one of the problems with the education system as a whole. The low-income communities are treated like experiments. I am by no means discrediting the character of the TFA teachers. I am sure that they have the best intentions and really want students to flourish.

Another problem is that TFA presents itself as a savior to these low-income communities and this perpetuates the idea that these communities need to be rescued. This is insulting. They do not need rescuing; they merely have a high demand for resources because they have been given so few resources in the past. If TFA teachers bring this bias (along with many others) with them into their classroom, it can have an extremely negative impact on the students and on the education system as a whole. Actions and language from teacher to student, or teacher to parent, may imply an insult or condescension if the teacher thinks they are superior to the community. These micro-aggressions would have the opposite of the desired effect of the program. I’m not saying that this is a problem in every instance, but it definitely occurs.

While the objectives and goals behind the Teach For America program and its participants are positive, the execution is not fantastic (to put it lightly). A more effective way to provide a more equitable education experience to students in low-income communities would be to seek out the highest qualified educators in the field and recruit them. Let’s not forget, all of those “non-traditional teachers” who come through the Teach For America program are taking jobs away from those who have dedicated four or more years to learning and studying how to become a teacher and who are passionate and dedicated to their students and the teaching profession!