Matthew Kramer, President of Teach for America, told us that Teach for America teachers:
- Come from a highly selective pool of talent, about one it 10 are accepted.
- Work 90 hours a week and are expected to have a no excuses approach.
- Are union members. They earn the same as any beginning teacher.
Some general takeaways from the 80-minute conversation
• Kramer’s presentation echoed several of the themes from the presentation by Peter Hutchinson of the Bush Foundation. For instance, Teach for America (TFA) at its core is about recruiting the best and brightest into teaching and providing ongoing support for teachers in the field.
• Both Kramer and Hutchinson emphasized improving teacher accountability measures. The measure should be how much academic progress does an individual student make during the academic year, not the No Child Left Behind yardstick of whether schools make adequate yearly progress.
• TFA tries to instill the strengths of good leadership (goal setting, continuous improvement, etc.) into teachers in a relatively short period of time, get them into the classroom and connected with mentor teachers. TFA program directors also support teachers in the field (one director per 30 teachers).
• TFA spends about $40,000 per teacher, half of that is for training and support. It uses student achievement data of teachers in the field to constantly revise its teacher selection process.
• TFA teachers:
• TFA is not in Minnesota, but the process is underway. It could begin as early as this fall with 40-50 teachers.
• Lynn Nordgren, the union head in Minneapolis, said MFT is supportive of Teach for America and so is Education Minnesota and the American Federation of Teachers.
• Kramer’s talk and the Q&A clearly hit a nerve. On one hand, some in the audience criticized teacher tenure and/or teacher attitudes that poor kids just can’t learn. Others felt the conversation became teacher bashing.
Kramer’s presentation
Observations
• By age 9, an average kid growing up in a low-income community has already fallen three grades behind in math and reading compared to their affluent peers. A nine year old in an affluent community reads chapter books. A nine year old in a low-income community can’t sound out a book like “Run Spot Run.” That’s not the severe situation, that’s an average situation.
• Kids growing up in a low-income community have a 50 percent chance of graduating from high school and a 10 percent chance of graduating from college. The high school graduates are likely to have the skills of an eighth grader.
• In Minnesota, the gap between rich kids and poor kids is astounding, it is like 50 percentile points. It is a shameful figure. It is the second highest gap in the county, after Connecticut.
Teach for America
Started based on an understanding of how this situation came to be.
1. Kids growing up in low-income communicates come to school with an unbelievable set of challenges relative to their peers in affluent communities
o Not eating breakfast, inadequate health care, parents don’t have education, parents working multiple jobs; crowded living conditions
2. Our school systems were not designed to solve that problem. They were not designed to take a kid who was three years behind by the time they were nine and catch them up multiple years in a given year. Schools do not have the length of day, do not have that aspiration, and are not set up to make that happen. It shouldn’t surprise us. Schools were designed to solve a different problem: How to take a middle class community and move kids ahead a year at a time.
3. Why do we let this happen? My sense talking to civic-minded reasonable people do not feel it is solvable. We have worked on schools for a long time. Sometimes, under the surface, there is a belief that poor kids cannot achieve at the same level. As a pragmatic country, if we have limited resources and energy, we should put our energy somewhere where it will work.
Against that backdrop, Teach for America does the following:
• It recruits the most talented future leaders of the country. One by one we talk them through this problem and convince them to put off their other plans and spend two years working 90 hours a week doing whatever it takes to catch kids up. Last year we recruited in 450 schools and had 33,000 one-on-one meetings. This last year we brought in 3,600 people to Teach for America out of 25,000 applicants.
• We train them how to be teachers in our particular brand of teaching. To go and figure out where kids are, and what it will take to advance them multiple years in a single year. It means working every minute of every day: bring the students in early, keep them late and get parents on your side.
• Coming in to Teach for America, about 10 percent say they are considering teaching or education as a career. Coming out of Teach for America, 67 percent stay in education for the rest of their lives. About half as classroom teachers, the others in school administration or professors.
• We channel this group of incredibly talented people into becoming educational leaders for the rest of their lives.
The first thing that happens for teachers entering Teach for America is the shocking reality of schools in low-income communities and the dire situation. Success requires good preparation. It requires finding a good mentor. If they succeed they discover what most people don’t know. This is entirely solvable problem. It is not the kids’ fault. It is not their parents’ fault. It is our collective fault. When you give the kids the opportunities they deserve, they achieve at the same level as affluent peers. When Teach for America teachers discover that, it makes them mad and it changes their lives.
Teach for America is an important part of a broader effort to make schools and educational opportunities fair and equal. It is not a magic bullet.
Question and Answers:
Q: Why isn’t Teach for America in Minnesota?
A: We might. We started 20 years ago looking for places with the highest level of poverty we started in New Orleans, New York, etc. Minnesota 20 years ago didn’t have all the problems that Minnesota has today. We are considering it now. We got a call from the State Board of Teaching two years ago asking us to contemplate it. We have been in conversation with school districts and prospective funders.
I would say there is a reasonable chance that Teach for America will come to Minnesota this coming fall.
Q Recruits?
A: There were 3,600 placed this year and 2,900 last year, so there is a little more than 6,000 in their two years right now. There are 14,000 alumni. This year applications are up 48 percent over last year. There will be 4,000-5,000 more next year.
Q: Impact on student achievement?
A: We are one of the most studied interventions in education in the country. There are different levels of methodological rigor. The challenge of evaluating TFA teachers is there is an enormous degree of non-randomness in how they are assigned in schools. A proper study needs random assignments. A randomized study was done once, about four years ago. It concluded that getting a TFA teacher was the equivalent of about an extra month in math and a slight change in reading scores. (He did not give a citation, here is one possible link: http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/Publications/PDFs/teach.pdf He also cited a recent Urban Institute study that said students of TFA teachers showed better end-of-year test results that those taught by experienced teachers. Here is a link: http://www.urban.org/publications/901157.html)
Studies show that TFA teachers’ students have either better results or the same results as traditional teachers’ students, and the more control involved in the studies, the more you see the results.
Q: Who pays? How do districts gain access?
A: School districts pay 10 percent of the costs. That is the fee we charge to make sure they want TFA teachers. [Amended answer: The federal government provides 15 percent, states provide 10 percent and a mix of corporations, individuals and foundations provide the rest.]
As for placements: First states need to request the program, then districts need to ask for TFA, then the principal needs to want to hire Teach for America folks. We start new sites off at about 50 new people a year. So if we come to Minnesota, we would be placing 40-50 new people per year here. Over time we tend to grow. NYC gets more than 500 new teachers a year.
Q: How are teachers selected?
A: They apply online. There are seven criteria we look for: Demonstrated track record of achievement; Perseverance (As things get harder, they lean in an work harder); Critical thinking skills; Organizational ability; Influencing and motivating skills (listening skills and customized conversation skills); Fit with our mission (want to join a movement to eliminate educational inequity); and respect for people in low-income communities.
The screening process includes a review of resume, transcript and two essays they write for us. We do phone interviews. Then we take the top half. We invite them to a full- day battery of interviews. They do sample teaching. We watch and score them. There is group discussion, individual interviews. By the time we are done, we take about 10 percent of those who apply.
Q: Do you see Teach for America as a long-term solution or is this what was have to do to change things so we don’t need a 90-hour week?
A: Two-part answer. TFA’s essence is not about the 90-hour workweek. It is about recruiting the most talented people in the country to give their lives to this cause. That is a long-term solution. I think the question of whether the people we recruit have to enter entirely overwhelming environments is short-term. I don’t think anyone thinks that is the way it should be. I have people ask me what I think of the view that things outside the school should be held partially responsible for what happens in school. It is obvious that that is true. (e.g. poverty, health care, nutrition and violence) But in the meantime, the teachers who accept no limitations or boundaries can make a difference. The right thing to do is both.
Q: Is TFA about changing teacher preparation?
A: We are not really engaged in teacher preparation issues broadly … the essence of our work is about whom we go after and what we do with them after we get them.
Q: How do we make the job more attractive without the prestige of Teach for America?
A: Honestly, people like prestige. I am not sure there is any reason that should not be part of the solution. Part of the answer is to find a way to make teaching have a brand that is attractive to people who have lots of options. TFA has done a good job at that. …
My take: I don’t see why we would frame the problem as, how can we make this work without Teach for America. I think Teach for America has a lot of little insights about what it takes to get people to teach.
Q: I am one of those licensed teachers. Working 90-hour weeks is not something that average teacher would find unusual. You are asking me to believe that you are putting these kids in, doing what I am doing, putting the same hours I put in and they are making no money.
A: They make the same money any first-year teacher would make. They make the same salary and benefits. All of our teachers are union members. My personal view is not that Teacher for America teachers should supplant other teachers or be a method for getting union labor out of districts. Districts need incredibly talented people. Teach for America is one very good source.
Q Licensed teachers are being laid off all over the state.
A Teach for America teachers cannot take a spot of an existing teacher. The only way to get hired is if there is an open vacancy. A teacher with bumping rights goes in first. This is not a union busting strategy. Lots of former Teach for America teachers are union leaders.
Q; (A long, multi-part question on curriculum and diversity.)
A: Curriculum: I don’t know very much about it. TFA operates in about 100 districts in 25 states. Each district has its own curriculum. I have a sense that the curriculum needs attention, which is not something we focus on.
Diversity: We heavily prioritize diversity in our recruiting. We find that teachers who share the backgrounds of their kids have the possibility of serving as an example of success. Colleges are not diverse: 5 percent of college graduates are African American and 5 percent are Latino Ten percent of the TFA Corp is African American and 6.5 percent is Latino, and nearly 30 percent are people of color. We do not have admissions preferences. We work hard campus-by-campus to recruit leaders of color.
Q: What kind of teacher training do you do?
A: First, they begin an online learning sequence, learning theory and child development. Then they come in for orientation. [Amended: Students go through our 5 week training institute, with student teaching in the mornings and intensive course work in how to be an effective teacher in the afternoons and evenings.] Students get an introduction to the district they are in. We have a group of 250 program directors, one for every 30 Corp members. They get into classrooms and observe. They go through student achievement data, give teachers feedback and serve as an educational leader if the Corp member doesn’t have one.
Q: Any longitudinal studies?
A: We have looked at doing one of those studies. But studies already show that four good teachers in a row versus four average teachers in a row leads to a 50-point gap. And the same teachers produce good results year after year and the same teachers produce bad results year after year. If you have one good teacher followed by four average teachers, four years later the effects are gone. The effort it would take to track our kids over a decade would be extraordinary. We trust the general wisdom of existing studies.
Q: Obama’s point person on education is Linda Darling-Hammond, a long-time critic of Teach for America.
A: President Obama has shown himself open to the idea of Teach for America. Also, he generally hasn’t made his views on education clear. I am sitting tight. I wouldn’t read anything into it yet.
Q: Interviews seem subjective. How do you test critical thinking? Your selection process seems to show that it works, how do you do it?
A: We are a data-based organization. We run the series of selection events. Every part of the interviews is scored. We get the results on the teachers’ student achievement levels a year later. Statisticians run models. They say, “This piece of the interview doesn’t predict student achievement. Throw it out and come up with something else.” Or, our front line coaches might say: “We are not screening effectively for this … “
We are definitely better than coin flipping on selection. It still requires an incredible amount of training and support. How do we screen for critical thinking? We give students a sample of student achievement data to interpret. They will give a diagnostic test to their students on the first day of the year. It’s a practical example of how you would do lesson plans based on data.
Q: The one thing I think TFA is doing, it is helping to change the culture in public schools. We have to change the culture in public schools right now. We need staff to believe that children can achieve and that have the will to do that no matter what and who do not take any excuses.
A: I appreciate that. I don’t think TFA changes the culture of a whole school system… School systems have to take on their own cultures. These are good issues for management and unions to work together on, to shape the culture that they want.
Q You need a critical mass of people thinking differently.
Q: Have you looked at what teachers do in the classroom to make a difference? Do you have a list of the seven or ten things that those teachers do?
A: Yes, we have a list for everything. For most of the first decade of Teach for America, most of the thinking about what good teaching looks like came from other people. Starting around 2000 we began investing what differentiates teachers getting great results. We looked at those getting astounding results.
We realized there were a handful of things that were completely different. It has formed the basis of Teaching as Leadership, our training curriculum, Great teachers are doing the same thing that great leaders do in any context.
• They pick a point they want to get to.
• They create a big, inspiring goal that everyone in the classroom understands is where they are trying to end up. It is the edge of what is possible. They get clear about what the kids will be able to do at the end of the year. They get everyone on the same page. This is a classroom on a mission to achieve a goal.
• They backwards plan to the goal.
• They run the plan.
• They work very hard. They have a truly limitless capacity. This is the unfortunate reality. It is not one year’s worth of work to close two years’ worth of gaps.
• Last, they continuously improve their effectiveness, changing their practice and approach based on how things worked out.
Q: Most districts have declining enrollments. Some have laid off teachers. Does that mean you can’t do TFA in some areas?
A: I have not ever seen a school district that doesn’t hire lots of new teachers every year in certain subjects, grades or schools. Minneapolis Public schools hired 200 new teachers last year. People don’t always know that. We don’t place teachers in individual spots in individual districts. Districts are hiring and we supply good teachers.
Q: What are the criticisms of Teach for America?
A: Some are problems of facts. Teach for America teachers aren’t good. That is a problem of fact. Low retention of TFA teachers, that is another problem of fact… Low-income schools have unbelievable teacher attrition. Over the first few years, TFA retention had better retention. Over time, it tends to fall. (But it depends on how you measure retention. If you count people who go to charter schools, stay in field as principals, etc. the retention rate is good.)
Some have philosophical critiques. Some criticisms are that this is a Band-aid. Are we propping up a system that is unjust and has unfair expectations of our teachers by putting people in who have unusual pain thresholds? At various times in its history, Teach for America has been controversial. That is less and less true.
Q: Is there a difference between existing and new program?
A: Teach for America looks similar everywhere. We don’t train locally.
Q: Teachers union representative comment
The union is not against any of this. We just want to make sure we are not kicking teachers to the curb. School Board member Pam Costain talked about the fact we need teachers who care about kids. I don’t want people thinking our teachers don’t care about kids. That is why they dig into their own pockets. It is a bigger picture than that. We all have work to do. The more we say, “This is all on the teachers’ back,” the less change we will see. Teacher mentoring is key in the beginning. We had the residency program. We no longer have money for …
Q: How much support does TFA provide for each teacher?
A: Our total investment in every teacher is about $40,000. Some is recruiting. About half is training and support.
We have a lot of common ground between the residency model and TFA training, there is 90 percent overlap in the theory of those two ideas. Both provide serious investment after a teacher starts teaching …
Q: It is not that teachers don’t care about kids, but some don’t believe that low-income kids can’t succeed. How do you immunize TFA teachers from that prevailing message?
A: I have met a lot of teachers. I haven’t met a teacher who doesn’t care about their kids. I have met teachers who think this is not a solvable problem. Interesting thing, in TFA the answer has evolved. Ten years ago this was a hard thing to do. Now there are a lot of examples of schools that put kids on equal playing fields. We find if we show students enough of this stuff, when they realize this is solvable they will do whatever it takes to get there.
Q You talked about the role of prestige in teaching. Why isn’t it as hard to get into a school of teaching as it is law school?
A: I don’t understand all the issues at educational schools. There are clearly issues. They clearly over-graduate graduates in certain fields. Our selectively is related to our ability to get tens of thousands of applications. When they tell their mom, they can say it was hard to get into.
Q: In north Minneapolis, a lot of parents have been taking their students out of the schools. I am a child of a union member. Tenure is the biggest impediment to educating children. Like In any profession, there are horrid teachers. They can’t get rid of them. Do you ever have teachers who should be in a different occupation? What do you do?
A: We don’t do anything. We don’t discourage the districts from doing whatever they should do, either. The teachers are part of the union and the district. We are not in the middle of that transaction. I fully agree people who are bad teachers should not be teaching. There is debate on the mechanism to remove them. I am not an expert on the issue.
Q: (Comment): Tenure doesn’t mean you can’t get fired. It just means you have due process rights; you have to be treated fairly and equitably. In Minneapolis, we have removed more teachers who are not effective in the last few years than all the previous years combined. Someone has to tell us that they are there. We are working on it.
Q: (Comment) Here’s one reform that would help. We as parents have the right to say, I don’t want my child taught by that teacher. Pretty soon, if a teacher only has four kids, … you will know that teacher isn’t doing his or her job.
Q: (Comment) All you have to do is look at who is graduating and who is not. That tells the story right there.
Q: (Comment from a Minneapolis teacher) This really isn’t fair. If you take a child who started with us in kindergarten and goes all the way through the MPS system, you are looking at better than an 80 percent graduation rate. I find it difficult for me, as an elementary teacher, to have to feel responsibility for a kid who comes in from St. Louis or wherever, into Minneapolis, in 6th or 8th grade, and I have to feel responsible for those graduation rates. That is setting me up. That is why teachers start feeling burned out.
A: One of our broad challenges is information transparency. As a fourth grade teacher you shouldn’t be held accountable for someone who shows up in sixth grade. However, if I were a sixth grade teacher, I think I would want to be held accountable for how much teaching and learning I can accomplish with a student, no matter where the student comes from.
The general browbeating of teachers that is unfair. What is reasonable for a great teacher to accomplish with a sixth grader who shows up at a school five years behind, and can we do that? I have known teachers who said if they measured the right things, I would love to be held accountable.
Q: (Comment) This conversation borders on teacher bashing. I don’t know if we could recruit the best and brightest. Tenure is no more than due process.
A: I feel bad for teachers as a group that that the No Child Left Behind regime chose to measure the wrong thing when it decided to create accountability. The fact that it is measuring the wrong thing is massively problematic. The fact that a school looks bad as a population transitions is ridiculous. If we want to hold ourselves accountable, we have to measure the right thing: The amount of learning that occurs in a single kid in a single year. The Department of Education has started a pilot to try to use growth measures as the underpinning for the NCLB. It took a long time.
• Kramer’s presentation echoed several of the themes from the presentation by Peter Hutchinson of the Bush Foundation. For instance, Teach for America (TFA) at its core is about recruiting the best and brightest into teaching and providing ongoing support for teachers in the field.
• Both Kramer and Hutchinson emphasized improving teacher accountability measures. The measure should be how much academic progress does an individual student make during the academic year, not the No Child Left Behind yardstick of whether schools make adequate yearly progress.
• TFA tries to instill the strengths of good leadership (goal setting, continuous improvement, etc.) into teachers in a relatively short period of time, get them into the classroom and connected with mentor teachers. TFA program directors also support teachers in the field (one director per 30 teachers).
• TFA spends about $40,000 per teacher, half of that is for training and support. It uses student achievement data of teachers in the field to constantly revise its teacher selection process.
• TFA teachers:
- Come from a highly selective pool of talent, about one it 10 are accepted.
- Work 90 hours a week and are expected to have a no excuses approach.
- Are union members. They earn the same as any beginning teacher.
• TFA is not in Minnesota, but the process is underway. It could begin as early as this fall with 40-50 teachers.
• Lynn Nordgren, the union head in Minneapolis, said MFT is supportive of Teach for America and so is Education Minnesota and the American Federation of Teachers.
• Kramer’s talk and the Q&A clearly hit a nerve. On one hand, some in the audience criticized teacher tenure and/or teacher attitudes that poor kids just can’t learn. Others felt the conversation became teacher bashing.
Kramer’s presentation
Observations
• By age 9, an average kid growing up in a low-income community has already fallen three grades behind in math and reading compared to their affluent peers. A nine year old in an affluent community reads chapter books. A nine year old in a low-income community can’t sound out a book like “Run Spot Run.” That’s not the severe situation, that’s an average situation.
• Kids growing up in a low-income community have a 50 percent chance of graduating from high school and a 10 percent chance of graduating from college. The high school graduates are likely to have the skills of an eighth grader.
• In Minnesota, the gap between rich kids and poor kids is astounding, it is like 50 percentile points. It is a shameful figure. It is the second highest gap in the county, after Connecticut.
Teach for America
Started based on an understanding of how this situation came to be.
1. Kids growing up in low-income communicates come to school with an unbelievable set of challenges relative to their peers in affluent communities
o Not eating breakfast, inadequate health care, parents don’t have education, parents working multiple jobs; crowded living conditions
2. Our school systems were not designed to solve that problem. They were not designed to take a kid who was three years behind by the time they were nine and catch them up multiple years in a given year. Schools do not have the length of day, do not have that aspiration, and are not set up to make that happen. It shouldn’t surprise us. Schools were designed to solve a different problem: How to take a middle class community and move kids ahead a year at a time.
3. Why do we let this happen? My sense talking to civic-minded reasonable people do not feel it is solvable. We have worked on schools for a long time. Sometimes, under the surface, there is a belief that poor kids cannot achieve at the same level. As a pragmatic country, if we have limited resources and energy, we should put our energy somewhere where it will work.
Against that backdrop, Teach for America does the following:
• It recruits the most talented future leaders of the country. One by one we talk them through this problem and convince them to put off their other plans and spend two years working 90 hours a week doing whatever it takes to catch kids up. Last year we recruited in 450 schools and had 33,000 one-on-one meetings. This last year we brought in 3,600 people to Teach for America out of 25,000 applicants.
• We train them how to be teachers in our particular brand of teaching. To go and figure out where kids are, and what it will take to advance them multiple years in a single year. It means working every minute of every day: bring the students in early, keep them late and get parents on your side.
• Coming in to Teach for America, about 10 percent say they are considering teaching or education as a career. Coming out of Teach for America, 67 percent stay in education for the rest of their lives. About half as classroom teachers, the others in school administration or professors.
• We channel this group of incredibly talented people into becoming educational leaders for the rest of their lives.
The first thing that happens for teachers entering Teach for America is the shocking reality of schools in low-income communities and the dire situation. Success requires good preparation. It requires finding a good mentor. If they succeed they discover what most people don’t know. This is entirely solvable problem. It is not the kids’ fault. It is not their parents’ fault. It is our collective fault. When you give the kids the opportunities they deserve, they achieve at the same level as affluent peers. When Teach for America teachers discover that, it makes them mad and it changes their lives.
Teach for America is an important part of a broader effort to make schools and educational opportunities fair and equal. It is not a magic bullet.
Question and Answers:
Q: Why isn’t Teach for America in Minnesota?
A: We might. We started 20 years ago looking for places with the highest level of poverty we started in New Orleans, New York, etc. Minnesota 20 years ago didn’t have all the problems that Minnesota has today. We are considering it now. We got a call from the State Board of Teaching two years ago asking us to contemplate it. We have been in conversation with school districts and prospective funders.
I would say there is a reasonable chance that Teach for America will come to Minnesota this coming fall.
Q Recruits?
A: There were 3,600 placed this year and 2,900 last year, so there is a little more than 6,000 in their two years right now. There are 14,000 alumni. This year applications are up 48 percent over last year. There will be 4,000-5,000 more next year.
Q: Impact on student achievement?
A: We are one of the most studied interventions in education in the country. There are different levels of methodological rigor. The challenge of evaluating TFA teachers is there is an enormous degree of non-randomness in how they are assigned in schools. A proper study needs random assignments. A randomized study was done once, about four years ago. It concluded that getting a TFA teacher was the equivalent of about an extra month in math and a slight change in reading scores. (He did not give a citation, here is one possible link: http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/Publications/PDFs/teach.pdf He also cited a recent Urban Institute study that said students of TFA teachers showed better end-of-year test results that those taught by experienced teachers. Here is a link: http://www.urban.org/publications/901157.html)
Studies show that TFA teachers’ students have either better results or the same results as traditional teachers’ students, and the more control involved in the studies, the more you see the results.
Q: Who pays? How do districts gain access?
A: School districts pay 10 percent of the costs. That is the fee we charge to make sure they want TFA teachers. [Amended answer: The federal government provides 15 percent, states provide 10 percent and a mix of corporations, individuals and foundations provide the rest.]
As for placements: First states need to request the program, then districts need to ask for TFA, then the principal needs to want to hire Teach for America folks. We start new sites off at about 50 new people a year. So if we come to Minnesota, we would be placing 40-50 new people per year here. Over time we tend to grow. NYC gets more than 500 new teachers a year.
Q: How are teachers selected?
A: They apply online. There are seven criteria we look for: Demonstrated track record of achievement; Perseverance (As things get harder, they lean in an work harder); Critical thinking skills; Organizational ability; Influencing and motivating skills (listening skills and customized conversation skills); Fit with our mission (want to join a movement to eliminate educational inequity); and respect for people in low-income communities.
The screening process includes a review of resume, transcript and two essays they write for us. We do phone interviews. Then we take the top half. We invite them to a full- day battery of interviews. They do sample teaching. We watch and score them. There is group discussion, individual interviews. By the time we are done, we take about 10 percent of those who apply.
Q: Do you see Teach for America as a long-term solution or is this what was have to do to change things so we don’t need a 90-hour week?
A: Two-part answer. TFA’s essence is not about the 90-hour workweek. It is about recruiting the most talented people in the country to give their lives to this cause. That is a long-term solution. I think the question of whether the people we recruit have to enter entirely overwhelming environments is short-term. I don’t think anyone thinks that is the way it should be. I have people ask me what I think of the view that things outside the school should be held partially responsible for what happens in school. It is obvious that that is true. (e.g. poverty, health care, nutrition and violence) But in the meantime, the teachers who accept no limitations or boundaries can make a difference. The right thing to do is both.
Q: Is TFA about changing teacher preparation?
A: We are not really engaged in teacher preparation issues broadly … the essence of our work is about whom we go after and what we do with them after we get them.
Q: How do we make the job more attractive without the prestige of Teach for America?
A: Honestly, people like prestige. I am not sure there is any reason that should not be part of the solution. Part of the answer is to find a way to make teaching have a brand that is attractive to people who have lots of options. TFA has done a good job at that. …
My take: I don’t see why we would frame the problem as, how can we make this work without Teach for America. I think Teach for America has a lot of little insights about what it takes to get people to teach.
Q: I am one of those licensed teachers. Working 90-hour weeks is not something that average teacher would find unusual. You are asking me to believe that you are putting these kids in, doing what I am doing, putting the same hours I put in and they are making no money.
A: They make the same money any first-year teacher would make. They make the same salary and benefits. All of our teachers are union members. My personal view is not that Teacher for America teachers should supplant other teachers or be a method for getting union labor out of districts. Districts need incredibly talented people. Teach for America is one very good source.
Q Licensed teachers are being laid off all over the state.
A Teach for America teachers cannot take a spot of an existing teacher. The only way to get hired is if there is an open vacancy. A teacher with bumping rights goes in first. This is not a union busting strategy. Lots of former Teach for America teachers are union leaders.
Q; (A long, multi-part question on curriculum and diversity.)
A: Curriculum: I don’t know very much about it. TFA operates in about 100 districts in 25 states. Each district has its own curriculum. I have a sense that the curriculum needs attention, which is not something we focus on.
Diversity: We heavily prioritize diversity in our recruiting. We find that teachers who share the backgrounds of their kids have the possibility of serving as an example of success. Colleges are not diverse: 5 percent of college graduates are African American and 5 percent are Latino Ten percent of the TFA Corp is African American and 6.5 percent is Latino, and nearly 30 percent are people of color. We do not have admissions preferences. We work hard campus-by-campus to recruit leaders of color.
Q: What kind of teacher training do you do?
A: First, they begin an online learning sequence, learning theory and child development. Then they come in for orientation. [Amended: Students go through our 5 week training institute, with student teaching in the mornings and intensive course work in how to be an effective teacher in the afternoons and evenings.] Students get an introduction to the district they are in. We have a group of 250 program directors, one for every 30 Corp members. They get into classrooms and observe. They go through student achievement data, give teachers feedback and serve as an educational leader if the Corp member doesn’t have one.
Q: Any longitudinal studies?
A: We have looked at doing one of those studies. But studies already show that four good teachers in a row versus four average teachers in a row leads to a 50-point gap. And the same teachers produce good results year after year and the same teachers produce bad results year after year. If you have one good teacher followed by four average teachers, four years later the effects are gone. The effort it would take to track our kids over a decade would be extraordinary. We trust the general wisdom of existing studies.
Q: Obama’s point person on education is Linda Darling-Hammond, a long-time critic of Teach for America.
A: President Obama has shown himself open to the idea of Teach for America. Also, he generally hasn’t made his views on education clear. I am sitting tight. I wouldn’t read anything into it yet.
Q: Interviews seem subjective. How do you test critical thinking? Your selection process seems to show that it works, how do you do it?
A: We are a data-based organization. We run the series of selection events. Every part of the interviews is scored. We get the results on the teachers’ student achievement levels a year later. Statisticians run models. They say, “This piece of the interview doesn’t predict student achievement. Throw it out and come up with something else.” Or, our front line coaches might say: “We are not screening effectively for this … “
We are definitely better than coin flipping on selection. It still requires an incredible amount of training and support. How do we screen for critical thinking? We give students a sample of student achievement data to interpret. They will give a diagnostic test to their students on the first day of the year. It’s a practical example of how you would do lesson plans based on data.
Q: The one thing I think TFA is doing, it is helping to change the culture in public schools. We have to change the culture in public schools right now. We need staff to believe that children can achieve and that have the will to do that no matter what and who do not take any excuses.
A: I appreciate that. I don’t think TFA changes the culture of a whole school system… School systems have to take on their own cultures. These are good issues for management and unions to work together on, to shape the culture that they want.
Q You need a critical mass of people thinking differently.
Q: Have you looked at what teachers do in the classroom to make a difference? Do you have a list of the seven or ten things that those teachers do?
A: Yes, we have a list for everything. For most of the first decade of Teach for America, most of the thinking about what good teaching looks like came from other people. Starting around 2000 we began investing what differentiates teachers getting great results. We looked at those getting astounding results.
We realized there were a handful of things that were completely different. It has formed the basis of Teaching as Leadership, our training curriculum, Great teachers are doing the same thing that great leaders do in any context.
• They pick a point they want to get to.
• They create a big, inspiring goal that everyone in the classroom understands is where they are trying to end up. It is the edge of what is possible. They get clear about what the kids will be able to do at the end of the year. They get everyone on the same page. This is a classroom on a mission to achieve a goal.
• They backwards plan to the goal.
• They run the plan.
• They work very hard. They have a truly limitless capacity. This is the unfortunate reality. It is not one year’s worth of work to close two years’ worth of gaps.
• Last, they continuously improve their effectiveness, changing their practice and approach based on how things worked out.
Q: Most districts have declining enrollments. Some have laid off teachers. Does that mean you can’t do TFA in some areas?
A: I have not ever seen a school district that doesn’t hire lots of new teachers every year in certain subjects, grades or schools. Minneapolis Public schools hired 200 new teachers last year. People don’t always know that. We don’t place teachers in individual spots in individual districts. Districts are hiring and we supply good teachers.
Q: What are the criticisms of Teach for America?
A: Some are problems of facts. Teach for America teachers aren’t good. That is a problem of fact. Low retention of TFA teachers, that is another problem of fact… Low-income schools have unbelievable teacher attrition. Over the first few years, TFA retention had better retention. Over time, it tends to fall. (But it depends on how you measure retention. If you count people who go to charter schools, stay in field as principals, etc. the retention rate is good.)
Some have philosophical critiques. Some criticisms are that this is a Band-aid. Are we propping up a system that is unjust and has unfair expectations of our teachers by putting people in who have unusual pain thresholds? At various times in its history, Teach for America has been controversial. That is less and less true.
Q: Is there a difference between existing and new program?
A: Teach for America looks similar everywhere. We don’t train locally.
Q: Teachers union representative comment
The union is not against any of this. We just want to make sure we are not kicking teachers to the curb. School Board member Pam Costain talked about the fact we need teachers who care about kids. I don’t want people thinking our teachers don’t care about kids. That is why they dig into their own pockets. It is a bigger picture than that. We all have work to do. The more we say, “This is all on the teachers’ back,” the less change we will see. Teacher mentoring is key in the beginning. We had the residency program. We no longer have money for …
Q: How much support does TFA provide for each teacher?
A: Our total investment in every teacher is about $40,000. Some is recruiting. About half is training and support.
We have a lot of common ground between the residency model and TFA training, there is 90 percent overlap in the theory of those two ideas. Both provide serious investment after a teacher starts teaching …
Q: It is not that teachers don’t care about kids, but some don’t believe that low-income kids can’t succeed. How do you immunize TFA teachers from that prevailing message?
A: I have met a lot of teachers. I haven’t met a teacher who doesn’t care about their kids. I have met teachers who think this is not a solvable problem. Interesting thing, in TFA the answer has evolved. Ten years ago this was a hard thing to do. Now there are a lot of examples of schools that put kids on equal playing fields. We find if we show students enough of this stuff, when they realize this is solvable they will do whatever it takes to get there.
Q You talked about the role of prestige in teaching. Why isn’t it as hard to get into a school of teaching as it is law school?
A: I don’t understand all the issues at educational schools. There are clearly issues. They clearly over-graduate graduates in certain fields. Our selectively is related to our ability to get tens of thousands of applications. When they tell their mom, they can say it was hard to get into.
Q: In north Minneapolis, a lot of parents have been taking their students out of the schools. I am a child of a union member. Tenure is the biggest impediment to educating children. Like In any profession, there are horrid teachers. They can’t get rid of them. Do you ever have teachers who should be in a different occupation? What do you do?
A: We don’t do anything. We don’t discourage the districts from doing whatever they should do, either. The teachers are part of the union and the district. We are not in the middle of that transaction. I fully agree people who are bad teachers should not be teaching. There is debate on the mechanism to remove them. I am not an expert on the issue.
Q: (Comment): Tenure doesn’t mean you can’t get fired. It just means you have due process rights; you have to be treated fairly and equitably. In Minneapolis, we have removed more teachers who are not effective in the last few years than all the previous years combined. Someone has to tell us that they are there. We are working on it.
Q: (Comment) Here’s one reform that would help. We as parents have the right to say, I don’t want my child taught by that teacher. Pretty soon, if a teacher only has four kids, … you will know that teacher isn’t doing his or her job.
Q: (Comment) All you have to do is look at who is graduating and who is not. That tells the story right there.
Q: (Comment from a Minneapolis teacher) This really isn’t fair. If you take a child who started with us in kindergarten and goes all the way through the MPS system, you are looking at better than an 80 percent graduation rate. I find it difficult for me, as an elementary teacher, to have to feel responsibility for a kid who comes in from St. Louis or wherever, into Minneapolis, in 6th or 8th grade, and I have to feel responsible for those graduation rates. That is setting me up. That is why teachers start feeling burned out.
A: One of our broad challenges is information transparency. As a fourth grade teacher you shouldn’t be held accountable for someone who shows up in sixth grade. However, if I were a sixth grade teacher, I think I would want to be held accountable for how much teaching and learning I can accomplish with a student, no matter where the student comes from.
The general browbeating of teachers that is unfair. What is reasonable for a great teacher to accomplish with a sixth grader who shows up at a school five years behind, and can we do that? I have known teachers who said if they measured the right things, I would love to be held accountable.
Q: (Comment) This conversation borders on teacher bashing. I don’t know if we could recruit the best and brightest. Tenure is no more than due process.
A: I feel bad for teachers as a group that that the No Child Left Behind regime chose to measure the wrong thing when it decided to create accountability. The fact that it is measuring the wrong thing is massively problematic. The fact that a school looks bad as a population transitions is ridiculous. If we want to hold ourselves accountable, we have to measure the right thing: The amount of learning that occurs in a single kid in a single year. The Department of Education has started a pilot to try to use growth measures as the underpinning for the NCLB. It took a long time.
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