Building the Movement to End Educational Inequity

Abstract

TEACH FOR America exists to address educational inequity--the stunning reality that in our nation, which aspires so admirably to be a land of equal opportunity, where one is born still largely determines one's educational outcomes. Despite plenty of evidence that children growing up in poverty can do well academically--when given the opportunities they deserve--the stark reality in our nation today is that the 13 million children growing up below the poverty line are already three grade levels behind children in high-income communities by the time they are 9 years old. Moreover, even the half of low-income children who do manage to graduate from high school are performing, on average, at the level of eighth-graders who live in affluent communities. Why do we have this problem? We believe that the foremost reason is that children in low-income communities face extra challenges of poverty that other children don't face, including lack of adequate health care and housing and lack of access to high-quality preschool programs. The situation is compounded by the fact that the schools they attend were not designed to put children facing extra disadvantages on a level playing field with students in other areas. These circumstances persist because our national policies and practices, driven by our national priorities, have not been sufficient to tackle either the socioeconomic challenges or the inadequacies in our school systems. At Teach for America, we know we can solve this problem because we see evidence in classrooms across the country that, when students growing up in poverty are given the opportunities they deserve, they excel. Knowing that we cannot expect every teacher to go above and beyond traditional expectations to the extent necessary to compensate for all the weaknesses of the system, however, we believe our best hope for a lasting solution is to build a massive force of leaders working from inside and outside education who have the conviction and insight that come from teaching successfully in low-income communities. We need such leadership working at every level of our school systems, working outside the system to address the socioeconomic factors that contribute so significantly to the problem, and working in policy and the sectors, such as journalism and business, that influence policy. In order to provide more students growing up in poverty today with excellent teachers and also to build this force of leaders, Teach for America recruits our nation's most promising future leaders, invests in the training and professional development necessary to ensure their success as teachers in our highest-poverty communities, and fosters their ongoing leadership as alumni. The evidence indicates that our approach is working. Last year, more than 18,000 graduates of top universities competed for the opportunity to teach in urban and rural communities. Our incoming corps of 2,900 members achieved an average GPA of 3.6; 95% of them held at least one leadership position in a campus activity. Twenty-eight percent of the corps members identify as people of color, and 29% are male. They come to this effort with a desire to reach the nation's most disadvantaged students, and based on the results of the most rigorous evaluation conducted to date, they are in fact teaching students who begin the year, on average, at the 14th percentile against the national norm. The research actually does not show that our teachers have less impact than fully certified teachers, as Megan Hopkins seems to suggest. Multiple rigorous studies, such as the one she cites by Thomas Kane, Jonah Rockoff, and Douglas Staiger, have actually found that certification is a weak predictor of effectiveness and that Teach for America teachers do as well as or better than those from traditional preparation routes. Moreover, the small to which she refers was conducted by Mathematica Policy Research; the random-assignment methodology used in that study is widely considered the gold standard in research. …