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An effective element of TFA's smart recruiting strategy, Curran says, is a rolling-admission approach: Students are accepted into the program at different points in the academic year, meaning that they can encourage their peers to check out the organization for which they've developed such enthusiasm. And Caroline Davis' frequent presence on campus as a recruiter (one of sixty-four TFA recruitment directors, she says she spends half her time recruiting at Duke) makes it possible for the organization to build relationships with students.
Many college seniors look to their futures with concern and confusion. TFA addresses that issue, says Curran. "These students have a huge fear of the unknown. They have gone through life always knowing what the next step is." As they step into the TFA corps, students are rewarded with something they have come to value, Curran says—a support network. (They also plug into a website that's filled with information about the region to which they're assigned, even cost-of-living details.) Their friends are a huge part of their lives. And with their strong ties to the social network of fellow corps members—not the least of them
the corps veterans who serve as regional "program directors," assigned the ongoing role of providing support, guidance, and feedback—recent graduates can feel that, in a sense, they've never left college.
In Curran's view, those students are very competitive. The fact that TFA puts applicants through so many hoops, and that it thrusts its corps members into a challenging environment, is attractive in itself. Students realize, too, that TFA can make them marketable. Employers will always look for qualities that define a teacher's role in the classroom: flexibility, innovation, cross-cultural skills, an ability to move out of a personal comfort zone, a knack for presenting effectively and clearly. Lakis, the Washington teacher, mentions getting a barrage of e-mail messages from talent-hunting consulting firms as he was completing his second, and final, year with the program.
This fall, Business Week named Teach For America one of the ten best places to begin a career. According to the magazine, "young workers view Teach For America as a valuable launching pad to an assortment of careers and paths."
Not every observer of education is quite so ready to label Teach For America a valuable launching pad. A handful of studies suggest that training and certification give novice teachers an edge in the classroom. When TFA teachers obtain certification, their students do as well as traditionally prepared teachers. But TFA teachers leave after two or three years, freshly certified and still approaching pedagogic proficiency.
One critic is Rosemary Thorne, who recently stepped down after eighteen years as head of Duke's Master of Arts in Teaching program. She says what the one-year M.A.T. can give young people—and what Teach For America can't—is a year's worth of guided training in the public schools. M.A.T. students work closely with mentor-teachers trained by Duke. Supplementing that experience is classroom exposure to basic pedagogy—how young learners acquire knowledge, how learning disabilities should be dealt with in the classroom, how schools show awareness of legal issues.
Thorne says she can understand why school districts want to hire Teach For America corps members. She has "nothing but admiration" for the graduates who enter the program and want to make a difference in the schools. They are "responding to their better angels." But, she adds, "TFA and programs like it are bad public policy."
For one thing, she's uncomfortable with TFA's aura as a kind of domestic Peace Corps, "treating our schools and our children like Third World countries. Is that how we should be thinking about them? Teach For America perpetuates the idea that teaching is not really a profession, that it is something you can drop in and do for a short time, but it is not a reasonable thing for a bright, talented, well-educated person to do over the long haul." In addition, she says, it takes five years for teachers to "really hit their stride."
What teaching needs, according to Thorne, is the sort of cultural shift that values teachers as professionals—a shift that draws the best and brightest into teaching and that encourages longevity in the classroom. By the time they reach that five-year mark, half of all teachers have gone, she says. (Some 85 percent of Duke M.A.T. graduates are still in the classroom after five years.) "I don't think Teach For America is any kind of long-term solution for the problems facing public schools." By sending the message that a corps of idealistic young people can turn public schools around, "it delays the search for a solution," she says.
Some of Thorne's concerns are echoed in the experiences of Andrew Nurkin '03, who joined Teach For America and then dropped out. Initially, Nurkin followed a typical Duke student pattern: "What got me involved was the idea that you're approaching graduation and it's not clear what you want to do. And there are posters all around campus appealing to a particular set of liberal ideas about changing the world and becoming involved in what they call the new civil-rights movement. They are advertising, in a very well-targeted way, to young people who are social-minded but haven't yet found the niche or social issue that they want to attach themselves to."
His first teaching immersion came in Houston, as part of the TFA orientation, when he began teaching English as a second language to eighth-graders. There he was hit with an instant, and unsettling, realization. "I saw that I had not acquired in my life experience what it was going to take for me to deal with what I'd have to be dealing with. And I didn't anticipate acquiring it in my five weeks of the crash course."
Corps members who have stuck with the program acknowledge the difficulties of their first year of teaching. Some who avidly blog on TFA-related websites refer to an inevitable "disillusionment phase" affecting new teachers. Classroom management is a major source of distress, they say, and new teachers come to question both their commitment and their competence. Barnapuria, in New York, revels in his ability to connect with his students. But other corps members, in their blogging, express frustration with the limited scope of their impact. One declared that "there is only so much a motivated teacher can do," adding that vouchers or an expansion of charter schools would be a better, more systemic way out of the education crisis.
The crisis was more personal for a New Jersey-based teacher, in postings to fellow corps members in late October. The blogger's lament was that "in an average day, a teacher is pulled in so many different directions that you struggle to think that you're doing anything meaningful. I feel so sorry for my students who are there to learn." An entry from another reported, "I still feel like I start every day completely unprepared for the chaos ahead. And there is really no other way to describe my classroom (and the junior high in general)…. The worst part is that life no longer really surprises me. Yesterday, we had a student arrested because he stole the principal's wallet. No big deal."
Juliet Summers '06 has moved beyond any crisis-of-confidence phase. She teaches second-grade students on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in south-central South Dakota, far removed from the urban scene but a tough area nonetheless. A few years ago, Rosebud's unemployment rate was estimated to be 85 percent; the per-capita income for the county ranked sixty-sixth out of the state's sixty-six counties. A tribal report last summer on teen suicides pointed to "poverty, depression, a lack of jobs, drugs, alcohol, and other social problems." Almost nothing grows on the land, Summers says. "There are no trees, just rolling plains for as far as you can see." She adds, "We can tell what time of year is coming by what bug we're being invaded by. Right now, it's wasp season, and later it's tick season, which is our least favorite."
Summers says her first encounters in the classroom were overwhelming. "This time last year, I was just trying to figure things out. I remember asking myself day by day, 'What can I do tomorrow in class that is slightly better than today? What lesson can I plan for next week that will be better than this week?' And I remember feeling, a lot of days, like I wasn't doing a great job. But then there come those days when you do feel like you are doing a good job. And that makes it worth it."
There's no quibbling over Teach For America's worth from a panel of corps veterans. Their job this midsemester evening is to help replenish the ranks of TFA with a new crop of student leaders. In a gray-toned, nondescript Bryan Center conference room, students have assembled to take in the uplifting message and the familiar mini egg rolls.
Led by the ubiquitous and unfailingly upbeat Caroline Davis, this particular presentation focuses on "Life After Teach For America." She introduces the panel, all Duke alumni: a medical student, a public policy graduate student, the chief executive of a nonprofit organization that teaches managements skills to leaders of other nonprofits, and a consultant specializing in the construction industry. They talk about how Teach For America appealed to their interest in bringing about social change, how they were drawn to the opportunity to make an impact, and how they found their corps experiences transferable to their later work.
Just a few miles away, a recent alumna recruited by Davis as a student, Susan Patrick '07, is just finishing up her school day. As an undergraduate, Patrick tutored at elementary schools. She also worked at an alternative school, with middle-school students suspended from their home school.
Through Teach For America, Patrick is teaching eighth-grade language arts at Githens Middle School in Durham. Githens is unusually diverse. Patrick is dealing with the children of professors and doctors as well as children from low-income, single-parent households. Some of her students live with their grandparents, and some are homeless. She has readers at the sixth-, fifth-, or even fourth-grade level. Others are far above grade level. With such gaps in background and preparation, it's tough to keep them on task, together.
"I came in knowing I was going to have a lot of challenges," she says. "Thirteen-year-olds do things that most normal people wouldn't dream of."
No longer a teaching novice, Summers, in South Dakota, has mastered some of those challenges. With a year's experience behind her, "the ball game is totally different," she says, and she feels prepared for the issues she'll face in the classroom. "For a lot of the kids here, there's just so much they have to deal with, so much death and family struggles. And they're so little, they don't how to articulate that. They don't know how to say, 'I'm unhappy today because my brother tried to kill himself.' All they can do is punch a wall.
"Teach For America really stresses in our training that in our classroom, we're going to see so many kids who have so many needs. You want to take care of them for the seven hours. But it's so important to keep your focus on the thing that you can actually give them, and that's an education. So many of my kids will be writing a story that says something like, 'On Friday night, my mom was drunk, and I went to my auntie's house.' What can you say to that? Definitely these societal problems affect their lives. You have to do the best you can to teach through all of that, and to be respectful of all the good things they get from their community and their loved ones."
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