Op ed takes Teach for America to task

by David Safier

An op ed in Sunday's Republic questions the value of the Teach for America program and the success of its teachers. (Full disclosure: I'm friends with one of the authors, Carole Edelsky, a retired ASU prof, but I didn't know about the op ed until I saw it this morning.)

According to the authors,

Large-scale, peer-reviewed studies in Arizona and Texas – conducted under the auspices of prestigious research laboratories, involving thousands of teachers and over 100,000 students – show that the program's teachers are almost as good as poorly qualified (that is, uncertified) teachers at raising kids' reading scores and a bit better at raising kids' math scores.

But when comparing the program's teachers with fully qualified teachers, it's a different story. A 2010 study called Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence found "standard certified teachers consistently outperformed uncertified Teach For America teachers with comparable experience in similar settings."

Each study comes to about the same conclusion: The program's teachers are slightly better than the least prepared but far worse than the fully prepared. When the program's teachers take additional course work in education and get additional supervision, mentoring and experience, they improve.

My feelings about Teach for America are mixed, much like my feelings about charter schools. I like both concepts, but I'm not sure either works in the real world like I hoped it would.

An interesting side note to the op ed is that Jason Williams, one of the two Democratic candidates for Ed Supe (the other is Penny Kotterman) is a Teach for America alum — his 2 years of teaching experience were in the program — and he was the the exec director of Teach for America in Phoenix. Williams is more an advocate of alternative teacher certification than Kotterman, which fits with his TFA experience. The op ed suggests caution toward the notion that someone who is well educated and knowledgeable in subject matter can get a crash course in teacher education and step into a classroom ready to teach.