Teach for America and Teacher Quality

Over the last 3 years my school hired 6 Teach for America teachers and 2 left before completing their two year commitment (one after a year, one after a semester).  Many education reformers believe the quality of education is inadequate because the best and brightest choose other professions over education and so the remaining pool of teachers is less than what we need.  TFA recruits and accepts people largely based on GPA and extracurricular achievement; the best and the brightest will be the best teachers.  And it's a compelling argument that an ivy graduate will learn a new skill faster than someone from a community college.

The two teachers who quit were truly cream of the crop: great schools, great achievements, great resumes.  (I don't know if other teachers quit at lower or higher rates.)  TFA in NYC averages about a 90% retention rate over the 2 year committment.  While external achievement may proxy successfuly for teaching achievement in the aggregate, there is a lot of variation too.

Many educators say that it takes 5 years to be a good teacher, and despite all of the public rhetoric on intrinsic ability determining teaching quality, both the Obama and McCain education plans focused on speeding teachers' ascent of the learning curve. 

Here is the text from the Obama plan:

• Expand service scholarships to underwrite high-quality preparation for teachers.
• Support ongoing improvements in teacher education to enable teachers to meet the challenges of their demanding jobs,
• Provide mentoring for beginning teachers so that more of them stay in teaching and develop sophisticated skills.
• Create incentives for shared planning and learning time for teachers.
• Support career pathways in participating districts that provide ongoing professional development and reward accomplished teachers for their expertise.

And here is the text from the McCain Plan (go figure the McCain website is down, but I still had his education platform saved as a pdf):

Provide Funding For Needed Professional Teacher Development. Where federal funds are involved, teacher development money should be used to enhance the ability of teachers to perform in today's technology driven environment. We need to provide teachers with high quality professional development opportunities with a primary focus on instructional strategies that address the academic needs of their students. The first 35 percent of Title II funding would be directed to the school level so principals and teachers could focus these resources on the specific needs of their schools.

One of the things that makes me uncomfortable in the education community is that these two approaches to maximizing teacher quality are often seen as mutually exclussive.  I hardly ever hear people in the TFA camp acknowledging the importance of experience and professional development, or education traditionalists even acknowledging the existence of intrinsic human capital (excpet indirectly when complaining about other teachers).

Even supposing an extreme version of the alternative-certification narrative (read: teaching achievement is primarily determined by intrinsic ability as measured by traditional indicators), there is still an upper limit on the amount of the "best and brightest" we can lure away from other fields.  To wit: even if we get all the best and brightest, they will still be only a fraction of the overall community of teachers, and the traditional focus on teacher quality improvement, classroom-size reduction, etc. still seems necessary to close the achievement gap.

Michelle Rhee and TFA-style Education Reform

A good way to understand Teach For America and the standards based education reform movement is by reading this Time article on DC Superintendent and TFA Alum, Michelle Rhee.  Her approach to reform is summed up in a few key ideas:

• the quality of teachers is the most important factor for student success
  
• the quality of current teachers is low because unions make bad teachers unfireable and good teachers unrewardable
  
• students must be rigorously tested to make sure they are learning
  
• teachers must be rewarded and punished for their students' performance
  
• ed schools don't create good teachers; intelligent, competent people do
  

The article explains how Rhee has enacted her accountability based agenda:

In the year and a half she's been on the job, Rhee has made more changes than most school leaders--even reform-minded ones--make in five years. She has shut 21 schools--15% of the city's total--and fired more than 100 workers from the district's famously bloated 900-person central bureaucracy. She has dismissed 270 teachers. And last spring she removed 36 principals, including the head of the elementary school her two daughters attend in an affluent northwest-D.C. neighborhood.

It also showcases some good research backing Rhee's approach:

The data back up Rhee's obsession with teaching. If two average 8-year-olds are assigned to different teachers, one who is strong and one who is weak, the children's lives can diverge in just a few years, according to research pioneered by Eric Hanushek at Stanford. The child with the effective teacher, the kind who ranks among the top 15% of all teachers, will be scoring well above grade level on standardized tests by the time she is 11. The other child will be a year and a half below grade level--and by then it will take a teacher who works with the child after school and on weekends to undo the compounded damage. In other words, the child will probably never catch up.

But the article also reveals Rhee making some very polarizing comments.  Teachers unions often complain that standards reform people disparage the profession.  Rhetoric like this characterizes the debate:

"The thing that kills me about education is that it's so touchy-feely," she tells me one afternoon in her office. Then she raises her chin and does what I come to recognize as her standard imitation of people she doesn't respect. Sometimes she uses this voice to imitate teachers; other times, politicians or parents. Never students. "People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning,'" she says with a drippy, grating voice, lowering her eyelids halfway. Then she snaps back to herself. "I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job." [emphasis added]

This tone is problematic for standards based reform people and TFA.  I don't know in what other professional setting you can publicly and derisively mimic others in the workplace.  Many New York City teachers, including alternatively certified ones, already resent an implicit message they see in the program: that teaching is a 2 year volunteer stint before you start your real job, and that learning is poor because teachers are bad.  For a political platform premised on the deficient quality of existing teachers, its people don't exercise a lot of tact.

If you want to get a skewed but decent overview of the major education policy debate, this is a good read.