Relentless Pursuit

by Donna Foote

  TFA and some in the education establishment had been at odds since Kopp first wrote her thesis. Over the years, the issue of how to improve teacher quality has been the subject of exhaustive debate. While some, like Linda Darling-Hammond, have argued that the answer lies in improving the quality of teacher training, Kopp believes the answer is to be found in improving the quality of the teacher.

  To some, the presumption that smart kids with five weeks of training could do the job smacked of hubris. “You probably wouldn’t want to be injected by someone from an organization called Nurse For America,” says UCLA’s director of Urban Schooling Jeannie Oakes. “But we tend not to balk at someone inexperienced and untrained being put in some of the most challenging classroom situations in the U.S. TFA is at its root a stopgap measure.”

  “I guess we’re asking two different questions,” explains Kopp.

  “Some people out there believe that what we are doing is flying in the face of traditional notions about what needs to be done to improve education. For them, the starting question is how do we strengthen the profession of teaching; recruiting people to a short-term commitment seems like not the way to go.

  “The question we’re asking is: How as a society are we going to finally step back and make real progress to address the disparities in the educational opportunities [between the rich and poor]? We think the magnitude of the problem justifies out-of-the box solutions. We need to channel the energy of our most talented people in that direction.”

  Even as her organization has challenged the status quo in education, Kopp has tried to avoid direct confrontation with the powers that be. Politically nimble, TFA has not directly criticized school districts or the powerful unions that often control them. “TFA doesn’t want to piss off the districts—the employers of their teachers,” notes former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, who was California’s secretary of education from 2003 to 2005. “And it doesn’t want to get into fights with the unions, which represent a mediocre bunch of people in a system with little or no accountability. TFA just wants to teach kids. So it’s not solving the whole problem. It’s going to take a revolution to do that, because under union control, there is no accountability, you can’t fire teachers or principals—you can’t even flunk students.”

  Though Kopp rejects the notion that the only path to the classroom is through campus-based teacher education programs and notes that many successful private schools employ noncertified teachers, TFA has formed strategic alliances with university credentialing and graduate programs—like Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia—so that recruits satisfy state and federal teaching requirements. At the same time, she joins a growing number of like-minded education reformers, and the federal government, in openly encouraging the growth of alternative credentialing programs as a way of attracting more top-flight talent into the profession. A 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found that the vast majority of the country’s university-level schools of education don’t have the capacity to produce excellent teachers, and more than half of the teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards—some of which accept 100 percent of applicants. Indeed, the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2004 reported that teaching attracts a “disproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.” That year, the average combined SAT score for college-bound seniors was 1026; the average of those intending to major in education was 965. (Future elementary school teachers tended to come from the bottom of the class; aspiring secondary school teachers were on a par with their peers.)

  The 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found wide variations in curricula and approaches, amounting to a training universe that author Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia’s Teachers College, likened to “Dodge City.” The obvious conclusion: nobody knows what it takes to make a good teacher.

  But Kopp believes the essence of good teaching is knowable. It isn’t magic. After nearly a decade of sending thousands of teachers into scores of districts, she developed a theory about why certain teachers produced better student results than other equally committed teachers. She came to believe that good teaching was, in essence, the exercise of good leadership. Her theory was dubbed “Teaching as Leadership,” or TAL. The idea was that excellent teachers—just like great leaders—set big goals, invest students in attaining the goals, work relentlessly to meet the goals, constantly assess progress, and improve over time.

  By the new millennium, TFA had distilled the twelve original selection traits down to seven “competencies” that it believed were key to effective classroom leadership: achievement, perseverance, critical thinking, organizational ability, influencing/motivating skills, respect for others, and fit with TFA.

  This time around, there was no guesswork involved. The organization spent countless hours identifying its most effective teachers, observing them at work, and breaking down their performances into discrete capabilities. TFA set student achievement goals and began using those benchmarks to develop a system by which to measure corps member effectiveness. In 2003, it rolled out IMPS—Information Management and Processing System—a database that allowed TFA to track corps member data across the program continuum.

  It got a little help from its friends. As a pro bono project, top consulting firm McKinsey helped TFA redesign its recruiting and selection process. And when McKinsey partner Matt Kramer eventually joined the TFA staff, he pioneered a predictive selection model that could identify which candidates would make the best teachers. The model linked student achievement outcome results to individual corps members’ incoming scores on the seven application competencies. As the data became more and more robust, TFA was able to identify a certain combination of teacher traits that were predictive of success in the classroom. Real people still presided over the interview process, but computers were increasingly relied upon to inform their decisions. By the time Hrag, Rachelle, Phillip, and Taylor applied, TFA had developed six distinct profiles of winning traits in successful teachers.

  Teach For America’s mission from the start had been to recruit and train the best and brightest to teach in America’s lowest-performing schools. The organization never promised to figure out a way to retain them. In fact, it fully expected the majority of its corps members to leave the classroom after their two-year stint. TFA took the long view, guessing that TFA alums would assume positions of power in public life and ultimately figure out the retention piece as part of the larger solution to the achievement gap.

  By 2005, the theory was bearing fruit. “I think most people deeply engaged in ed reform believe and know that TFA is producing an unprecedented and deep pipeline of people moving the ball forward on education reform,” says Kopp. “I think we are going to see a dramatic growth in impact as our alums get older.” Education reformers agree. “We think of TFA as a farm system for leaders,” says Kevin Hall, a former TFA staffer who is chief operating officer of The Broad Education Foundation, one of the leading philanthropies funding school transformation. Jim Shelton, education program director for the mighty Gates Foundation, concurs. Noting that TFA has successfully seeded the educational-reform landscape with high-caliber human capital and talent that is “really, really smart and very, very good,” he describes it as “one of the most important nonprofit organizations serving public education in America.”

  But the immediate and pressing problem of the recruitment and retention of quality teachers has yet to be solved. Nationwide, an estimated 14 percent of teachers leave the classroom in the first year, nearly half by the fifth. High attrition rates are especially pronounced in low-performing schools. In California’s high-poverty schools, 10 percent of teachers transfer away each year. The result: in 2005, children in the state’s lowest-performing schools were five times more likely to face a string of unprepared teachers than were kids in the highest-performing schools.

  At Locke, the numbers were
worse. In the 2005–2006 school year, approximately one third of the faculty was new and three fourths had been there fewer than five years. Thirty percent lacked a full credential. Three of the six assistant principals were in their first year as Locke administrators, and not a single one had been at the school longer than five years.

  Locke students suffered the consequences. In the 2005–2006 school year, 32 percent of the classes in core academic courses were taught by teachers not qualified under federal law. And 302 classes were characterized as “teacher misassignments,” meaning that teachers assigned to the class lacked a legally recognized certificate or credential for the course. Three teacher positions went unfilled—a marked improvement over the fourteen full-time teacher vacancies the year before.

  There are excellent, experienced teachers at Locke. There just aren’t enough of them, and there never have been. Seasoned teachers in general have always tended to gravitate to advantaged areas where working conditions are more favorable. And lousy teachers, not wanted at high-performing schools but protected by tenure, have too often ended up at low-income schools. School districts have been complicit. Unwilling or unable to expend the considerable time and resources required to fire a tenured teacher protected by a powerful union, they have allowed subpar teachers to shuffle from post to post in a practice known within LAUSD as the “dance of the lemons.” Union laws have bound principals to accept any tenured transfer seeking an open position, regardless of past performance. The result: low-income schools became repositories for bad teachers. (In 2006, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed through a law that permits principals to reject transfers of underperforming teachers.)

  Even without the new law, poor-performing schools have little control over the quality of the staff, because beggars can’t be choosers. Without a large pool of applicants seeking tough inner-city posts, principals have had no choice but to take less experienced—and often less effective—teachers.

  Ironically, TFA represents both the problem and the solution to one of the thorniest issues facing Locke. On the one hand, in 2005 TFA had become the school’s primary hiring source, supplying nearly 20 percent of the teachers on staff. On the other hand, by the end of that year, nearly a dozen TFAers at Locke had resigned. Two never completed the first year of teaching; eight others left after fulfilling their two-year commitments. In one fell swoop, some of the school’s most capable educators were gone. TFA fans and foes alike acknowledged the loss.

  Dr. Wells felt betrayed. “TFA teachers are leaving in large numbers,” he said bitterly. “The other teachers are always telling me to forget TFA; they are not committed to the community. I used to brush it aside as jealousy. But you invest in them, get them to a level of skill, and then they leave. I have to look for stability at the school. Last year I hired all TFAers for my vacancies. This year, I’m going to be looking for a significant number of non-TFA teachers.”

  Things didn’t work out that way. Wells ended up gobbling up as many TFA teachers as he could at the Teach For America hiring fairs over the spring and summer. Reason trumped anger. He found the quality of the thirteen new TFA candidates he hired to teach in 2006 much higher than that of those from other, more traditional credentialing programs, and he thought the passion they displayed for the mission could not be faked.

  Wells began to rethink his take on TFA. He started to see it as the educational equivalent of the U.S. Army. Enlistment in the military was for a finite period, he reasoned, but that didn’t mean the country’s highly trained volunteer army wasn’t successful in battle. Quite the contrary. The United States boasted the finest fighting force in the world. TFAers were like soldiers: carefully selected volunteers who were well trained and, for the most part, highly effective—often more effective than the lifers. Wells decided he could live with the fact that he got them for only two years, as long as he knew there would be another crop of highly skilled, bushy-tailed recruits to replace them.

  “Teach For America has literally saved this school,” he said, acknowledging that recruits were among Locke’s best teachers. “If it were not for TFA, Locke would be a school the state would refuse to take over, and be nationally recognized as the epitome of why public education doesn’t work. TFA teachers fill the holes and offer kids the kind of rigor that allows the students to grow academically. If you took all the TFA teachers out of Locke, we would have forty percent roving subs and mass chaos. We would not be able to survive.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  You’re in the Army Now

  In 1990, the New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published an article that Teach For America still refers to today. Entitled “Phases of First-Year Teaching,” it describes the stages new teachers move through during their first year. Anticipation, the short period that usually begins during training, comes first. The beginning teacher looks forward to the new career with a mix of excitement and anxiety. Survival follows close on its heels, soon after school starts. The overwhelmed teacher struggles to stay afloat. This period normally lasts six to eight weeks but can go on indefinitely. Then there is Disillusionment, a phase of profound disenchantment when new teachers question both their commitment and their competence. Rejuvenation eventually follows. For the lucky ones, it begins after winter break and continues well into spring. For the not-so-lucky, it can take weeks, if not months, to kick in. Finally, as the school year winds down, there is Reflection, the final phase of the cycle, in which the teacher begins to envision what the second year in the classroom will look like.

  Some new teachers find it hard to imagine finishing the first year. Teaching in a low-income school right out of college is a shock to the system—like getting really old really quickly, if you ask some TFA recruits. You shed your old skin, the one you were so comfortable in. A new skin develops and a new person emerges, one who is completely different from the old person. When you’re twenty-two, that takes some adjusting.

  The article is illustrated with a graph. The line charting the five-stage cycle starts high, dips very low very fast, and then slowly, slowly rises—unevenly. There’s nothing balanced or tidy about the drawing, and that’s probably apt. The first year of teaching is messy, misshapen, lopsided. And that’s if you’ve been in a traditional university-based credentialing program complete with student teaching and peer mentoring. Teach For America corps members become teachers of record after five weeks of training.

  For most of the 2005 recruits, the anticipation phase was just a blur marked by hard work, long hours, and little sleep. It started almost as soon as the candidates accepted the TFA offer—when the institute six-course curriculum (called the six-pack), plus the independent classroom-observation assignment, arrived in the mail. The package of pastel-colored, spiral-bound texts covered everything from diversity and classroom management to literacy, learning theory, and TFA’s central thesis, Teaching as Leadership (TAL). Before arriving, recruits were expected to read the texts and complete nine written exercises based on observations of experienced teachers at work. Many corps members (CMs) dispensed with the prep work; they arrived for their summer training cold.

  Institute began on a sunny Sunday in early July, when some six hundred Teach For America recruits streamed onto the campus of California State University, Long Beach. They were dressed in tank tops and jeans, board shorts and T-shirts—some emblazoned with the TFA logo and the words corps 05. Gucci and Burberry bags could be spotted here and there, but most inductees toted suitcases or hauled huge backpacks. The famous blue pyramid, a campus landmark, towered in the near distance. It all felt very much like the first day of college as CMs found their dorm rooms and the shortest route to the cafeteria.

  But any illusions corps members had about the rigor of the training to come were dispelled when they were given a thick three-ring binder with a letter of introduction and the institute calendar. A quick perusal of both made clear that institute would bear a much greater resemblance to boot camp than to a college orientatio
n program. Gone was the most basic of university freedoms—the right to manage time. In its place was a carefully choreographed sixteen-hour day—every minute of which would be accounted for. There would be no more waking at nine or ten and pulling on a T-shirt and jeans for a midmorning class. Under the TFA regime, the working day began at dawn and went pretty much until midnight. There was a grown-up dress code, too. For men, that meant a button-down shirt, tie, and slacks. For women, it was a skirt or dress of “reasonable length,” or slacks with a blouse.

  Breakfast was served each morning beginning at 5:45. Big yellow buses packed with bleary-eyed CMs clutching red lunch totes left the Long Beach campus about an hour later, headed for school sites. On-campus training lasted the length of the school day—from 8 a.m. until 4:05, when the buses ferried exhausted CMs back to the dorms for a break and dinner before the evening sessions began at 6:30. The day didn’t end three hours later when the nighttime workshops were wrapping up. After that, CMs were expected to prepare a lesson plan for the following day. Few got to bed before midnight, many not at all.

  Locke was the school assignment site for 139 TFA recruits. The Locke cohort was divided by teaching subjects into nine groups of fourteen to sixteen CMs, each headed by a corps member advisor (CMA). Each CMA group was further divided into four-person teaching teams. The recruits bonded quickly. TFA encouraged this with various ice-breaking exercises, but it would have happened anyway. There was an up-against-the-wall mentality to the Locke institute—and a gallows sense of humor.

  The first week was devoted entirely to curriculum course work. By the second week, recruits were working in classrooms with summer-school students. The TFA teacher-prep program stood the traditional student-teaching model on its head. Instead of having a student teacher shadowing a veteran educator at work, the TFA rookies took turns teaching while a paid faculty advisor (FA) from Locke’s staff observed from the back of the room. In the mornings, team members taught summer school; in the afternoons they received feedback and sat in on specific curriculum tutorials, like “The Five-Step Lesson Plan” and “Building a Culture of Achievement.” During week four, each recruit got to teach an entire day solo. By the end of the five-week crash course, student teaching was over. Each CM had spent the equivalent of about three full school days teaching. The next time they stood in front of a classroom of students, they would be the teachers of record.