The Numbers We Need the Most
Teach for America is a data-driven organization. A quick perusal of the organization’s website reveals some of the detailed statistics on recent recruits. The 2009 corps is more than 4,000 teachers; 18 percent were the first in their family to attend college; 15 percent attended grad school or worked as professionals before applying. But last week, The New York Times reported on another batch of numbers indicating, counter-intuitively, that TFA alums might demonstrate less civic engagement than peers who turned down an offer or who quit before their two-year commitment was up. Understanding these stats is certainly worthwhile, but the attention to TFA veterans should not come at the expense of attention to TFA teaching and the positive impact it has on public school students.
The focus of the story, by TFA alumna Amanda Fairbanks, is a forthcoming study from Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam, who surveyed everyone accepted by TFA from 1993 to 1998 and posed questions about voting, charitable giving, and civic engagement. The Eduwonk blog zeroed in on the findings themselves and suggested that the differences are interesting but hardly tragic: “while 92 percent of the sample overall voted in the last presidential election, only 89 percent of TFA completers did. You decide how much of a problem this is given that these rates are about double the averages for the age-cohort overall.”
And as a future data point myself, a recent recruit for the 2010 cohort, I also couldn’t help but trip over anecdotal evidence that conflicts with the study results. Every alum I spoke with during the application process is highly involved in some sort of civic enterprise; so are most of the alums they know. My informal polling is no way to make a counter-argument (see, I’ve already absorbed the data-driven ethos), so instead I’ll say this: the data on civic participation for TFA alums is intriguing, but is of less civic importance than the data on how those teachers are improving classroom education.
Put simply, we should focus more on how education is changing for the students and less on how life is changing for the recruits.
Fortunately, Amanda Ripley did exactly that in an Atlantic article published just days after Fairbanks’s NYT piece. For her in-depth feature, Ripley had access to 20 years of Teach for America data linking teachers to student testing results. Her snapshot: the organization has test-score stats for 85 to 90 percent of the nearly 500,000 students taught by 7,300 TFA teachers annually. The impact of this information in recent school years has been extraordinary:
In 2007, 24 percent of Teach for America teachers moved their students one and a half or more years ahead, according to the organization’s internal reports. In 2009, that number was up to 44 percent. That data relies largely on school tests, which vary in quality from state to state. When tests aren’t available or sufficiently rigorous, Teach for America helps teachers find or design other reliable diagnostics.
How does TFA achieve results like this? I don’t head to the summer training institute until June, but my current perspective aligns with Ripley’s conclusions: the organization finds people who don’t give up when faced with a daunting task (the word “relentless” turns up frequently during the application process) and teaches them the techniques to engage any student they meet. In practice, this means applying an intricate combination of strategies on a moment-to-moment basis to manage classroom behavior, tailor instruction to individual students, and reevaluate anything that isn’t working. Ripley captures this process in motion, chronicling in detail the methods of William Taylor, a math teacher at Kimball Elementary School in Washington, D.C. who is not a member of Teach for America, but who embodies the skills the organization aims to replicate.
Watching an effective teacher can be mesmerizing and extraordinarily intimidating. On a recent observation visit to a TFA teacher’s classroom, I saw middle-schoolers read in attentive silence, cheer at the start of a grammar lesson, and race to organize themselves into diligent literature study groups. The short videos that accompany the Atlantic article offer a taste of these classroom approaches, which teachers then multiply through an entire class period and across a six-hour day. I am under no illusion that this will be easy.
But considering the results that effective teachers, some of them TFA recruits, are having in classrooms today, I have to ask: Is it more important that the young adults in front of those classrooms might, after two years, change their patterns of civic engagement relative to their highly-engaged peers? Or is it more important that they are committed to a national experiment to refine the elements of good teaching and share them with the students who need them most?
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