New Role for TFA

I was intrigued by an interesting suggestion that Robert Pondiscio made over at the Core Knowledge blog the other day, and the discussion surrounding it has me thinking. Here's a rundown for those of you who haven't been following along:

1.) Pondiscio writes that Wendy Kopp should consider a different tact for Teach For America (TFA) -- putting the new teachers they recruit in wealthy schools as fill-ins and taking some experienced teachers from these wealthy schools and putting them in poor urban/rural schools that TFA currently helps staff. This way the kids in these schools would be getting experienced teachers instead of recent college grads.

2.) Kopp takes the time to reply to Pondiscio's post and basically argues that the people she recruits are at least as good as the experienced teachers in wealthy schools.

3.) Eduwonkette calls out Kopp for some weak arguments and encourages Pondiscio to run with the idea.

The way I see it, everybody's points have some merit. Let me start with the fatal flaw of the idea and then make some suggestions on how it could be slightly modified into a one that even Kopp might like.

There are two reasons why Pondiscio's current idea will never work (other than the fact that Kopp, the head of TFA, doesn't want to implement it):

1.) Very few of the people who currently apply to TFA will volunteer to go serve in a wealthy suburban school as a placeholder while the experienced teacher from that school spends two years in a high-poverty school. I might be wrong about this, but I think the biggest draw of TFA and similar programs is the chance to make the world a better place. I'm willing to bet that almost every new TFA enrollee plans on transforming their class (if not the school) ala "Dangerous Minds," "Stand and Deliver," "Freedom Writers," etc. Serving in the suburbs for two years just doesn't have the same allure or romanticism.

2.) Wealthy suburban schools wouldn't hire uncertified TFA enrollees with no classroom experience. Many of these schools get hundreds of applicants for each open position and very few would have any problem finding a teacher they find qualified, motivated, and experienced to fill in for their teacher who's jaunting off to help save the world for a couple years.

That said, I still like the idea. I think Kopp was wrong to, essentially, summarily dismiss it. I'm maybe most disappointed in the fact that she cited a flawed study as definitive evidence that TFA shouldn't make any changes. Here are the tweaks I would make to the idea:

1.) For the reasons above I'd scrap the exchange part of the program. Why not recruit both recent college grads and experienced teachers to serve in underprivileged schools?

2.) I'd create a separate branch of TFA for experienced teachers. Similar to the Jennifer Steinberger Pease's idea of an "urban teaching corps" that I discussed earlier.

3.) I'd find some sort of incentive to draw these teachers into serving in these schools for 2+ years. TFA is quite adept at fundraising, so maybe they could raise some money for bonuses or something. I have little doubt that they could find a few thousand mid-career teachers to sign up to spend 2 years doing some community service if they pitched it correctly, could somehow guarantee them a job in their home district when/if they finished, and had some sort of incentive to boot.

TFA prides itself on its ability to select and train high-quality individuals and teachers. I see no reason why they couldn't do this with experienced teachers as well as recent college grads. If TFA is serious about upgrading high-poverty schools I think this is an idea they need to get behind.

An Urban Teaching Corps?

I was all set to go to bed when I noticed this post on the eduwonkette blog. Given that I was less than satisfied with my last two posts (I was too busy to do much more than regurgitate what happened in those sessions) I felt pressured to write something a little better for anybody clicking here for the first time. So I clicked on the other link provided in that posting and found an interesting idea that Jennifer Steinberger Pease wrote about in EdWeek.

She writes about an acquaintance who wants to apply to Teach For America (TFA), but will already be certified and have a master's degree and, therefore, is not really TFA material (I checked TFA's website to see if they would accept such a candidate, but their description didn't answer the question in either direction). She feels that this teacher-to-be would benefit enormously from, and be ideal for, TFA, but sees no other comparable option available for certified teachers. She, therefore, proposes an urban teaching corps similar to TFA -- but for certified teachers.

I've thought (and debated) a lot about the pluses and minuses of TFA and other alternative certification programs but, honestly, such a scenario had never occurred to me (nor had such a solution). Jennifer does seem to have found quite the gap in the current system. I've had many discussions about whether TFA and other programs imply that teacher certification is meaningless, but never really thought about the TFA-quality people who are already certified. I'm not sure that there are quite as many people who want to teach in high-poverty schools but are unable to as she seems to believe, but I don't doubt that more would teach in these schools if they could enter a TFA-like program.

I can see only two major holes in her plan:

1. TFA may, in fact, take certified teachers -- I simply don't know. And if not them, many other similar programs might (The New Teacher Project runs a number of sister programs). I taught with the NYC Teaching Fellows (one of those sister programs) and I know that other people in the program had previous teaching experience (though I'm unsure if any were certified).

2. High-Poverty schools are not only in urban areas. Accordingly, TFA is not only in urban areas (I know two former TFA members that taught in rural areas in the Mississippi Delta and along the Texas border). So I would propose either changing "urban" to "high-poverty" or adding a "rural" teaching corps as well.

Normally new ideas for education have to be taken with a large grain of salt -- it seems that there's always a strong reason that they'll never happen and/or a large downside. I see neither of these with this idea. The easiest solution (but not necessarily the best), of course, would be for alt cert programs to simply start accepting certified teachers. Either way, this idea makes sense to me.

How to fix the dropout problem?

I try to be open-minded and unbiased when I read a new policy proposal, but I can't help but be excited when I read something that's "outside the box" -- something about new ideas just appeals to my creative side regardless of how good they are.

This blog post and this blog post both pointed me to this article in the Washington Post from Monday that is nothing not "outside the box" (the two blog entries seemed to take opposite sides on the article).

In short, his idea is this: let kids drop-out of high school instead of trying to keep them in, but take the money that would've been spent on their education and put it in an education trust fund that they can access at a later date. Then, at some point in time they realize that dropping out was a dumb idea and they have the resources to finish their education.

The fact that idea, at least in its current form, is politically infeasible makes me hesitate to spend much time analyzing it. One of the biggest problems is that schools don't currently spend the x dollars that it takes to educate one kid when they drop out, so they'd have to raise spending in order to put that amount in a savings account each year. Secondly, they don't save x dollars when a kid drops out -- there are too many fixed costs. Lack of economic feasibility aside, I like the effect such a plan would have on the environment in high schools (all the kids who don't want to be there would be gone) but am doubtful that the later-in-life education would be a panacea or that all problems can be solved simply by giving somebody more options. That said, I do find the idea absolutely fascinating simply because it is so different.