“What will you teach your students? App deadline this Friday!”
I was receiving emails like this from a Teach For America representative for several months, sending me video links of inspiring things TFA corps members are doing in the classroom and reminding me to finish my application. I never did end up finishing it.
Back in October, I was pretty excited to apply to TFA. I first learned about the organization while aimlessly perusing post-grad occupations at a career fair. It’s tempting to apply—there are numerous benefits and incentives to being a corps member. The application requirements are relatively minimal, and teaching experience is not necessary. The organization trains everyone for around five to seven weeks in the summer, with some summer school teaching experience built in.
Salaries are complete with full health benefits, not including the substantial number of financial and educational resources at your disposal. In addition to designating money to help corps members repay student loans, TFA allows corps members to defer monthly loan payments while in the program and will cover interest accrued on corps members’ loans. And when corps members finish the two-year commitment, they gain access to a huge network of graduate school and career opportunities, with corporations and universities actively recruiting TFA alumni. Without any clear post-graduation plan in mind, applying to Teach For America seemed like a great option.
But Teach For America’s goal is no longer to create lifelong teachers dedicated to delivering the best education possible to the most socioeconomically disadvantaged communities. Wendy Kopp’s original vision was to “mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life,” but that has completely changed. TFA now prioritizes its corps members and their personal and professional growth and development, not education and equality of opportunities for low-income students.
“We’re a leadership development organization, not a teaching organization.” – Wendy Kopp, Teach For America Founder
It’s easy to become disillusioned with the attractive idea that TFA is making a significant impact on the futures of low-income students. As TFA’s mission shifts, more and more inexperienced college graduates are funneled through the organization and placed in classrooms where they are generally unprepared to teach. While 88 percent of TFA teachers return to teach for their second year, only about 30 percent of TFA alumni continue to teach today. It’s detrimental to advertise teaching as a career stepping stone that will catapult you into more successful career elsewhere.
“We just never consented to our kids being part of Ms. Kopp's experiment, organization or political agenda.” – a mother of a student taught by TFA teachers who commented here.
Low-income communities recognize the impermanence of the TFA teacher, and it has a huge impact. The two-year teaching contract advertised to recent college grads as an attractive, noncommittal occupation can take a huge psychological toll on parents, other teachers, and students. Low-income schools consistently receive less funding and fewer resources (including teachers, teacher training, textbooks, and classrooms) than more affluent school districts.
Since TFA teachers are less expensive for schools to hire, they often replace more experienced teachers—teachers who have been teaching for longer, have had more extensive training, who have lived and worked in these communities for years and have committed their lives to education. And, although TFA just recruited its most diverse set of teachers this past year, a vast number of them are do not share the same socioeconomic backgrounds as the students they will be teaching.
TFA teachers are not given the tools to succeed when it comes to race and culture; with such a large focus on “teaching as leadership,” how can a young, inexperienced teacher with hardly any substantial training be an effective leader when s/he cannot effectively communicate with or relate to his/her students? Those who do not fully understand the lives and experiences of low-income students are simply not fully equipped to teach them.
In the absence of a better option, TFA has marginally helped with the shortage of teachers. The organization does staff the most in-need schools with teachers when these schools would not have them otherwise. But those both in support of and in opposition to Teach For America can agree that the American education system is in serious need of a structural overhaul. Low-income communities and people of color are systematically disadvantaged by the current state of the education system; the inequalities are asinine and undeniable. TFA’s efforts to address institutional inequalities is, in some ways, commendable, but it’s simply naive to believe that a nonprofit can fix them.
