Nobody reads original sources anymore. That's unfortunate, especially in public policy. It leads to things like this happening, when serious public policy mistakes are constructed because they're flashy, they have a name and they give the appearance that you've actually done something, even if all you've done is abdicate your own authority to someone with a good ad team.
Teach for America gets eager teachers into districts in which recruitment is difficult. MNPS doesn't have a recruitment problem. It has a retention problem. Rather than address why it is that most new teachers don't want to spend their careers in Nashville schools anymore, apparently the new plan is to just lower change the expectation of how long new teachers should remain. No longer will we have to worry about that rascally retention problem, because instead we'll commit to hiring temps.
Teach for America is a great way to inspire young adults to get involved in their communities and to consider lives in education. It is not effective school reform.
The New York Times recently published an editorial praising Teach for America. Taking little more effort to draw its conclusions than our local politicos have, the Times based its editorial on a single, unpublished study, written by a relative of an employee at... wait for it... Teach for America. That study disagrees with the findings of 4 other studies, each of which has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. What were the substantiated findings?
- Students of new TFA teachers achieve at significantly lower levels in math and reading than students of new, fully-certified, trained teachers.
- The strongest negative effects (in other words, the area in which the TFA teachers did the worst) was in elementary level reading. Teaching kids to read is arguably the most important thing that happens in elementary school.
- Only when TFA teachers had 3 years or more teaching experience AND had completed a full certification program did they fare as well as their traditionally-prepared colleagues, and only 20% of TFA teachers actually stick around that long. (In other words, once you gave TFA teachers the same background as traditionally prepared teachers, they began to perform as well as, surprise surprise, traditionally prepared teachers.)
- The other 80% (i.e. the ones who teach for two years, pay off their student loans, and then go into other professions) cost $15,000-$20,000 each to replace.
I didn't know how much I didn't know about teaching before I was educated in a nationally-accredited teacher education program. I remember that each time I work with first year university students or first semester grad students... you have no idea how little you know and how much you assume about schools, just because you happened to have been a student in one. Metro students deserve teachers who have received rigorous preparation to do their work well and they deserve a school system which treats teachers as professionals, within which great teachers want to stay. Well, sure, we're not going to fully fund our schools or, you know, prioritize teacher professional development over, say, whether there will be a major league hockey mascot in town to dance at the school assemblies, but look! We haven't forgotten about it entirely! Hey! The New York Times likes it! It MUST be good!
In an effort to announce that we're doing something, Metro is embracing a program for the cut of the dress instead of the strength of the cloth. The ship's still sinking, but at least we've got those lovely violins.
Comments