Teach For America Research Articles

‘Shit shows’ or ‘like-minded schools’: charter schools and the neoliberal logic of Teach For America

Over the past three decades, two neoliberal educational reform efforts have emerged in tandem – the charter school movement and Teach For America (TFA). This paper critically examines the relationship between these entities through the lens of TFA corps members placed in charter schools, and explores two types of schools described by interviewees, namely, ‘shit shows,’ and ‘like-minded schools.’ Grounded in corps members’ teaching experiences, this paper argues that even at its best, the close partnership between TFA and charters can create a mutually reinforcing educational subculture that is isolated from broader educational discourses and practices. At its worst, this partnership can result in the ill-advised ‘propping up’ of under-funded, mismanaged, ill-equipped charters that might otherwise struggle to find adequate staffing and, consequently, close. This paper suggests that these two tendencies – toward corps members’ insularity and poor placement – have the potential to conflict with the charter movement’s and TFA’s stated purposes of improving the quality of schooling for disadvantaged and marginalized students.

Teach for America Placement and Teacher Vacancies: Evidence from the Mississippi Delta

Background/Context Teach for America (TFA) represents an influential yet controversial preparation route for new teachers. In recent years, TFA has received criticism from traditionally trained teachers and schools of education on the basis that they are crowding out or taking positions away from non-TFA teachers. Despite this criticism, research on TFA has tended to focus on its impact on student outcomes rather than on its implications for teacher labor markets. Research Questions This study explores the relationship between TFA placement in school districts in the Mississippi Delta and district advertised vacancies to provide the first evidence on the impact of TFA on teacher labor market outcomes. The questions addressed include the following: What is the relationship between TFA presence in a Mississippi school district and the number of district vacancies advertised through the state board of education? Do these relationships vary by characteristics of the vacancy such as grade level or subject area? Setting This study uses data on school districts in the state of Mississippi for an 11-year period from 2001 through 2011. Research Design This study utilizes two primary analytic strategies. The first encompasses school district and year fixed effects with a series of time-varying control variables to identify the impact of TFA placement off changes in the use of TFA by districts over time. The second approach capitalizes on an abrupt increase in the presence of TFA in Mississippi starting in 2009 by using a difference-in-differences design. A series of robustness and sensitivity checks are also included. Findings/Results The results indicate that the presence of TFA in a district predicts approximately 11 fewer advertised vacancies per year per district and that each additional TFA teacher placed in a district predicts approximately one less advertised vacancy. Conclusions/Recommendations The results indicate that in the Mississippi Delta, TFA appears to be filling teacher vacancies. This suggests that the continued use of TFA by districts may be a viable solution to addressing teacher shortages.

Teach For India: Marketing an Idea

In 2008, Shaheen Mistri, founder of the nonprofit Teach For India (TFI), was grappling with applying and adapting the business and recruitment models of the successful U.S.-based Teach For America and UK-based Teach First to meet the challenges of the education sector in India. The case provides a review of the U.S.- and UK-based models, as well as an analysis of the factors that drove their growth in their respective markets. However, the adaptation of these models to create one that could succeed in the Indian context was not straightforward. The case describes a number of ways the challenges in India differ from those in the United States and United Kingdom—namely, the size and magnitude of educational inequity, the motivations of undergraduate students as potential teacher-volunteers, the part that parents play in making career decisions for their children, and the attitudes of school officials.Students reading the case will discuss the roles of various constituencies involved in these models. After identifying how crucial constituencies are served by the U.S. and UK models, the students will then brainstorm concrete ways that these models could be adjusted for India so Mistri could successfully recruit her program's first cohort of TFI fellows Understand that crucial constituencies and value propositions often change as a for-profit or nonprofit business moves from one country (or part of the world) to another Apply the disciplines of market positioning of for-profit businesses (target market selection, frame of reference, and point of difference or superiority) to a nonprofit business Create value propositions for the various constituencies of a nonprofit organization, including volunteers, funders, and aid recipient

The Impact of Teach for America on Non-Test Academic Outcomes

Recent evidence on teacher productivity suggests that teachers meaningfully influence non-test academic student outcomes that are commonly overlooked by narrowly focusing on test scores. Despite a large number of studies investigating the Teach For America (TFA) effect on math and English achievement, little is known about non-tested academic outcomes. Using administrative data from Miami-Dade County Public Schools, we investigate the relationship between being in a TFA classroom and five non-test student outcomes commonly found in administrative datasets: days absent, days suspended, GPA, classes failed, and grade repetition. We validate our use of non-test student academic outcomes to assess differences in teacher productivity using the quasi-experimental teacher switching methods of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff ( 2014 ) and fail to reject the null hypothesis of unbiasedness in most cases in elementary and middle school, although in some cases standard errors are large. We find suggestive evidence that students taught by TFA teachers in elementary and middle schools were less likely to miss school due to unexcused absences and suspensions compared with students taught by non-TFA teachers in the same school, although point estimates are very small. Other outcomes were found to be forecast-unbiased but showed no evidence of a TFA effect.

Political determinants of philanthropic funding for urban schools

ABSTRACTK-12 education philanthropy has grown rapidly since 2000, with major funders like the Gates and Walton foundations expanding their grant portfolios. We examine whether and to what degree place-based characteristics help explain funding for local school districts. Using an original database of grants from the 15 largest K-12 education foundations to the largest school districts in 2000, 2005, and 2010, we present three main findings. First, the set of districts receiving the most funds varies over time. Second, foundations tended to give to sites with capacity for reform in 2000; yet by 2010, funders increasingly targeted places embracing philanthropic priorities, including charter schools and Teach for America. Finally, major foundations increasingly gave grants to same districts as other major funders—producing a convergent pattern of funding. These rapid and dramatic changes introduce questions about how foundations and districts interact and whether these funds will produce sustained reforms.

An Entrepreneur in the Educational World (a): Principal Matthew Landahl

This case reviews the facts behind an effort to transform an underachieving elementary school through the lens of the school principal and the district superintendent. Written from two different perspectives, the principal's A case (UVA-OB-1004) has Matthew Landahl, a principal at a high functioning school at central office meeting with superintendent and talking about his experiences as a Teach For America (TFA) teacher and how much he missed it. The superintendent asks him if he would be interested in taking on the principalship at Greer Elementary, explaining that it was about as close to a TFA school as he would find in a small city. Although he was told to take some time and think about it, Landahl immediately imagined himself in the role of principal at Greer and the challenges he would face. Would the position at Greer really offer the kind of leadership challenges and rewards he wanted? If he took the job, what strategies would be needed to help Greer students and staff succeed? And what kind of support would he need to ask of the superintendent? This case has been taught in an executive education school turnaround program for district administrators and principals. It could also be used in a first-year MBA leadership and organizational behavior course as an introduction on creating value through people-management and design. Excerpt UVA-OB-1004 August 30, 2010 AN ENTREPRENEUR IN THE EDUCATIONAL WORLD (A): PRINCIPAL MATTHEW LANDAHL A former Teach for America educator and a seasoned principal at a middle-class school in Charlottesville, Virginia, Matthew Landahl had all the right credentials. And he was bored. Although he was grateful for the opportunity to hone his leadership skills in a well-heeled, high-functioning elementary school, it was time for a change. Landahl intended to put some feelers out back home in Chicago about jobs openings for principals and decided it was only fair to let Albemarle County Public School Superintendent Pamela Moran know. They met in her office in the spring of 2007. As the two talked, the superintendent brought up Mary Carr Greer Elementary (Greer)—one of the two Title I elementary schools in the county system. Why was she talking to him about Greer? Was she thinking of making some changes there? If that school opened up, would he even be interested? . . .

An Entrepreneur in the Educational World (a): Superintendent Pamela Moran

The superintendent's A case has Pamela Moran concerned about losing one of her up-and-coming administrative stars, who had accepted the position of principalship at Greer two years earlier. Moran had also heard whispers that she may lose a former TFA educator and a seasoned principal in a middle-class school because of his desire to lead in a more challenging environment. What should she do about the principal who was struggling and the principal who was bored? Would it make sense to offer the at-risk school leadership position to the ex-TFA principal? And if he accepted, what expectations would she set for him? And what about the school? What level of support should Moran provide Greer relative to the other 27 schools in the district? This case has been taught in an executive education school turnaround program for district administrators and principals. It could also be used in a first-year MBA leadership and organizational behavior course as an introduction on creating value through people-management and design. Excerpt UVA-OB-1006 August 30, 2010 AN ENTREPRENEUR IN THE EDUCATIONAL WORLD (A): SUPERINTENDENT PAMELA MORAN The irony, that Mary C. Greer Elementary in Charlottesville Virginia was named after a woman of color who devoted her life to educating youth, and that economically disadvantaged students at the school, many of whom were also of color, consistently failed to achieve ratings necessary to pass the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) benchmarks in either reading and mathematics or both, was not lost on Albemarle County School Superintendent Pamela Moran. Nor was the staffing problem she found herself thinking about during the spring of 2007. One of her most passionate, well-liked, and promising administrative stars had accepted the position of principalship at Greer two years earlier, and Moran was worried she was going to lose her because of that experience. In addition, Moran had heard whispers that she may also lose a former Teach for America (TFA) educator and a seasoned principal in a middle-class school because of his desire to lead in a more challenging environment. What should she do about the principal who was struggling and the principal who was bored? Would it make sense to offer the at-risk school leadership position to the ex-TFA principal? And if he accepted, what expectations would she set for him? And what about the school? What level of support should Moran provide Greer relative to the other 27 schools in the district? . . .

Sisyphean neoliberal reforms: the intractable mythology of student growth and achievement master narratives within the testing and TFA era

Neoliberal discourses defining and measuring ‘student achievement’ and ‘teacher success’ through myopic high-stakes testing-driven criteria for ‘accountability,’ can perpetuate the very inequities these reforms purport to address. Nested within a five-year inquiry using grounded theory to investigate experiences of Teach For America (TFA) Corps members learning to teach during a district-wide testing cheating scandal, the researchers used Atlas.ti, to analyze 5897 daily reflections written during a yearlong, field-based, initial certification course. Iterative phases of constant comparative analysis utilized a multi-rater/multi-stage/multi-year analysis. This manuscript focuses on the dominant theme of ‘Student Growth and Achievement,’ as defined, conceptualized, and experienced by 38 TFA novice teachers and the co-occurrences of this theme with other dominant themes within this data-set. Findings indicate circumscribed understandings of student growth and achievement which shaped teacher and student engagement, including: (a) narrowing of the scope of teaching by spending significant time atomizing testable skills, drilling students, and administering tests, (b) creating limiting expectations and deficit views of learners, families, and communities when the drill-then-test pedagogy did not produce high test scores, and (c), causing and exacerbating affective distress for teachers and students. Implications for policy-makers, TFA, and educational leaders worldwide are considered.

Supplying Disadvantaged Schools with Effective Teachers: Experimental Evidence on Secondary Math Teachers from Teach For America

AbstractTeach For America (TFA) is an important but controversial source of teachers for hard‐to‐staff subjects in high‐poverty U.S. schools. We present findings from the first large‐scale experimental study of secondary math teachers from TFA. We find that TFA teachers are more effective than other math teachers in the same schools, increasing student math achievement by 0.07 standard deviations over one school year. Addressing concerns about the fact that TFA requires only a two‐year commitment, we find that TFA teachers in their first two years of teaching are more effective than more experienced non‐TFA teachers in the same schools.

Review of Learning from counternarratives in Teach for America: Moving from idealism towards hope

Review of Learning from counternarratives in Teach for America: Moving from idealism towards hope

Teacher Attrition and Mobility During the Teach for America Clustering Strategy in Miami-Dade County Public Schools

Retaining effective teachers is a key policy priority nationwide, particularly in districts that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students. We investigate whether a change in the Miami region’s Teach for America (TFA) placement strategy was accompanied by changes in teacher attrition and mobility decisions. Our results suggest that the increased concentration of TFA corps members in schools was associated with a reduction in TFA mobility across schools after the first year of service, but showed no association with the overall retention of corps members in the district after the 2-year commitment. We also find that TFA corps members eventually retained beyond the 2-year commitment performed substantially better in mathematics during their first 2 years of teaching: evidence of positive selection into postcommitment retention.

Teaching for All? Teach For America's Effects Across the Distribution of Student Achievement

ABSTRACTThis article examines the effect of Teach For America (TFA) on the distribution of student achievement in elementary school. It extends previous research by estimating quantile treatment effects (QTE) to examine how student achievement in TFA and non-TFA classrooms differs across the broader distribution of student achievement. It also updates prior distributional work on TFA by correcting for previously unidentified missing data and estimating unconditional rather than conditional QTE. Consistent with previous findings, results reveal a positive impact of TFA teachers across the distribution of math achievement. In reading, however, relative to veteran non-TFA teachers, students at the bottom of the reading distribution score worse in TFA classrooms, and students in the upper half of the distribution perform better.

Professionalization of Teaching in America: Two Case Studies Using Educational Research Experiences to Explore the Perceptions of Pre-Service Teachers/Researchers

In 2013-2015, two faculty-led educational research studies were conducted, aided by five undergraduate preservice teachers/researchers (PSTR). Faculty-researchers designed a qualitative phenomenological-inquiry based methodology to examine the PSTR perceptions regarding their respective research experiences with faculty. Triangulation of the data was sought from narrative text interview transcripts and response essays by PSTR prior to and after each respective study. Using content analysis techniques and coding, five themes emerged. PSTR reported an interest in the educational research topic and the need for positive relationships with faculty research mentors to begin and remain active with a research study. The results indicated PSTR valued learning with collaborative peers while completing their respective research studies. PSTR related self-efficacy with research skills due to their research experiences. Results indicated research experiences as a whole were professionally and personally transformative in nature. Discourse regarding research experiences to professionalize the teaching profession in America was explored.

Reconceptualizing Teach for America : An analytical review of Neoliberal reframing of teacher education and its implications for the teacher education in S. Korea

Reconceptualizing Teach for America : An analytical review of Neoliberal reframing of teacher education and its implications for the teacher education in S. Korea

The Power of the Network: Teach For America’s Impact on the Deregulation of Teacher Education

In this article, we illustrate the relationships between Teach For America (TFA) and the deregulation of university-based teacher education programs. We use policy network analysis to create a visual representation of TFA’s connections to individuals, organizations, and private corporations who are working to shift the way teachers are prepared. In doing this, we identify human capital dependents, jurisdictional challengers, and legislative supporters who are working independently and collectively to shift our national focus from teacher education to teacher training for those teachers serving students in marginalized communities.

Teach For America’s preferential treatment: School district contracts, hiring decisions, and employment practices

Teach For America (TFA) began in 1990 as an organization purportedly interested in working towards ameliorating a national teacher shortage by sending its corps members into urban and rural schools. In the decades that followed, especially during and immediately following a nationwide onslaught of teacher layoffs instigated by the 2008 Great Recession, teaching shortages no longer exist in many of the districts TFA continues to place corps members. In response to growing criticism, TFA has altered its public rhetoric, suggesting now that their “corps members” are better than traditionally trained teachers – including veteran teachers – and are hired only through equal hiring processes rather than being afforded preferential treatment. We analyze Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs) between TFA and regional school districts, TFA’s official literature, and public discourse to address the degree to which TFA is privileged in hiring practices. We provide evidence that school districts are contractually obligated to reserve and protect positions exclusively for corps members, jobs held by corps members are not a result of equal and open competition, corps member positions are specifically not limited to “so-called shortage areas,” and TFA’s partnership with charter schools and alumni of the organization have skewed hiring practices in favor of TFA over non-TFA teachers.

Cultivating political powerhouses: TFA corps members experiences that shape local political engagement

In recent years, Teach for America (TFA) has invested in developing corps members as leaders. Although TFA asks corps members for a two-year commitment, TFA celebrates the achievements of alumni who have gone on to careers in politics, public policy, and advocacy. Thus, many community leaders see the arrival of TFA corps members as having a greater impact than just inside the classroom. While expectations for corps members are often high both from TFA and from the communities they serve, we seek to understand whether and how corps members become actively engaged in the broader political life of their placement city. Do corps members find the city fertile with opportunities to solve problems and engage in civic and political life? Or will these corps members leave their placements, viewing the political and educational challenges as intractable due to larger city politics? Using data from a panel study of 2012 corps members in four mid-sized city TFA placement sites, this study examines how attitudes towards and engagement with local politics shift as a result corps members’ experiences. Our research indicates that commitments to local politics shift significantly. While some corps members report an increased commitment to local politics, a sizable group actually becomes less enthusiastic and involved. These shifts appear to be related to the perceived openness of the local political arena to newcomers, one’s teaching placement and the local actions of TFA spin-off organization Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE).

TFA and the magical thinking of the “best and the brightest”

This article draws on oral history testimonies to examine the experiences of participants in the inaugural 1990 cohort of Teach For America (TFA)—a group of young people dubbed the “best and brightest” of their generation and tasked with “saving” urban education. For 25 years, TFA has operated according to the principle of the “best and brightest,” in which it is assumed that participants’ personal qualities and prior academic achievement can stand in for deep professional knowledge and experience. Yet as our data show, the presumptions—that any “smart” person should be able to pick up teaching by doing it, that there is no specialized knowledge needed in order to teach, and that “outsiders” with little knowledge of a school community and its families can “swoop in” and “rescue” underserved students—ultimately set up and demoralized the participants with whom we spoke when they could not live up to such unrealistic expectations. Through participants’ words and experiences, framed in historical context, we raise questions about the myth of the “best and brightest,” the theory of action promoted by TFA, and what it takes to teach in urban classrooms.

Teach For America’s long arc: A critical race theory textual analysis of Wendy Kopp’s works

We read and analyzed 165,000 words and uncover a series of counter-stories buried within a textual corpus, authored by Teach For America (TFA) founder Wendy Kopp (Kopp, 1989, 2001; Kopp & Farr, 2011), that offers insight into the forms of racism endemic to Teach For America. All three counter-stories align with a critical race theory (CRT) framework. Specifically, we answer the following questions: What evidence of institutional and epistemological racism is exposed by a CRT textual analysis of TFA’s founding document and later works by Wendy Kopp? To what extent has TFA appropriated the language of culturally relevant pedagogy, while advancing an uninterrogated neoliberal ideology? And, to what extent does TFA’s contribution to a “culture of achievement” (Kopp & Farr, 2011) constitute an actual “poverty of culture” (Ladson-Billings, 2006a) that enacts real harms on communities of color?

Reframing Teach For America: A conceptual framework for the next generation of scholarship

In this article, we advance a conceptual framework for the study of Teach For America (TFA) as a political and social movement with implicit and explicit ideological and political underpinnings. We argue that the second branch of TFA’s mission statement, which maintains that TFA’s greatest point of influence in public education is not in classrooms, but in its facilitation of entry into leadership positions aimed at reshaping public schooling, can be better understood in terms of the organization’s: a) infusion of “policy entrepreneurs” into educational policymaking processes; b) cultivation of powerful networks of elite interests; c) promotion of “corporate” models of managerial leadership; and, d) racial and social class identities of its corps members that facilitate entry into leadership and policy networks. Our framework is informed by the extant research literature on TFA, interview data from more than 150 alumni and corps members, and our observations of TFA’s 20th Anniversary Summit in Washington, D.C., as an illustrative case of TFA’s messaging and general orientation toward educational reform. We conclude that this framework can help illuminate under-examined political and ideological motivations behind the organization’s activities.