Wendy
Kopp, founder and Chair of the Board of Teach For America (TFA), recently penned a piece in response to the growing tide of
critique/criticism her organization faces.
Concluding that this criticism is misplaced and “toxic,” she attempts to
silence her critics with the “facts.”
Kopp’s
undergraduate thesis (B.A. in public and international affairs from Princeton)
was the genesis of her national corps of teachers that turned into TFA. The preface of that thesis notes that her
organization was founded on the assumption that one of the major problems in
schools was the “lack of qualified teachers” (Kopp, 1989, p. i). Ultimately, Kopp laid out a plan for developing
a cadre of alternatively certified teachers in an effort to ameliorate the
teacher shortage of the late 1980s. In
fact, Kopp asserted that,
[TFA] would bill itself as an emergency response to a shortage of
experienced, qualified teachers and would therefore not be telling the nation
that its inexperienced members were preferable to, or as qualified as,
experienced teachers. Kopp, 1989, p. 50.
This
initial “billing” of TFA has radically shifted as TFA now claims that its corps
members compete even-handedly with traditionally certified teachers for
openings and, as Kopp asserts in her piece, TFA has explicitly transformed
itself into an organization that proclaims its inexperienced members are
preferable to experienced teachers.
Beyond
the classroom, Kopp points out that alumni of the
organization “have started and work in education nonprofits and help shape
policy in districts and state education departments.” Yet, Kopp fails to consider the types of
policies (pro-charter, pro-alternative certification, pro-voucher, anti-teacher
union, anti-teacher tenure) that her alums (like Michelle Rhee and John White)
fervently cheerlead. And, as a recent
article
concluded, TFA alumni who do become engaged in policymaking “incorporate
significantly more messages aligned with TFA.”
Given TFA’s brand of education reform and a favoring of high-stakes
testing, alumni who have had little introduction into teaching and pedagogy will
likely continue to mimic TFA’s brand of reform (see here and here for examples).
Kopp, much like co-CEO Elisa Villanueva-Beard, repeats the usual “we’re
open to criticism” mantra. However, in a
forthcoming article (Brewer & Wallis, in press), we show that TFA largely
ignores online critique/criticism and, instead, creates a digital echo chamber
of allies. And while Kopp’s recent piece
suggests that critique of her organization is largely “toxic” given that
critics don’t “consider the facts” about the organization, Kopp then goes on to
provide her readers with those “facts.” Namely,
that TFA provides an “intensive program of pre-service and ongoing professional
development” for its teachers. However,
she fails to point out that this “intensive” pre-service training is limited to
145 hours of training where 18 of those hours are spent in front of
students. By comparison, given that it
requires 1,500 hours in Illinois to become a
licensed cosmetologist, 18 hours of practice would hardly qualify as “intensive.”
Another
“fact” presented by Kopp – in a continued effort to promote its corps members
as explicitly better than traditionally certified teachers – is a recent study
conducted by the Mathematica Policy Institute.
That study concluded that TFA corps members who taught high school math in
a public school provided their students with an additional 2.6 months of
learning. However, there are numerous
issues with the Mathematica study that Kopp cites. The sample of corps members in the
Mathematica study are not representative of TFA as the majority of them were
White, taught high school, and taught mathematics. What is more, “even if the Mathematica findings are
taken at face value, investments in smaller class sizes may close the gap in
student achievement far more cost-effectively than TFA.” Not to mention, measuring learning by the
metric of days/months of learning requires the acceptance of numerous assumptions about learning and, from a
mathematical perspective, the reported 2.6 additional months of learning has
been challenged here, here, here, and here.
Another of Kopp’s “facts” suggests that of the 47,000 alumni, 86%
remain in education or in jobs improving lives.
This is a troublesome statistic considering: (a) the lumping together of
multiple categories appears to be an attempt to inflate the actual numbers;
and, (b) the data for this is gathered through TFA’s well-guarded annual alumni
survey (most recently released on September 22, 2014). In that email, co-CEO Matt Kramer notes that 23,000
alumni participated in last year’s survey.
As is such, Kopp’s numbers simply don’t add up. At the very least, claiming that any
percentages of its 47,000 alumni are engaged in any activity when the response
rate is less than half of its alumni is exceedingly problematic. That is, it is misleading for Kopp to write
that 86% of her 47,000 alumni are doing anything when the organization only
knows what 23,000 of them are doing.
In sum, Kopp’s attempt to respond to the growing tide of
criticism that her organization faces has likely done little to quell dissent
and has equally provided her critics with another example of TFA-spin as Kopp
exaggerates what the organization knows about its alumni in an attempt to
distance the organization from the perception that its teachers abandon
education after their two year commitment expires.
by T. Jameson Brewer (@tjamesonbrewer)
Brewer,
T. J., & Wallis, M.
(in press). #TFA: The Intersection of Social Media and Education Reform. Critical Education.
