Wendy Kopp started Teach For America with a question she asked as a Princeton senior: why weren’t graduates being recruited to teach in urban and rural schools as aggressively as they were being recruited to Wall Street? Thirteen years later, Shaw Middle School in Southwest Philadelphia had seven classrooms with no teacher in them. It was September 2003, Teach For America’s first year in Philadelphia and my first full year as a principal.
The district gave us two choices: seven substitutes or seven brand-new teachers through Teach For America. I had not heard of them, and I was out of the country at the time. I went online and looked them up. We took the seven teachers. Tracy-Elizabeth Clay, who launched TFA Greater Philadelphia that fall and led it with brilliance, grace, and impact, was a partner to Shaw from the first week, and Mike Wang carried that partnership forward after her.
Those seven walked into a building that had run through three principals in six months. The year before, four of every hundred Shaw fifth graders had tested proficient in math. They did not fight alone. They blended in with veteran teachers, one of them an Overbrook schoolmate of mine, who had been holding that building together, and with neighbors, faith partners, and families who had never stopped showing up for their children. The spring we left, Shaw met all seventeen of its federal targets, with double-digit gains in math and reading in a single year.
Roughly half of our staff in those years came through alternative certification, TFA and TNTP mostly, and the children could not have told you which teacher came through which door. The turnaround at Shaw, and later the one at Shoemaker, belongs to all of our teams, the veterans, the newcomers, the families, and the block. Two decades later, contrary to the two-and-out caricature, many of them are still teaching and leading.
When we moved to Mastery Shoemaker in 2008, the partnership came with us. By our tenth anniversary at Shoemaker, about 40 percent of our classroom teachers and 40 percent of our leadership team had started through TFA, and 84 percent of our graduates were heading to four-year colleges. Ten years ago a post on this very blog carried the title “The Problem With Teach For America,” and it ended on a suspicion: maybe the actual problem was something else. There was no long line of traditionally certified veterans waiting to teach Black children in Philadelphia. When we asked people to sign up, these young folks stood up.
None of that made any critique go away. It sharpened it.
In every school and organization I have led, from Shaw to Shoemaker to The Fellowship: Black Male Educators for Social Justice to the Center for Black Educator Development, TFA corps members and alumni have been among the founding members and partners who pushed us toward the outcomes our students deserve. That partnership never meant silence. For years the corps looked too much like the typical teacher preparation program, whose output is a profession where fewer than two percent of teachers are Black men. So we pushed.
Many of us pushed, for years, in rooms and in print. We pushed on who got recruited and from where. We pushed on retention, because a child’s fourth teacher in four years is not a reform. We pushed on whether sending bright young strangers into Black neighborhoods was a solution or a symptom of a deeper theft, the dismantling of the Black Teacher Pipeline that began in the aftermath of Brown and that no alternative certification program caused or could fix alone.
TFA moved. Not all at once, and not on every count, but it moved.
In 2009, about a third of incoming corps members were people of color. In 2014, for the first time, half the incoming corps identified as people of color. Under Elisa Villanueva Beard, who led TFA through most of that shift, the corps became 57 percent people of color and 45 percent first-generation college students, against a national teaching force that is roughly 20 percent people of color. Traditional programs have also been pushed and many have not moved like that. Seventy-one percent of the people completing them are still white, in a country where most public school students are not.
A critique around preparation deserves the same scrutiny. The standard charge against TFA is that a summer institute is not enough training to become a teacher of record, and it is not. But if one of us spends four or five years in a college of education and another spends one summer at an institute, and we both walk into a classroom as first-year teachers, it should not be close.
It is close. Far closer than you might imagine.
In a random-assignment trial run for the U.S. Department of Education, students of TFA secondary math teachers learned about 2.6 months more math in a year than students of teachers in the same schools who came through other routes. A separate federal trial found no difference in student achievement between teachers from alternative and traditional routes, and in New York City a teacher’s certification path told researchers very little about how much their students would learn. Closer to home, a Temple University study of eight programs that prepare teachers for Philadelphia schools found few connections between where or how teachers were prepared and how they performed, and 72 percent of the new teachers surveyed said they felt unprepared to work in an urban classroom.
That study is not new, and it may be one of the few Philadelphia-based studies of its kind, but it mirrors what the national studies have shown. Not every study lands there, and none of it says a summer is sufficient. It says four years often is not either. A field that lets that stand while reserving its scorn for the newcomers is not defending rigor. The better question is what the four years should have bought: a start in high school, a residency beside a master teacher, a pipeline from the neighborhood itself.
My friend and 8 Black Hands colleague Chris Stewart, an honorary corps member like me, wrote this week about why he is boycotting TFA’s 35th anniversary summit. Under the joke, and the running bit about the certificate he says he never received, he says the harshest callouts of TFA come from inside the house, and that the organization has a habit of handing its critics a microphone.
A confession: had I known Teach For America existed when I finished college, I likely would have applied.
Before I graduated college, no one had invited me into the profession. I still had law school on my mind when Mama Cynthia Moultrie, my best friend’s mother, pointed out that I could lead a classroom, and Dr. Martin Ryder opened the door to this beautiful profession through his leadership of the coalition of Cheyney University, the School District of Philadelphia, and the nonprofit Concerned Black Men, eventually helping me land at Turner Middle School.
I wish I had been given a summer to develop before I became the teacher of record. Once I knew I was interested, I signed up to substitute in the district’s schools and started classes at Cheyney that summer, learning the work while doing it. I would not trade the coalition that brought me in.
Still, I would have welcomed a TFA institute, and, for that matter, a Teaching Academy as a high school course and a Freedom Schools Literacy Academy in my high school and college summers. That is the kind of entry point into teaching, and the invigoration, that we must offer the next generation of teachers.
What I had, and what carried me, was Dr. D’Alfonso, the Turner principal who hired me and had a great deal to do with my staying, and Mrs. Corbett, Mrs. Savior, Dr. Blackwell, Mrs. Lee, Ms. Williams, and Mr. Gibbs, veteran educators who taught me the job while I was in the building, in front of children. Many of us get into this profession because somebody asked, and stay because somebody showed us how. TFA’s whole design is that ask, made to thousands of young people, many of whom no one else was asking. I am grateful for my invitation, and I understand why so many answered theirs.
At the Center for Black Educator Development, the people rebuilding the Black Teacher Pipeline include several leaders who were first invited into a classroom by TFA, in Washington, D.C., in East San Jose, and elsewhere. One traces her policy and advocacy work to her time with Teach For America. Another began his teaching career in a TFA placement and now runs our programs. TFA alumni have helped lead The Fellowship from its earliest days. Some of my favorite mentors, colleagues, comrades, and staff across three decades in this work are TFA alumni. I cannot imagine doing this work without them. We are immensely grateful for them, and we are grateful to the organization that put them in front of children in the first place.
Partners also ask things of each other. Aneesh Sohoni, who now leads TFA, wrote this week that the summit will reckon with how much work remains and that TFA is entering an era of acceleration, recruiting more high-potential recent college graduates. His piece does not say where those graduates should come from. Ours does. Wendy Kopp’s question was about Princeton seniors and Wall Street. Ours, thirty-five years later, is about the seniors at Overbrook, Sankofa, Girls’ High, Science Leadership Academy at Beeber, and Olney, and at schools like them across the country. They should be recruited to teach at least as aggressively as the seniors at Princeton. Aneesh inherits Chris’s certificate request along with this list.
Two years is a beginning, not a career. By TFA’s own count, three in four alumni work in education or mission-related fields, which is far more than many early critics expected. The number that matters to a child is how many are still in a classroom. Ten percent of the current corps were themselves taught by corps members, which means the pipeline can feed itself. Make that the norm. Recruit from the high schools the corps already serves, and start earlier than senior year of college, the way our Teaching Academy does with high school students. Send Ignite fellows and alumni into the Black Teacher Pipeline instead of alongside it. Measure yourselves not only by who joins but by who is still teaching Black children at year ten, and publish it.
Many of the men who have come through the Black Men in Education Convening, this November’s in Philadelphia and every one before it, came into this work through your invitation. Thank you.
Happy birthday, Teach For America. Thank you for answering when seven classrooms at Shaw Middle School were empty.
