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Copyright 1996 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
January 7, 1996, Sunday, Late Edition
Final
SECTION: Section 4A; Page 26; Column 1; Education Life Supplement
LENGTH: 1816 words
HEADLINE: TEACHING TEACHERS;
Teach for America: Learning the Hard Way
BYLINE: By RACHEL SHTEIR;
York
Ra'chel Shteir is a freelance writer based in New
BODY:
Five years after Teach for America began sending recent college graduates to
'some of the poorest urban and rural schools, the organization finds itself still
trying to handle its growing pains with grace.
Teach for America, which sprang from the 1989 senior thesis th'at its
founder, Wendy Kopp,wrote at Princeton University, has placed 3,000 teachers
and gained both praise and strong criticism for its methods. Every year, after
training 500 recruits -- many of them graduates of Ivy League colleges -- for
five weeks, the program assigns them to two-year teaching posts in areas as
varied as New York City, the Mississippi Delta and South Central Los Angeles.
Patterned after the Peace Corps, Teach for America has been hard hit by what
its director of development, .Richard Barth, call,s a "belt-tightening crisis." In
1995 the recruiting staff was slashed from seven, to two. (Overall, the
organization employs about 80 people.) To maintain one of the program's
essential components
the on-site mentors who help new recruits get adjusted
to teaching
Teach for America has begun to seek out partnerships with local
universities and community colleges, as well as to rely more heavily on alumni
to contribute time and expertise.
"We're stepping back from trying to take on all to the responsibility
ourselves," explained Ms. Kopp, 28, as she sat in her organization's
headquarters in New York City's financial district.
In addition, Teach for America is struggling to rebut its critics.
In May, responding to several recent studies by educational groups
�tfa1
Page
criticizing its teacher training program. Teach for America released a report it
had commissioned. According to the'report, the majority of. superintendents are
happy with the teachers' work. "In some areas we come out looking good," Ms.
Kopp said.
Sharon Mitchell, the placement coordinator in the Unified School District of
Oakland, Calif., said: "They're climate changers. They think out of the box."
. Teach for America is part of a larger trend that has emerged since the early
1980's, when states began to offer alternative licensing or certification
programs for teachers. Such programs' allow liberal arts graduates and others
without education degrees to work as teachers in areas where there are teacher
shortages. Most often ,these schools; are found in poor districts. According to
data collected by the National Center for Education Information in Washington,
40 states now offer such programs, up from 33 in 1990.
"If the school district provides adequate mentoring and support," said Pat
Dingsdale, the education committee chairwoman for the National Parent-Teacher
Association, in Chicago, "any alternate certification program can work."
Yet many of Teach for America's critics argue that such support is not
forthcoming. In 1991 Melissa McDonald graduated from Tufts University with a
degree in American history. She then spent a turbulent nine weeks'in a l\Jew
Orleans school she described as "a trash can" before reluctantly leaving Teach
for America. She is now a manager at the Nature Company in Boston.
"I had 10-year-olds who had failed second grade three times," said Ms.
McDonald. She blames Teach for America for her quick departure because it placed
her in the school and failed to give her support.
"The corps members who finished their two-year commitments had strong
mentors -- and their schools wanted them there," she said~
In New York City, firs-year Teach for America teachers make about $28,000,
about $4,000 less than first-year teachers with master's degrees. During their
two':year commitment, program participants have the option of working toward
their permanent licenses.
.
,
Supporters of Teach for America say that over the last five years the
"
.
, program has filled a gap in recruiting hard-to-find bilingual, special education
and math and science teachers. According to the organization's statistics, the
number of its teachers who finish the two-year commitment has risen from 70
percent in 1990 to 85 percent in 1993. The statistics also indicate that the
organization does better than the education profession overall in recruiting
�minorities, who now make up 46 percent of all corps members. This figure
·.includes24 percent African-Americans, 8 percent Hispanics and 8 percent Asians.
According to figures from the National Library of Education, 86.5 percent of all
teachers nationwide are white and 7 percent are African-American, 4 percent
Hispanic and 1 percent Asian.
According to Teach for America statistics on ~he first group of program
teachers, vyho finished in 1992, some 55 percent are still teaching, although 72
percent remain .in education. By contrast, only 7 percent of teachers with
master's degrees nationwide have dropped out of teachi~g after three years.
Teach for America, however, says that in the areas where its teachers are
employed, the .overall turnover rate tends to be much higher, up to 50 percent.
And Ms. Kopp says as much as training teachers, the program seeks to create
leaders.
"I'd like people to someday talk about T.F.A. the w,ay they talk about the
Rhodes scholarship," she said.
In the summer of 1993, President Clinton approved Teach for America as part
of Americorps, his national service initiative. The program now receives
about 21 percent of it$ $5.2 million budget from Americorps, which also pays off
participants' undergraduate loans and offers small grants for future education.
The majority of .Teach for America's money, however, still comes from
corporations and individuals among them are the Lilly Endowment Corporation
and Philip Morris.
Yet because of Teach for America's budget cutting, some of its most ambitious
initiatives are being dropped, like the costly and time-consuming efforts tp get
states to accredit its five-week summer training program as an alternative route
to teacher certification.
And two education divisions of Teach for America have left to become
nonprofit companies. The two divisicms are Teach, which focuses on recruiting
people in other professions to become teachers, and The Learning Project, which
helped design the Houston Summer Institute where Teach for America teachers are
trained.
In addition, many educators in traditional graduate teacher- training
. programs remairi skeptical about Teach for America's long-term impact.
"What Teach.for America is doing would be more productive if they recruited
. 'for the long term instead of as' a pit stop~" said Linda Darling Hammond, a
professor of education at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York.
�. By putting teachers into the neediest schools, she said, the program is cheating
a generation of "high risk" children.
Professor Darling Hammond also accused the program of taking jobs away from
teachers who are more qualified.
"Districts can only legally hire us if they have a shortage," Wendy Kopp
responded.
But last year in Seattle, which has no teacher shortage, the Board of
Education voted to hire 17 Teach for America teachers, even though Washington
state certifies 2,500 teachers every year. Of these, half remain unemployed
after receiving certification. "The vote was controversial," said Ted Andrews,
the state's .director of professional education and. certification.
,
.
Most teacher educators critical of Teach for America say they do not oppose
alternative certification as such, but what they characterize as the
program'sslapdash approach to training.
"The summer institute is a series of one-hour workshops with no curriculum,"
said Robert Roth, a professor of education at the State University of California
at Long Beach, who evaluated Teach for America's summer training institute in
Houston for several states in 1993. "The students could choose anything they
wanted in any order," he said. "In five weeks you cannot train teachers to step
into the classroom. We have difficulty doing that in four years."
Teach for America, however, said the training institute's recruits teach at a
summer enrichment program for students in Houston's public elementary schools.
In the afternoons and evenings, according to program outlines, the trainees
attend curriculum workshops. Veteran teachers and experienced corps members are
asked to evaluate the performance of the new recruits on a daily. basis.
"It was like educational boot camp," said Catherine Schoeffler, who got a
sociology degree at the University of Southwestern Louisiana before teaching at
a tiny elementary school in Ruleville, Miss.
Pam Briskman, a Teach for America recruit from Stanford University in Palo
Alto, Calif., said, "I really don't think that anything can prepare you for the
first day of class."
.
.
. Ms. Briskman, who has taught at Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland, Calif.;
for three years, said she feels that the Teach for America approach is at least·
as effective as the traditional teacher-training education programs from which
her colleagues graduated.
�In New York, at P.S. 28 on West 15.5th Street in Harlem, Gina Laporta, an
English major who graduated from Bostol) College in 1994, said her training was
adequate, but her first year of teaching was still an enormous struggle.
"All of a sudden I was going to be responsible for 20 children who wanted to
be educated."
For several months she was in shock, she said, overwhelmed by a classroom
where many of the students had emotional problems for which she had no training.
She was assigned two mentors -- one from Teach for America and the other a
veteran teacher at the schooL But even now, Ms. Laporta does not know if she
will stay a third year. "I change my mind every day," she said.
David Gunderson had a different experience.
After graduating from Yale University in 1989 with a major in political
science,' he wanted to teach before medical school.
.But because he didn't want to spend a year getting a degree in education, he
found that Teach for America presented an ideal opportunity. Mr. Gundersonspent
four years teaching life science at Compton High in South Central Los Angeles.
"It's the greatest education you'll ever have," he said.
Now Mr. Gunderson intends to go back to medical school and to earn a master's
degree in public health.
'''In 1 0 years, I'd like to be living in a rural area where I can practice
medicine half the time and teach the other half," he said.
For Seth Kugel, who finished his two-year stint in the South Bronx in New
York last year, academic critics of Teach for America miss the point.
Mr. Kugel, who is now a first-year student at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard University, said: "If you'rea T.F.A. teacher, you don't
have to worry about staying, about pension, about red tape, about getting the
ideal job in the ideal school -- you don't have to worry about getting out of
the South Bronx. You don't have to learn the system. If you're in T.F.A., you
can just teach."
GRAPHIC: Photo: Wendy Kopp's Teach for America has put 3,000 recent college
graduates into poor schools. (Andrew Lichtenstein·for The New York Times)
�
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Bruce Reed - Education Series
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Bruce Reed
Education Series
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Bruce Reed's Education Series include material pertaining to national standards and testing; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) and the 1999 efforts to reauthorize the Act; 100,000 teachers and class size; charter schools and vouchers; education events and forums; social promotion; Goals 2000; HOPE Scholarships; Pell Grants; the Education Flexibility Partnership Act of 1999 (Ed-flex); education funding and budgets; and various school and teacher issues. The files contain correspondence, reports and articles, memos, polls, handwritten notes, hard copies of emails, schedules, printed material, and memos to the President.
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Teaching
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Bruce Reed
Education Series
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Box 95
<a href="http://clintonlibrary.gov/assets/Documents/Finding-Aids/Systematic/Reed-Education-finding-aid.pdf" target="_blank">Collection Finding Aid</a>
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