Education Reform: Pot, meet Kettle

Here's something that frustrates me about academia: an individual "authority" shouting down from her Ivory Tower to criticize an alternative model that has been shown to function well in the real world, outside the traditional walls of the academy. The latest issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education includes a somewhat negative piece about Teach for America. Granted, I am a TFA alum (Baltimore '02), and may be a bit biased about the impact of the corps. Below are some of the criticisms from education academics:

1. Teach for America does not adequately prepare its teachers for the schools they will enter.
2. Teach for America corps members do little good by only completing their two year teaching commitment and then moving on to other careers.
3. Teach for America is not a viable solution to the education crisis in the United States.

In response to these critiques, I will concede that I do not completely agree with everything that Teach for America as an institution has done. But, I do strongly believe that in essence TFA works and has made a significant change in the direction of the education reform conversation in this country. With that, my responses to the above:

1. The 5-week TFA Institute completed the summer before a corps member's first year of teaching is quite literally, a crash course, aka teacher boot-camp. Did I feel that I was prepared to teach by the end of the summer? Not really. But I do know that TFA is constantly reflecting and revising their materials to improve the summer training. This year they will include separate science pedagogy instruction, which was no where to be found when I completed my training in summer of 2002. In addition, I was teaching in a school with other first year teachers, some of whom were part of an alternative certification cohort, some who had formal teacher training in college. I can say, hands down, myself and the other TFA teachers in my school performed as well, if not better, in improving student achievement than these other teachers. And I believe this to be a major success of TFA's model.
2. I know, I know, I'm no longer teaching, therefore, what good am I doing for the education system? My experience in the corps drastically changed my outlook on my career path. I always intended to be an academic research scientist. Now I realize that teaching and education reform also must be part of my vocation. I see myself working both at the university level and the political level (i.e. volunteering, grant writing, policy making) to make change. Many, many other of my fellow corps members are still teaching. And the others are making an impact in fields like medicine, law, and business. The TFA model of building a movement of leaders in all fields that recognize the great need to overcome educational inequity in the US in our lifetime is working. I am proof of that.
3. As far as whether Teach for America can be a solution to the crises that our education system faces, I don't think it's the silver bullet. However, I'm not sure what else has been proposed that is working. This is where disparaging comments from the academics in education really start to bug me. If they have the answer to education reform, what or where is it? Especially in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) how many teachers are the schools of Ed producing and sending to the schools of highest need? As a chemistry teacher in Baltimore I know that many of my students had other science and math teachers with no training in the subject mater (physics, upper level mathematics) they were teaching! Until the schools of Education can produce the necessary numbers of highly qualified science and math teachers, programs like Teach for America, which heavily recruit top science and math undergraduates to apply, are the only real solution to the problem. Programs like UTeach at University of Texas and others, which were featured in Science magazine recently, are a start, but UTeach is a program run outside the traditional education academies.

In the end, I believe that those in the academy must embrace alternative solutions and work with them towards a common goal. It is very easy to discuss limitations of a novel model over the traditional one. Unfortunately, the traditional model has yet to stem the tide of the problem, especially as our education system falls farther and father behind in science and mathematics.