This Is What Happens When You Criticize Teach for America [View all]

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/186481/what-happens-when-you-criticize-teach-america

The incredible assumptions of talent afforded to TFA members, both as instructors and later as political figures, are integral to the logic holding the organization together. For decades, sociological research has shown that anti-poverty measures, not energetic young college students, are the driving factors in improved education outcomes. Yet for over twenty years TFA’s organizational model has been based upon the idea that a college student, fresh from a five-week summer camp, could swoop into an poor, overcrowded classroom and inspire her students to overcome all barriers of structural inequality. Thus, the fundamental premise of Teach For America elides this need for wealth redistribution, perhaps explaining TFA’s massive corporate donor appeal.

As Julian Vasquez Heilig, professor of educational leadership and policy studies at California State University, explained to The Nation, the numbers do not justify TFA’s organizational premise. “TFA has a single study that they always trot out to show they have a positive impact at a standard deviation about 0.07,” said Vasquez Heilig. “While yes that number is bigger than 0, as researchers we do not consider that very significant, especially when reforms like class size reduction and universal pre-K do so much more.” Vasquez Heilig continued, “Prior studies have not demonstrated that TFA does better than than traditionally certified teachers, though they have shown that they do better than alternatively certified teachers, which makes sense because those teachers get thirty hours versus TFA’s five weeks. Its a choice between bad and worse.” Echoing the concerns of many other education researchers, Vasquez Heilig also claimed a lot of positive research TFA cites is often misleading, failing to meet basic research standards, such as clarifying the pool of teachers to whom recruits are being compared.

Further, despite overwhelming sociological research to the contrary, most TFA alumni believe that in the world of education, just as in that of high finance, getting rid of the dead weight is the key to raising the bottom line (i.e., higher test scores). Note, for instance, Michelle Rhee’s rhetoric at a Harvard education policy panel: “If someone told you as a business, that if you removed the bottom 6 percent of your performers, that you would move from 25th in the market to top-5, you would do it in a heartbeat. You would not even think twice about it. But we have an incredibly hard time in this country. We like teachers. It is an incredibly noble position in this country. But we have to look at the reality.”

Though decorated with the trappings of quantitative analysis, this so-called “reality” is highly manipulable. At Crosby S. Noyes Education Campus, one of Rhee’s heralded turnaround schools, in only two years the student body leapt from a math proficiency level of 10 percent to 58 percent. These enormous gains were attributed to Rhee’s merit pay system, which supposedly incentivized the Noyes teachers to work harder; in both 2008 and 2010, Rhee’s district rewarded these teachers for their output with $8,000 bonuses. A USA Today investigation, however, found that over the course of three years, 80 percent of Noyes’s classrooms churned out standardized exams that were flagged for “extraordinarily high numbers of erasures on standardized tests,” indicating that cheating was taking place. During Rhee’s tenure, over 103 public schools were flagged for having alarmingly high erasure rates while from 2007–08 alone over $1.5 million was handed out to teachers, principals and support staff for their “improvements.”