I keep getting a lot of emails from Teach for America recruiters asking me to apply. I’d like to ask them to stop.
TFA has rapidly expanded, but likely at the expense of teachers who already have training in the field of education. Granted, TFA is placing some teachers in areas where there is a significant shortage, but it is also helping to expand privately funded charter schools.
In the 2010-11 school year, student enrollment in charter schools accounted for only 5 percent of students in the United States, according to data from the Department of Education. This is in contrast to a city like Chicago, where Catalyst Chicago, an education journal, reports that 59 percent of TFA teachers are in charter schools. This is troubling, considering Chicago experienced 50 public school closures last year. It doesn’t take a policy analyst to see who benefits there.
Teacher turnover is incredibly high for TFA teachers. A report from the Great Lakes Center, a group that researches education, found that more than 50 percent left the profession after two years and more than 80 percent left after three years. This may be good for schools who are looking for cheap and transient labor, but not so for students who would benefit from having a higher proportion of experienced teachers.
There is also something uncomfortable about an organization that sends mostly white (about 61 percent, according to TFA’s website), energetic and under-qualified teachers into high-need schools with the belief that they are going to change lives.
TFA teachers only have five weeks of preparation before they are thrust into the classroom full-time. Often, these classrooms are in high-need areas. Although my training in the Patton College of Education has been less than stellar, the experience I have had in the classroom for four years I feel has better prepared me than if I was only in a classroom for a summer before I started teaching.
I don’t blame my friends applying for TFA who genuinely want to teach, because it is one of the best routes for people coming out of college who do not have a teaching degree. The benefits of TFA are vastly preferable to the additional debt one would likely take on to obtain a master’s degree in education.
All that said, if TFA is still dying to have me apply (fingers crossed!), I do have a couple of suggestions.
One: Only allow TFA teachers to be placed in high-need public school districts and refrain from creating charters to place TFA teachers in. TFA can play an important stop-gap role when it is hard to find teachers for those areas, but TFA should not be placing teachers in areas where they are being laid off.
Two: Change the commitment to five years instead of two, and make the first year something akin to student teaching. Applicants should be serious about teaching and not view it as something they can do for two years as a resume-builder.
Until those things happen, I cannot, in good faith, apply for an organization whose values do not match my own.
Matt Farmer is senior studying political science and education. Do you agree with Matt about Teach for America? Email him at mf291209@ohiou.edu.
