Relentless Pursuit (5 page)

The first Teach For America Institute was held in June 1990 at the University of Southern California. Dr. Marvin Bressler was the keynote speaker. His advice to the five hundred graduates who came from one hundred colleges was fittingly self-effacing: “Whatever you do as teachers, never discourage your students.”

The institute started on a high note, and then things went rapidly downhill. The eight weeks of training were disastrous, recalls Kopp. Corps members sparred with one another, the training was inadequate, the housing spartan; on top of all that, recruits were ineligble for the loan forgiveness from the federal government that TFA had promised them. People skills were not Kopp's strong suit; she holed herself up in a suite of dorm rooms to avoid all the conflict. Teach For America barely survived its first summer institute. There would be many more challenges during the so-called dark years of the early and mid-nineties, when the organization's very existence was at stake.

Linda Darling-Hammond, a highly regarded professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, almost sank the flagship in 1994 when she published a scathing critique of Teach For America in the September issue of the
Phi Delta Kappan,
the premier academic journal of the education community. Noting the unequal status of TFA recruits and their charges, Darling-Hammond alleged that the “frankly missionary program” was a quick fix that was harmful to students most in need of qualified teachers. For recruits, TFA's true beneficiaries, it was a handy “pit stop” on the road to their “real” jobs in law, medicine, or business. The “slapdash” teacher-training program devalued teaching as a profession, she continued. And the “revolving-door trip into and out of teaching” only exacerbated the critical problem of teacher retention in the ghetto. The assault hurt Kopp personally and Teach For America publicly. Funding, always an issue, became even more precarious. Some supporters got the jitters. Internecine fighting broke out among staff. Kopp wrote in her memoir that the organization at that point reminded her of
Lord of the Flies.

The financial turnaround began in 1996; structural and programmatic improvements followed. By the time Teach For America was ten years old, fifteen hundred corps members were teaching in fifteen different placement sites. Over the decade, more than thirty thousand applicants had competed for five thousand teaching jobs in low-income communities across the country. On firmer footing, the ten-million-dollar organization began an ambitious five-year plan to grow in size and impact. Money flowed in as corporations and foundations lined up behind Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher to underwrite TFA's expansion. What had started out as a small grassroots movement was poised to become one of the most successful—and sophisticated—nonprofits in the country.

But did it work? And how could you tell? In the beginning, there was no measurable way to assess success in the classroom. You just knew it when you saw it. But sometimes appearances did not match reality. Sometimes the teachers who seemed most successful—those who had the greatest rapport with students—were not the ones raising kids' test scores. Kopp knew that equal resources did not correspond to equal opportunity. In order to close the achievement gap, low-income kids needed to
achieve
at the same academic level as their more privileged peers. So TFA decided that student outcomes should be the barometer of a teacher's success.

“[Kopp] shifted the conversation from input to output, from what credentials people have to what results they get with their kids,” observes TFA alum Dave Levin, cofounder of the successful KIPP schools, a chain of fifty-seven charter schools serving more than fourteen thousand students nationwide. “And that is a fundamental shift in the way education is viewed.”

Such an approach flouted educational convention. To some, the idea of evaluating a teacher based on student test scores seemed to ignore the myriad factors that militate against academic success for children in disadvantaged communities. Teachers couldn't and shouldn't be held accountable for the broken homes, the poverty, and the violence that circumscribed student achievement in underserved schools. Education wasn't about numbers and metrics; it involved many intangibles, making it much more complicated than a simple teacher-student binary. For lack of a better measure, districts and unions tied teacher salaries to years of service and academic degrees.

TFA and some in the education establishment had been at odds since Kopp first wrote her thesis. Over the years, the issue of how to improve teacher quality has been the subject of exhaustive debate. While some, like Linda Darling-Hammond, have argued that the answer lies in improving the quality of teacher training, Kopp believes the answer is to be found in improving the quality of the teacher.

To some, the presumption that smart kids with five weeks of training could do the job smacked of hubris. “You probably wouldn't want to be injected by someone from an organization called Nurse For America,” says UCLA's director of Urban Schooling Jeannie Oakes. “But we tend not to balk at someone inexperienced and untrained being put in some of the most challenging classroom situations in the U.S. TFA is at its root a stopgap measure.”

“I guess we're asking two different questions,” explains Kopp.

“Some people out there believe that what we are doing is flying in the face of traditional notions about what needs to be done to improve education. For them, the starting question is how do we strengthen the profession of teaching; recruiting people to a short-term commitment seems like not the way to go.

“The question we're asking is: How as a society are we going to finally step back and make real progress to address the disparities in the educational opportunities [between the rich and poor]? We think the magnitude of the problem justifies out-of-the box solutions. We need to channel the energy of our most talented people in that direction.”

Even as her organization has challenged the status quo in education, Kopp has tried to avoid direct confrontation with the powers that be. Politically nimble, TFA has not directly criticized school districts or the powerful unions that often control them. “TFA doesn't want to piss off the districts—the employers of their teachers,” notes former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, who was California's secretary of education from 2003 to 2005. “And it doesn't want to get into fights with the unions, which represent a mediocre bunch of people in a system with little or no accountability. TFA just wants to teach kids. So it's not solving the whole problem. It's going to take a revolution to do that, because under union control, there is no accountability, you can't fire teachers or principals—you can't even flunk students.”

Though Kopp rejects the notion that the only path to the classroom is through campus-based teacher education programs and notes that many successful private schools employ noncertified teachers, TFA has formed strategic alliances with university credentialing and graduate programs—like Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia—so that recruits satisfy state and federal teaching requirements. At the same time, she joins a growing number of like-minded education reformers, and the federal government, in openly encouraging the growth of alternative credentialing programs as a way of attracting more top-flight talent into the profession. A 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found that the vast majority of the country's university-level schools of education don't have the capacity to produce excellent teachers, and more than half of the teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standards—some of which accept 100 percent of applicants. Indeed, the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2004 reported that teaching attracts a “disproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.” That year, the average combined SAT score for college-bound seniors was 1026; the average of those intending to major in education was 965. (Future elementary school teachers tended to come from the bottom of the class; aspiring secondary school teachers were on a par with their peers.)

The 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found wide variations in curricula and approaches, amounting to a training universe that author Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia's Teachers College, likened to “Dodge City.” The obvious conclusion: nobody knows what it takes to make a good teacher.

But Kopp believes the essence of good teaching
is
knowable. It isn't magic. After nearly a decade of sending thousands of teachers into scores of districts, she developed a theory about why certain teachers produced better student results than other equally committed teachers. She came to believe that good teaching was, in essence, the exercise of good leadership. Her theory was dubbed “Teaching as Leadership,” or TAL. The idea was that excellent teachers—just like great leaders—set big goals, invest students in attaining the goals, work relentlessly to meet the goals, constantly assess progress, and improve over time.

By the new millennium, TFA had distilled the twelve original selection traits down to seven “competencies” that it believed were key to effective classroom leadership: achievement, perseverance, critical thinking, organizational ability, influencing/motivating skills, respect for others, and fit with TFA.

This time around, there was no guesswork involved. The organization spent countless hours identifying its most effective teachers, observing them at work, and breaking down their performances into discrete capabilities. TFA set student achievement goals and began using those benchmarks to develop a system by which to measure corps member effectiveness. In 2003, it rolled out IMPS—Information Management and Processing System—a database that allowed TFA to track corps member data across the program continuum.

It got a little help from its friends. As a pro bono project, top consulting firm McKinsey helped TFA redesign its recruiting and selection process. And when McKinsey partner Matt Kramer eventually joined the TFA staff, he pioneered a predictive selection model that could identify which candidates would make the best teachers. The model linked student achievement outcome results to individual corps members' incoming scores on the seven application competencies. As the data became more and more robust, TFA was able to identify a certain combination of teacher traits that were predictive of success in the classroom. Real people still presided over the interview process, but computers were increasingly relied upon to inform their decisions. By the time Hrag, Rachelle, Phillip, and Taylor applied, TFA had developed six distinct profiles of winning traits in successful teachers.

Teach For America's mission from the start had been to
recruit
and
train
the best and brightest to teach in America's lowest-performing schools. The organization never promised to figure out a way to
retain
them. In fact, it fully expected the majority of its corps members to leave the classroom after their two-year stint. TFA took the long view, guessing that TFA alums would assume positions of power in public life and ultimately figure out the retention piece as part of the larger solution to the achievement gap.

By 2005, the theory was bearing fruit. “I think most people deeply engaged in ed reform believe and know that TFA is producing an unprecedented and deep pipeline of people moving the ball forward on education reform,” says Kopp. “I think we are going to see a dramatic growth in impact as our alums get older.” Education reformers agree. “We think of TFA as a farm system for leaders,” says Kevin Hall, a former TFA staffer who is chief operating officer of The Broad Education Foundation, one of the leading philanthropies funding school transformation. Jim Shelton, education program director for the mighty Gates Foundation, concurs. Noting that TFA has successfully seeded the educational-reform landscape with high-caliber human capital and talent that is “really, really smart and very, very good,” he describes it as “one of the most important nonprofit organizations serving public education in America.”

But the immediate and pressing problem of the recruitment and retention of quality teachers has yet to be solved. Nationwide, an estimated 14 percent of teachers leave the classroom in the first year, nearly half by the fifth. High attrition rates are especially pronounced in low-performing schools. In California's high-poverty schools, 10 percent of teachers transfer away each year. The result: in 2005, children in the state's lowest-performing schools were five times more likely to face a string of unprepared teachers than were kids in the highest-performing schools.

At Locke, the numbers were worse. In the 2005–2006 school year, approximately one third of the faculty was new and three fourths had been there fewer than five years. Thirty percent lacked a full credential. Three of the six assistant principals were in their first year as Locke administrators, and not a single one had been at the school longer than five years.

Locke students suffered the consequences. In the 2005–2006 school year, 32 percent of the classes in core academic courses were taught by teachers not qualified under federal law. And 302 classes were characterized as “teacher misassignments,” meaning that teachers assigned to the class lacked a legally recognized certificate or credential for the course. Three teacher positions went unfilled—a marked improvement over the fourteen full-time teacher vacancies the year before.

There are excellent, experienced teachers at Locke. There just aren't enough of them, and there never have been. Seasoned teachers in general have always tended to gravitate to advantaged areas where working conditions are more favorable. And lousy teachers, not wanted at high-performing schools but protected by tenure, have too often ended up at low-income schools. School districts have been complicit. Unwilling or unable to expend the considerable time and resources required to fire a tenured teacher protected by a powerful union, they have allowed subpar teachers to shuffle from post to post in a practice known within LAUSD as the “dance of the lemons.” Union laws have bound principals to accept any tenured transfer seeking an open position, regardless of past performance. The result: low-income schools became repositories for bad teachers. (In 2006, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed through a law that permits principals to reject transfers of underperforming teachers.)