Nearly everyone at Harvard has heard of Teach for America. It’s all over college campuses, it’s in the news on teacher labor policy, it goes through another round of debate every time a new alum publishes a blog post about why you absolutely should/should not do the program. Most recently, the organization came up again when a national group called United Students Against Sweatshops launched a campaign to ban TFA from college campuses.
Nearly everyone who’s heard of Teach for America has strong feelings about it. Most people tend to agree that the program, which recruits recent high-performing college graduates to teach in some of America’s most challenging schools, is illustrative of everything that’s wrong with our nation’s schools and teachers.
“Everything that’s wrong,” of course, varies in nature depending on who you ask. To some, TFA calls attention to—and addresses—not only teacher shortages, but also the shortcomings of the current teaching work force. It opens up teaching to bright, creative, motivated young people, exactly the kind of people we want in our schools. To others, TFA is just one more well-funded, high-profile example of the privatization of education and the deprofessionalization of teaching.
Neither line of reasoning, though, is definitively supported by the evidence. Does TFA illustrate problems with our education system? Yes. Does it solve them? Unclear. The best evidence we have supports neither the protest nor the zealous support that typically dominates the debate.
The research on the impacts of Teach for America teachers finds mixed and not entirely informative results. Studies using teacher value-added scores, a measure of a teacher’s impact on student test scores that Raj Chetty has shown to correlate closely with students’ later life outcomes (2014), suggest that TFA teachers produce gains in learning about equal to or slightly greater than the gains produced by their peers certified via more traditional pathways (Decker, Mayer, & Glazerman, 2004; Heilig & Jin Jez, 2010; Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2008). In short, on the most rigorous quantitative measure available of a teacher’s effect on students’ lives, TFA teachers perform similarly on average to non-TFA teachers. Moreover, these impacts vary across geographic locations, and due to obvious missing data problems, it is difficult for researchers to ask the only question that really matters: are TFA teachers better than the teachers whose jobs they are taking in districts where they are doing more than just filling shortages?
Even more challenging is a question that quantitative research simply isn’t equipped to answer: if TFA teachers were better than the counterfactual, would this make the program a good thing? Regardless of how TFA teachers perform relative to their peers, the argument can be made that the program undermines the teaching profession, that the only reason TFA teachers perform “well” is that our standards for teacher quality are too low, and, perhaps most difficult for TFA supporters to acknowledge, that the program’s resources could do more for teaching if they were used to improve teacher preparation programs and support teachers in the classroom rather than to make recent college grads into the saviors of our nation’s kids.
In the end, problems with TFA and problems with teaching in the U.S. are not mutually exclusive. TFA may produce positive outcomes for some students, but it also further lowers the status of an already underrespected profession. It’s okay to protest TFA for the impacts it has on teachers and teaching—but it’s important to remember throughout these debates that teachers are in schools for students, and we can’t leave TFA’s impacts on kids out of the conversation.