For years, Teach For America has been criticized as a vanity project of the elite: a highly selective two-year foray into teaching the underprivileged for Ivy League graduates right before they enter corporate lives of investment banking, lawyerdom or suburban parenthood.
But the results are in: Teach For America works, and not just as an enlightening experience for college graduates attempting to explore the alien world of the impoverished. A new large-scale random assignment study, released this month by Mathematica Policy Research, suggests that TFA teachers saw more success in teaching secondary math classes than certified teachers.
“They were more effective across the board,” said Melissa Clark, a senior researcher at Mathematica, in an interview I conducted for USA Today. She noted that TFA teachers made gains with the students “equivalent to an additional 2.6 months of school for the average student nationwide.”
The study examined the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 school years and involved 4,573 students nationwide in eight states. Researchers randomly assigned students to a TFA teacher or a certified teacher for secondary school mathematics, and then compared end-of-year test scores. Even the least experienced TFA teachers outperformed the certified, experienced teachers.
True, this study does not examine a wide berth of TFA educators, who teach many different subjects at many different ages. There are TFAers in special education, ESL, and science. The study only examined middle and high school educators — and a significant amount of TFA teachers work with elementary schoolers. But high poverty schools have the most problems attracting qualified math teachers — lending legitimacy to the study as a gauge of TFA’s effectiveness.
TFA teachers are younger and less experienced than most certified teachers. They often have less training in math. They’re thrown into inner-city schools after five weeks of training. They’re less likely to have an advanced degree, though they probably went to a more selective school. So why do they appear to be more effective educators, at least in secondary math?
While TFA’s more cynical detractors may feel that the college graduates use TFA as a resume-builder, TFA teachers are, by and large, excited by the prospect of teaching. They may have stronger beliefs in the efficacy of education and children’s potential. In short, they’re less jaded.
TFA candidates also face an intense screening process. With an acceptance rate of less than 15 percent, getting in to TFA is comparable to admission at a top university.
Critics are still unsatisfied. “Sadly, Teach for America is a revolving door of inexperienced teachers for the students who most need a highly qualified one,” wrote Julian Heilig, associate professor of educational policy and planning at the University of Texas, in The New York Times. He refers to TFA as a “glorified temp agency.”
But here’s the secret: even with the high turnover rate, TFA teachers are still better at teaching compared to their certified counterparts.
“Even if [the school district] plan to repeatedly hire [a new TFA teacher],” says Clark. “They can still expect higher student achievement on average from hiring these Teach For America teachers rather than hiring a teacher from some other program who might remain teaching long term.”
Perhaps we should focus our criticism on the public education system that made TFA necessary — instead on TFA itself.
Teachers’ unions, for example, are mammoth organizations: financed and supported by 38 percent of the educators across the nation. In the rest of the workforce, 12 percent is unionized. While workers’ rights undeniably deserve protection, teacher’s unions tend to benefit their members, not the students.
On average it takes around two years and $200,000 to fire a bad teacher. Principals don’t even try. Once public teachers achieve seniority, it’s virtually impossible to fire them — and their salary continues to rise with every year they teach. A junior teacher, while possibly a more effective educator, will always be paid less.
TFA detractors worry that TFA participants steal the jobs that more experienced teachers could fill. But if the experienced teachers aren’t doing their job, a program like TFA becomes vital to educating children in high-poverty areas.
In recent years, public school teachers have been piling on their advanced degrees — seeking masters and doctorates in exchange for higher pay.
But according to the same Mathematica study, these extra courses don’t make much difference to a child’s education.
“For each additional 10 hours of coursework that teachers took during the school year, the math achievement of their students was predicted to drop by 0.002 standard deviations,” wrote the study. “These findings imply that a teacher who took an average amount of coursework during the school year, whether for initial certification or any other certification or degree, decreased student math achievement.”
In other words, the extra degrees have very little effect on how well a teacher teaches. Perhaps the time and money could be spent better elsewhere—on rewarding teachers for results, not for seniority or empty degrees.
In the meantime, continue to fill out your TFA applications. Rest assured, you’re making the world a better place.
Cara Newlon ’14 can be reached at cara_newlon@brown.edu.
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