Teach for America was developed with the idea of providing good teachers for low-income, low-performing schools. It takes recent college graduates in fields other than education, puts them through a five-week training class, and sends them into some of the country’s most challenging classrooms.
That’s how it started, but it has changed its focus in recent years, given the nation’s over-reliance on standardized test scores. Now, TFA’s main objective is to increase scores on standardized tests for kids who attend public schools in impoverished communities.
A report commissioned by the US Department of Education shows that Teach for America recruits, who commit to teaching in low-performing, low-income schools for at least two years, “were as effective, if not more, at teaching math as those from similar programs or even career educators,” the Baltimore Sun reports on today’s front page.
To explain how I feel about this, I have to recount a classical music side story. One of the idiosyncrasies in the symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven is his occasional use of the bassoon to double the melodic line an octave below the oboe or other woodwind. You can hear this several times in his Ninth Symphony and a few times in his Fifth. It’s a musical instrumentation technique used so rarely in his time that it stands out for people who listen to a lot of classical music.
An anecdote relayed to me years and years ago (so some details may be incorrect due to my failing memory): Sir Georg Solti, who conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in its heyday, was in a recording session for one of Beethoven’s symphonies one day. After the final movement ended, Solti turned around to the recording engineer and asked him if he had successfully recorded the piece. “I can’t hear the bassoons,” the recording engineer reportedly said. Solti threw his arms up in the air and yelled back, “I don’t care about the bassoons!”
Can I say it any louder? I don’t care about the bassoons!
I mean, I care about the bassoons, but in a Beethoven symphony, the bassoon is meaningless without the accompanying oboe. That’s about how much I care about the scores on some standardized test that measures a few points of data on one subject.
To rely on this limited data is to abandon our ability as analysts of the news to understand and explain to our readers what really matters in education. Here’s a hint: it’s not the scores on a narrowly focused standardized math test. Basing an entire conclusion about how good a program like TFA is on just test scores in math excludes everything that is important in education. Yet that’s what Mathematica Policy Research does in a study released in September (full report), and it’s what the Baltimore Sun faithfully reports, right off the press release.
To rely on this limited data is to utterly abandon low-income kids and tell them we have no expectation that they actually succeed; all we care about is their number. Whenever we put stories like this on the front page of a major newspaper, we tell them, it’s OK if you can just master a few learning objectives.
Look, the quickest way to make a kid fail is to tell him he can’t succeed. By ignoring all the things we want kids to succeed in when we report only math scores or base important policy decisions on just math scores, we effectively tell kids we expect them to fail on everything else and we’re not even going to consider any of those “other” things when we make decisions that affect their futures.
There’s an entire symphony being performed, and we’re harping about the bassoons here, folks!
Instead, I want low-income kids at low-performing schools to succeed, not just survive, and I will not limit my analysis to math scores, especially on a standardized test, especially when the basis for comparison was a group of teachers who had far less than the typical practicum time during their teacher training.
That’s right, when the Baltimore Sun told us readers that “those from similar programs or even career educators” were the basis for comparison, the reporter neglected to report what those words actually mean. They mean, TFA is as good as other programs like TFA, and teachers who come from TFA teach about as effectively as teachers who come out of other alternative certification programs that don’t have anywhere near TFA’s funding levels.
As the Huffington Post reported a few years ago, here, “Teach For America, the education organization that places recent college graduates in low-income public schools, is getting $100 million to launch its first-ever endowment in hopes of making the grass-roots organization a permanent fixture in education.” The source of the funds:
- $25 million from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation
- Laura and John Arnold Foundation
- Robertson Foundation
- Philanthropists Steve and Sue Mandel
That is, after all this money goes into TFA, the results are still about as good—in mathematics, anyway—as organizations that do the same thing at a much lower cost.
Let’s put it in the words of David Stone, the school board commissioner for Baltimore City Public Schools, which employs 622 TFA teachers or alumni and 45 recruits as principals or central office administrators: “For every teacher who changes a test score, there’s another that changes the trajectory of a child’s life, and that comes with experience,” the Sun quoted him as saying.
See, it’s the “life” part that has me flocking to Beethoven. Imagine hearing just the bassoon without any of the other instruments! Not exactly Beethoven, is it?