What Wendy Kopp Got Wrong With Teach For America

[The Philosopher]

Last week, the Huffington Post ran an op/ed piece by Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA. The title was In Defense of Optimism. I read it, tweeted it, and moved on, but it has been rattling in my head for some time now, so here are some thoughts in response.

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As I understand it, the original premise of TFA was that, in a school which lacked teachers (literally, did not have or was not able to hire qualified teachers), a bright, enthusiastic, young person with a college degree and some small amount of preparation would be better than nothing. And I can’t disagree with that. It would be better than nothing.

However, there were two things in the essay which, having reflected, really stand out to me. One is very specific, and one underlies the entirety of Ms. Kopp’s opinion.

The first is her assertion that,

A significant body of rigorous research shows that they [TFA teachers] are more effective than other beginning teachers and, on average, equally or more effective than veteran teachers.

This statement is given as accepted fact, and the addition of the word ‘rigorous’ gives the impression of academic certification, without the need for all those pesky citations. At the very least, this statement has been seriously disputed by professionals whose job it is to understand both teacher effectiveness and the methodology by which one might determine teacher effectiveness. Frankly, given my reading of current research and the critical discussions around that research, I would claim the exact opposite, that there is a significant body of rigorous research that shows that TFA teachers are in fact significantly less effective that either new teachers produced by more traditional teacher preparation programs, or than veteran teachers.

To avoid falling into the same trap Ms. Kopp does, here are some links to articles addressing these issues (I was happy to see that some of these were posted in the comments at HuffPo pretty quickly):

Click Here To Read More

[zipplewrath]

1. The quotation is almost absurd within itself

A "rigorous" study has determined that education and training are COUNTER productive to... well... education and training? It seems absurd on the face of it.

i.e. teaching someone makes them less effective. So tomorrow we're going to fire all the engineers, and just get a bunch of really smart kids with some decent college educations in whatever, and put them through a 6 week course, and then we'll have really good doctors, lawyers, engineers, plumbers, electricians...

I'm a bit like you, my original understanding was that TFA was about taking people who had strong backgrounds in a subject, say math or science, maybe history, and giving them some background in education, to fill the need in these particular fields that was otherwise lacking. I'm not sure when it became the intention to REPLACE a solid educational background in teaching.

I've got a nephew that went the whole TFA route. He was massively overwhelmed for at LEAST 2 years. Basically he started dating a formally trained teacher and she drug his butt through SEVERAL years until he got the hang of it.