Sustainability Meets True Commitment
I did not want to continue the “blog war” as it has now been tagged because I hate providing people with a forum for their corporate agendas and their programmed responses, but I felt the need to talk a little about my primary reason for disliking Teach for America.
(Although it’s great when they keep linking to us because it raises our authority level in technorati)
Teach for America claims to be interested in closing the achievement gap, a gap that starts from birth. However, despite all the evidence that Head Start programs are a necessary tool in fighting this gap, TFA receives funding by some of the very people who want to close many of the Head Start programs. There seems to be a conflict of ideals in what TFA preaches and what they practice. In fact, TFA is contributing to a system of educational chaos on so many different levels.
Contrary to popular belief, the problems in high-needs school districts have less to do with teacher quality and more to do with a lack of commitment to lower socio-economic classes by policy makers, politicians, educators, and alternative certification programs.
TMAO over at Teaching in the 408 has written a very telling post voicing an insider’s concerns about “Teach for Awhile” and their willingness to help members leave the communities they have graciously decided to save serve. TMAO writes:
I have the opportunity to attend functions that tell me all the great things I should be doing instead of teaching. I can read in alumni bulletins all the wonderful accomplishments made by former corps members once they got out from under the shadow of those pesky under-performing urban schools. I can talk to a full-time TFA employee whose sole purpose is easing a corps member’s transition from a teaching “career” into another field and other endeavors, but I cannot have a conversation with a full-time employee about how to continue my development as an educator of high needs, at risk kids.
TFA encourages its members, many times from the very start, to look at teaching in high-needs schools as simply a stepping stone to something better. They encourage their alumni to “reassure [new recruits] that tfa won’t take them off their medicine/law career path,” a practice that shows that no matter how good-intentioned the program may be at heart, those who run it do not understand just what commitment means. Additionally, they have a misguided focus:
This is about the myth that the best way to bring about educational reform is to 1) align yourself with media-friendly small/charter school movements and undermine the school communities you promote yourself as serving and 2) steer talented individuals with some teaching experience out of the classroom and into other fields so they can tangentially affect the lives of today’s poor urban and rural youth — or not affect them at all. This is about TFA doubling down on the old saw that its members will use their law, policy, and grad school degress to benefit the communities in which they once taught. This is about missed opportunities and turning a blind eye.
Providing support for members who would stay in teaching should be TFA’s primary focus because after all, having good teachers in the classroom is the best way to launch an attack against the “status quo” that so many TFA supports accuse us of supporting.
Those who criticize our blog will inevitably ask, ‘So, what’s wrong with moving on? Why is encouraging members to leave these schools and enter into more lucrative industries a problem if they can affect change after doing so,’ but I have an answer.
In the first place, there is absolutely no way that anyone can master teaching in two years. The first two years of a teachers’ career are an absolute learning curve. This is why many suburban school districts won’t even interview a beginning teacher. Parents in suburban neighborhoods would never think of allowing their children to turn into a training ground for teachers. Why, then, is it OK for inner city children?
It’s also a problem because the relationships formed between a student and his or her teacher can determine what path that student will choose. When students are forced to adjust to a slew of new teachers every two years, they lose so much more than a familiar face. They lose their support system. They lose their cheering squad. They lose a connection that can never be replaced. In neighborhoods where many of the students move from group home to group home, foster home to foster home, and country to country, often times teachers are their only source of consistency. More importantly, students are sent a silent message: they are not worthy of commitment. They feel unimportant and unworthy of something as small as time. Without consistency and a feeling of importance, these students will fall by the wayside and get lost in the constant change of temporary fixes.
And before you say it, yes, I know that teachers from traditional programs leave too. However, going the traditional route to become certified takes a lot of thought and is often a choice bred of a desire to want to teach. These people want to help children and they usually plan to stay in education for the long term.
In fact, every single teacher in my school who has more than five years of teaching experience has gone through a traditional teaching program. Many, many alternatively certified teachers have come and gone, yet our ‘core’ teachers; those who are staying longer than two or three years, have come through the traditional route. What does this say about preparation?
Yes, some of these experienced people leave, but their leaving under-served schools is the failure of society’s disregard for the importance of teaching and even more so, a lack of concern for those who are not part of the mainstream. These teachers are urged to leave the system by the very organization that claims to want to close the achievement gap.
How can TFA fix the problem? I recently read Barack Obama’s Education Plan in which he talks about ways to (1) make teaching a more attractive profession and (2) retain teachers by providing support:
Recruit, Prepare, Retain, and Reward America’s Teachers
- Recruit Teachers: Obama will create new Teacher Service Scholarships that will cover four years of undergraduate or two years of graduate teacher education, including high-quality alternative programs for mid-career recruits in exchange for teaching for at least four years in a high-need field or location.
- Prepare Teachers: Obama will require all schools of education to be accredited. He will also create a voluntary national performance assessment so we can be sure that every new educator is trained and ready to walk into the classroom and start teaching effectively. Obama will also create Teacher Residency Programs that will supply 30,000 exceptionally well-prepared recruits to high-need schools.
- Retain Teachers: To support our teachers, Obama’s plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits. He will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices.
- Reward Teachers: Obama will promote new and innovative ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. Districts will be able to design programs that reward accomplished educators who serve as a mentor to new teachers with a salary increase. Districts can reward teachers who work in underserved places like rural areas and inner cities. And if teachers consistently excel in the classroom, that work can be valued and rewarded as well.
If we are to truly rebuild the forest, we need to plant trees that sustain even the toughest conditions. Teachers that enter the classroom looking to catapult their way into a better field, need to be discouraged from entering the profession at all. In addition, there needs to be a shift in the general thinking about education and educators. We need to redefine teaching a a profession so that staying in the classroom is more respected and less burdensome. Our students are worth more than a passing glance and they need teachers who believe that.
They are not a stepping stone for those with other aspirations.
There should be no higher aspiration than to work with inner city children.
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Comments
There is nothing like the process of watching students grow and develop over the years and the relationships that they form with you.
This is especially important in inner city schools where relationship is everything to kids.
Former students constantly stop by to visit previous teachers to talk, get advice , help and of course, college recommendations.
“Miss, are you coming to my prom?” “Miss are you coming to my graduation?”
These questions are huge to children who have known you since the ninth grade.
And let me tell you something-they definitely look out to see if you are there at these events, and boy will you get hell if you don’t attend!
We become family and this is vital.
Great post.
In particular, I liked this line-’These teachers are urged to leave the system by the very organization that claims to want to close the achievement gap.’
I remember hearing somewhere that the real brilliance of creating a mind set that deflects individuals from seeing the real problems in a society is that people begin to ‘police’ themselves.
Put out information to the public that causes them to devalue teachers. The public creates a pressure that lowers the morale of teachers. Teachers then leave the system.
[...] Teach for America employs full time people to help ‘transition’ former TFA members to fields other than teaching, they seem to have a harm time accounting for the rest of the money they have received from [...]
@Norm- Thanks. It has been brewing for a while. I was just trying to find the words. You know, the heroic teacher image is one that I hate because heroes are never what they appear to be.
@AVIW- I agree, family is very important when so many of our students come from less than ideal ones. I am going to graduation this year despite the fact that I don;t have to because I get to see some of my first ninth graders graduate. How could I pass this up?
@Brian- Again, you are right. Getting teachers to hate their job makes it easier to blame those teachers for the fall of the syste,.
You know, I’m not crazy about some of the Obama stuff.
Under his Recruit teacher idea, I’m not sure this works because I am not sure that you can force people to commit to a job for four years. We’are not indentured servants these days. You could, of course, ask people to refund the scholarship in full and with interest if they leave the 4-yr teaching part early.
(Just so you know, I was in this position a long time ago, having received a NYS Regents Fellowship for Beginning Grad. Study, 2 yrs. One was obligated to teach afterwards, which I had NO intention of doing. I wanted to be an opera singer and was intending to do a graduate degree only as back-up. And it wasn’t in Teaching either, it was in Musicology, so I could work at the college level. My guilt has long since been assuaged after 20 years in NYC classrooms, but I didn’t start off when I should have, at the end of the masters. It took 18 years for me to even begin my obligation to NYS in a classroom position.)
As to RETAIN teachers: Every time you pair a vet with a new teacher in a mentoring situation you are depriving kids of the mentor’s skills for those many hours. For me that’s the bottom line. Common planning time also cuts into time with kids. I’m not much for that either, and I know I’m fairly radical on both of these positions.
Am also radical on REWARDING teachers, because any time someone like Obama (corporately connected as they all are these days) talks about “innovative ways to increase teacher pay,” I see MERIT PAY go up in neon lights. Can’t go there.
PS: I riffed on TFA and myth-making over at Under Assault:
Woodlasss last blog post..TFA and myth-making
I understand what your concerns are Woodlass, but he is the only politician in a long time to actually talk about LONGEVITY. None of these programs actually force anyone to stay for any amount of time. They may fill you with utter fear at the thought of leaving (If you leave NYCTF before a year you have to pay money back), but no one is forced.
However, as stated in my post, 2 years is not enough time for ANYONE to become a good teacher. As much as I told that I was good at my job, i never gelt good at it during my first two years. I felt like I was barely holding on and just struggling to survive. It wasn’t until my third year, after spending two years picking the brains of my colleagues and scouring the Internet for materials to support what it was that I was trying to do in the class, that I began to feel like I can do this. Two years of on -the-job training is just not enough.
And giving veteran staff the opportunity to mentor is a hell of a lot better than sitting them in Rubber Rooms or the Library or covering classes where their knowledge and expertise is turning into bitterness and goes untapped.
Common planning time is a necessity for teachers who come in via ACR with no knowledge of how to plan a lesson. I would have been lost without the time that I spent bouncing ideas off of others.
We have to be willing to give a little. The current system is, excuse my language, screwing the teachers and the students. At least Obama’s plan attempts to foster hope.
Re: Common planning time … maybe we’re speaking across purposes, my fault. I believe in scheduling free periods so that colleagues or a teammates can talk face to face — if they want to. I was talking above about any type of CPT that detracts from teaching schedule, which I think happened in one of the schools I was in.
But NO ONE who stands in front of a class should be in earning a salary without being able to plan a lesson. Teachers get paid to disseminate information outwards, and if in their early years their lessons don’t always work, they’ll get many chances to hone them and learn from the spots that were less successful. They’ll get better at creating and executing these the longer they stay in the job, but they should never be clueless about it.
Where you say “we have to be willing to give a little” – I agree, and did it for a couple of decades giving away chunks of my evenings and huge chunks of my weekends in preparation and marking.
Woodlasss last blog post..TFA and myth-making
I’m a stickler for lesson plans also, I have to admit.
I think the real problem though, lies in this bizarre factory model that our high schools follow. Shove a bunch of kids in a room for a short period of time, give them some information, then beep… move them to the next room. It’s an assembly line.
When are we going to stop industrializing everything?
The ‘factory’ model may have worked (although I’m sure that many will debate this ) when children could actually expect to graduate high school and obtain a factory job.
Now, there are very few, and they certainly are not going to be able to support themselves from a salary earned in such a job.
Again, outside influences refuse to talk about these very real issues that are drowning our public schools.
Instead, they want to change teachers every two years.
It’s utterly ridiculous.
On the other hand, there is a point with long-time teachers where a sort of wall is reached, a certain staleness can set in. I sort of hit that point around my 17th year – I went and got an MA in computer science with the idea of having a fall-back position. I ended up out of the self-contained classroom as a computer teacher and it was never really the same intensity again. But I wonder how long I could have gone on the other way. There were very few teachers who reached 20 and were still doing the most intensive teaching – there are enough cluster and pull-out positions in elem school that allow senior teachers to escape. Once out, there’s almost no going back to that level of intensity. Remember, I am talking inner city schools here, so suburban teachers don’t seem to burn out as easily.
Maybe we need to rethink how to structure elementary schools to create a more viable situation for the long-term. I used to advocate a radical solution: everyone, and I mean everyone, in the water. No frills. You could really cut class size that way. As for preps, I could have lived with sending the kids home a period early. My ideal schedule: Teach all day, lunch, prep. For me, those days were the most efficient.
Norms last blog post..Found on Schools Matter: New Film on Teachers
Lois Weiner edited a book touching on this very topic.
http://www.amazon.ca/Reversing-Global-Assault-Teaching-Teachers/dp/023060630X
Norms last blog post..Found on Schools Matter: New Film on Teachers
Norm, I would never have guessed you could wait that long to eat.
I, too, hit a who-cares thing right about the same time. Thank goodness they made me an ATR. Now it’s a laugh a minute, with a new schedule every day.
Woodlasss last blog post..I prefer acupuncture
I think that part of the problem is that there are not enough opportunities for teachers within a traditional school setting to branch out-you teach five classes or you are an administrator. These are your only choices. There are many people who want to stay within the school system and who enjoy working with children, but who want to do something different than the rote 45 minute periods.
If schools were structured differently and teachers were provided with more opportunities to grow professionally, I think that burn out would greatly decrease.
Every job has a certain level of burn out, but I find it hard to believe that, as many TFA supporters say, that two years in is perfect because it combats burnout.
I have been in 4 years and I know I am teetering on burn out. Luckily I am able to do other things, but you are right AVIW, there are very few opportunities. But of course I have to ask, bow many teachers do you think would be willing to take the opportunities if there were some offered?
WOW! Great post. So many things I’ve been thinking about but didn’t see how to put into words. You make the very important point about a school community. Kids love to come back to see their teachers and teachers seeing their kids years after they leave has a positive impact on them and their teaching – they look at some kids differently, perhaps find another angle.
There’s also the angle TFA pushes of the heroic teacher who will put in their all for a short time (and they often do and do burn out) as opposed to teaching as a career and a job like just about so many others. What of teachers with families to go home to or with a long commute? Is there no room in teaching for people who put in a hard day’s work and go home at a reasonable time?
Norms last blog post..How Many Sides of His Mouth Can Tim Daly Speak Out Of?