Be sure to check out Dan Brown’s latest Huffington Post essay on the considerable publicity of Teach for America and the misunderstanding of the human capital challenges facing our nation’s highest-need schools. Dan, an excellent young teacher in a DC charter school, offers up key facts typically ignored by policy pundits and journalists in their ongoing analysis of the teaching profession and all its ills. Even bright college graduates need the right kind of training and support to be effective — and need to stay in teaching for longer than two years to make a meaningful difference.
Dan, a former NY Teaching Fellow and author of The Great Expectations School, describes in his must-read book how his lack of preparation left him unable to meet the needs of the students he served. Researchers like Richard Ingersoll, who does not have a dog in this ideological fight, have documented carefully that poorly prepared teachers (from whatever source) who exit the profession quickly leave their students to be taught by the next round of ill-trained novices who routinely replace them. A recent investigation has shown that “schools with high teacher turnover rates have difficulty planning and implementing a coherent curriculum and sustaining positive working relationships among teachers.”1 Other studies have found that entrants from strong teacher education programs both stay in teaching significantly longer and achieve stronger student achievement gains that those of either alternative route entrants or weak traditional programs.2
TFA has developed a masterful teacher recruitment strategy and created a potentially powerful mechanism to replenish the teaching profession with bright young minds eager to make a difference. But what if TFA worked to support a cadre of its Corps members to develop their teaching talents in a “residency” program (which I have written about at length), with incentives and supports to remain in teaching for five years? What if TFAers worked under the tutelage of seasoned experts — ensuring that all students have access to a stable team of teachers, organized and supported to maximize their collective skills and energy? What if we got out of the either-or rhetoric that so dominates the teaching quality debates of late and moved to some and/both thinking and action? We need to be thinking about what will make teaching a career that TFAers want to stay in. Keep an eye out for more from Teacher Leaders Network on this front — as Dan (a new member) and other Gen Y and X teachers join us in finding fresh solutions to the vexing problem of ensuring a qualified and effective teacher for every child. If we are willing to ask the questions differently, we might find some innovative answers that actually work.
1 Guin, K. (2004, August 16). Chronic teacher turnover in urban elementary schools. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 12(42). Retrieved April 23 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v12n42/.
2 Boyd, D., Grossman, P., Lankford, H., Loeb, S., & Wyckoff, J. (September 2008). Teacher preparation and student achievement. NBER Working Paper No. W14314. National Bureau of Economic Research. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1264576.
