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One was on track to be a dentist. The other worked at a privileged school in New York City. Both were inspired to change course — and teach at a “turnaround” middle school for troubled urban kids.
Tyrone Mayorga (at left above) and Stephanie Sun (at right), both of whom graduated from college in May, will join the staff at the new Domus Academy, one of two “turnaround” schools that are being reconstituted as part of a citywide school reform effort.
The two are part of a new wave of Teach For America (TFA) recruits set to start work Sept. 1 in the New Haven Public Schools.
As school district plows into the first year of a school change effort, it is doubling the number of young TFA teachers in city classrooms compared to last year.
The school board last week renewed a contract with Teach For America (TFA), a leading national not-for-profit focused on luring talented young people into urban classrooms and narrowing the racial achievement gap. TFA is linked to a national school reform movement into which New Haven is putting into practice when school starts Sept. 1.
The new contract allows for an increase in the number of TFA recruits in city schools. The agreement is a sign of an expanded relationship between the not-for-profit and the city as the reform effort gets under way, district and TFA officials said.
The teachers union president welcomed the new recruits — and said he hopes they will buck a TFA trend and stay with the district long-term.
TFA expects to place 20 to 25 new hires into city schools this fall, in addition to the 10 who are returning for their second year, according to TFA’s statewide director, Edna Novak.
That would be a significant increase over last year, when the city hired 12 new TFA recruits, and employed nine second-year TFA teachers.
New Haven Public Schools started working with TFA in the 2006-07 school year. The public schools have drawn from TFA heavily in the past, but less so in the past two years. The district hired 36 new TFA recruits in 2006-07, 25 in 2007-08, 11 in 2008-09, and 12 in 2009-10.
Novak said the number of TFA recruits in New Haven schools shrank in part because TFA was expanding to Bridgeport and Hartford, and partly because TFA teachers had a tough year in 2007-08 in New Haven schools.
So far this summer, the Board of Education has placed 11 new TFA recruits into classrooms in the public school district, which has about 1,700 teachers.
A New Challenge
Many recruits join TFA straight from college or graduate school. In lieu of a standard certification, they attend a five-week summer TFA training course to prepare for the classroom — then take classes during the school year to earn their Connecticut certification. They commit to teaching for two years, and have access to one-one-one coaching and teaching support during that time.
The district often uses TFA recruits to fill shortages in subjects like science and math. Last week, the school board hired five first-year science teachers for the following schools: Truman, Davis Street, Barnard, Beecher and Wexler/Grant.
Mayorga and Sun will be two of eight classroom teachers at the new Domus Academy. They’ll take on one of the most challenging assignments — to help “turn around” a struggling school for kids who have failed in traditional settings. Domus Academy, formerly known as Urban Youth, is the site of a new experiment: For the first time, the public school district has hired an outside group — Domus, a not-for-profit that runs charter schools in Stamford —to take over a low-performing school.
Mayorga, who’s 22, just graduated from Boston College. A philosophy major, he was on a pre-med track to become a dentist — until he got involved with a community service group. The Long Island native started teaching health workshops for inner-city kids — and loved it. He decided to break from the pre-med mold and continue that service work. At Domus, he’ll teach science for grades 6 to 8.
Sun, who’s 21, graduated in May from New York University with a Bachelor’s degree in English and anthropology. During school, she got the chance to teach some classes at a private school in the city. The school served affluent students, “putting them on really high paths in life,” she said.
“I realized that my passion was needed elsewhere,” Sun said in a phone interview Tuesday. Sun, who’ll teach English in grades 6 to 8, spoke on a conference call with Mayorga. The two are temporary roommates in Stamford while they go through TFA’s summer training course. They brimmed with enthusiasm about the task ahead.
During the weekdays, they’ll teach from 7:15 a.m. to 5 p.m. On weeknights, they’ll plan for their classes — and do their own set of homework, too: They’ll be taking a year-long course at Southern Connecticut State University to earn a Connecticut teaching certificate. The classes run all day on Saturdays. The new roommates said they’re ready to work hard.
Growing Partnership
Under its contract with TFA, the school board agreed to pay TFA $2,500 for each first-year teacher, and another $2,500 for each second-year teacher, that the organization recruited. The fee subsidizes the professional development that TFA provides to its teachers during those first two years, Novak said.
The contract was approved at last week’s Board of Education meeting with no discussion.
The fees are paid for with federal stimulus money, according to schools spokeswoman Michelle Wade.
Wade said the partnership has grown this year: Last year, the district paid for 21 TFA teachers; this year, the school board agreed to pay the fees for up to 30. The district may not need all 30 slots, but “the expansion offers us more flexibility with TFA if/when our needs require us to look to them for more candidates,” Wade wrote in an email.
Teacher recruitment is one main plank of the city’s school reform effort, which aims to cut the dropout rate in half and close the achievement gap by 2015. Besides the TFA partnership, the New Haven school district has taken trips to Puerto Rico to look for bilingual staff, and has expanded its job postings to reach a nationwide applicant pool.
Novak said the city’s reforms fit nicely with TFA’s focus.
“With the reform in the district, and how aligned it is with what we focus on in TFA,” she said, “we’re going to continue to see a stronger presence of TFA” in city schools. She said she hopes that presence grows naturally, as new TFA teachers succeed in the new “reform environment” and “want to remain a part of this for a long time.”
That growing presence comes at a time when TFA is booming nationwide. This fall, it expects to have over 8,200 “corps members” teaching in 39 urban and rural settings, the largest in its 20-year history. A “corps member” is a TFA teacher in his or her first or second year of the program. In a down economy, TFA received a record 46,000 applications this year, including 17 percent of Yale seniors, according to a spokeswoman.
“We Wish They’d Stay”
New Haven teachers union President Dave Cicarella welcomed the incoming class of TFA members. He laid out the pros and cons of having them lead city classrooms.
TFA members tend to be highly educated, motivated and hard-working, he said. “They’re terrific in terms of their content knowledge.” And “they care a lot” about the kids. “I’m very supportive of them.”
“The concern that we do have,” Cicarella said, “is that many of them don’t stay — they do the two years, and then they’re gone.”
Of the 36 new TFA recruits the district hired in 2006, only two remained for the 2009-10 school year, according to schools spokeswoman Wade. Updated numbers were not available.
While most teachers who enter the schools through traditional certification have chosen teaching as a career, many TFA recruits leave teaching for other careers, Cicarella said. “Not enough of them stay beyond the two years.”
“We wish they’d stay,” he said.
Cicarella said another common criticism — that young TFA teachers have trouble managing classrooms — isn’t quite fair, because a lot of new teachers face the same problem in their first or second years.
Others have questioned TFA’s effectiveness, because its teachers start the job with little training and leave the profession just when they’re getting the hang of it. A 2005 study by Linda Darling-Hammond found certified teachers “consistently produce stronger student achievement gains than do uncertified teachers,” including TFA recruits. If they get certified after two or three years, TFA recruits boost student achievement as well as other certified teachers, she found — “however, nearly all of them leave within three years.”
To its defense, TFA points to three recent studies that show TFA teachers performed as well or better than traditionally certified teachers.
Mayorga and Sun said they have talked about how rewarding it would be to see their sixth-graders graduate from high school.
“We’re in it for the potential that we can see in these kids,” Sun said.
They both said they’re open to teaching long-term.
“If it’s good for me,” Mayorga said, “I’m willing to stick with it.”
Check this out The corporate vampires are comming.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Is Teach For America A Program For The Poor Or For The Rich?
I'm going to start with full disclosure: I have never liked Teach for America. If that's going to bug you, you might want to move on to the next blog.
Why do I dislike Teach For America? Because it has nothing to do with permanent investment in our schools, or thoughtful reform of education. Because it is one of many organizations that seem to exist more or less to give privileged young people the "life experience" that will qualify them to go on to their next advanced degree. Because it relies for its prestige on the idea that people who are middle or upper class naturally have something special and intangible to offer to the poor. Because it activates our not so thinly-veiled social contempt for people who chose the hard work of teaching public school as a career, often doing it for decades in places where they are forced to buy books and classroom supplies out of their own salaries.
I dislike TFA because public education does not exist to give graduates of elite colleges and universities a couple swing years so that they can later go on to great graduate schools and fabulously well paid careers. I dislike TFA because I am a teacher, and I am quite clear that you don't learn to teach in five weeks, much less teach students who have a range of social, economic and developmental problems; who are often hungry, in pain, angry or frightened; and who come in unruly waves of 40-50 every 45 minutes. So thank you Michael Winerip for interviewing numerous elite college grads who are struggling with the "stigma" of having been rejected by this glitzy non-profit because there aren't so many paralegal and entry-level Wall Street jobs this year; and thank you for using this as an opportunity to take a look at this popular NGO that makes a lot of claims for itself that are thinly documented.
As someone who is a career teacher, I am offended by the notion that anyone can step into a classroom and teach effectively, even though they are inexperienced and virtually untrained, because they are oh-so-smart and have successfully gotten into Harvard or Zenith. And teaching public secondary school is harder than teaching, or being a student in, college. Public school is open to the public, folks, and nobody does a sort for you to separate out the ones who are ready to learn, or who already speak English. Magnet and charter schools can be even harder to teach in, since in their initial years they are often the dumping ground for students who have been expelled from and flunked out of other schools.
But let's be clear: mostly I dislike Teach for America because it is not school reform and it claims to be. It is a neo-liberal romance about the ways in which volunteerism by elites can replace a political and fiscal commitment to lifting Americans out of poverty by supporting, and investing in, the schools that poor people attend. Worse, TFA is a spiritual extension of those internship programs that these eager young things with BA's larded their records with to get into elite colleges and universities in the first place. The logic is: if it looks good for me, then it must be good for "them." As Winerip comments, "Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it's a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher's salary in the districts where they're placed."
And they don't stay in teaching. Perhaps the worst aspect of TFA is that it views teaching as a kind of boot camp for entering the leadership class. TFA's website claims that "corps members and alumni are creating fundamental change," but what that change comprises, and what counts as change, is not clear. The website cites research "that Teach For America corps members' impact on their students' achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers. Moreover, the most rigorous studies have shown that corps members' impact exceeds that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools." But in fact, if you click on the link that supposedly leads you to that research, you find that "Studies of TFA teacher vary widely in both their findings and the strength of their methodologies." Hmmm. And actually, although you can get citations for these studies, the documents themselves have not been uploaded to the website.
What the website doesn't tell you is how many of those teachers quit in the first six months. As Winerip notes, according to one study, "by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left" New York City schools." That's change for you. My guess is the rate of attrition is higher and faster in the Mississippi Delta, currently identified by TFA as a location in great need of amateur teachers. According to one of my former students who entered the program over five years ago and is still teaching in the troubled urban system he was assigned to, his cohort lost half its membership in the first year, and he is the only original member of his team still in teaching.
TFA has not helped to build a permanent corps of excellent teachers who will train other career teachers or use their classroom training to become effective principals. Hence, it has nothing to do with a program of fundamental, structural reform for our nation's public schools. It has nothing to do with how schools, and school systems, might use their centrality to communities to address issues that are currently crippling education, such as unfunded testing mandates, the effects of poverty and unemployment, teaching critical thinking rather than rote memorization, or state budget cuts that eliminate books and raise class sizes. TFA does, however, seem to be a training ground for education bureaucrats, such as Chancellor Michelle Rhee of the District of Columbia, who continues to blame most of her system's problems on undocumented teacher incompetence.
Rhee recently laid off over 250 teachers: how many of them will be replaced by TFA fly-by-nighters, whose salary is paid by a combination of private and federal dollars? I don't know about other states, but because of drastically reduced property tax revenues, Connecticut is currently laying off young teachers who have actually committed to teaching as a career, not as a temporary stopgap before law school. Other states are waiting anxiously to hear whether Congress will pass a bill that would fund the Obama Administration's new education initiative, and whether they will actually receive the millions of dollars they were promised for system-wide education initiatives. Will these funds be replaced by well-intentioned and untrained young people from elite schools who are here today and gone tomorrow?