education

Understanding Education: Teach for America (TFA)

Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash

Teach for America (TFA) was founded in 1989 by Wendy Kopp, spurred by an undergraduate thesis from Princeton.

TFA garnered a great deal of political and media support, notably during the Obama administration and concurrent with the popularity of charter schools (notably the Knowledge is Power Program [KIPP] charter school network).

However, in recent years TFA has seen a significant decline in participants amid greater and greater criticism and scrutiny of the organization’s claims and practices.

Despite some mostly in-house research showing some cases where TFA candidates seem to have students with gains (typically in math), many criticisms exist, including the following:

  • TFA significantly de-values teacher education and academic work in curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
  • TFA over-estimates that high-achieving college students can quickly and easily transition into full-time teachers, especially in the context of high-poverty, high-needs students.
  • Despite diversity and equity claims, TFA candidates tend to be affluent and white, serving disproportionately poor students and Black/brown students.
  • Initially created to address teacher shortages, TFA often displaces veteran teachers (certified and unionized) at an added cost to districts. (See the displacement of veteran teachers in New Orleans after Katrina as one example.)
  • The extreme “no excuses” ideology of TFA, combined with KIPP and other “no excuses” charter schools, has resulted in traumatic experiences for teachers and students.

Below are resources for critically considering TFA:

Understanding Education: Series

NCTQ

Understanding Education: National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)

Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) was established in 2001 by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank dedicated to free market ideology.

NCTQ has an anti-teacher education agenda that all of their reports confirm, regardless of the data or the methodology (this parallels decades of school choice and charter school research by conservative think tanks).

For research to be scientific, it must be experimental or quasi-experimental in methodology; however, NCTQ reports on teacher education tend to be analyses of course syllabi, surveys, and a great deal of citations to sources that are not scholarly (podcasts, media articles, blog posts, etc.).

For example, when I began my review of a 2023 NCTQ report, I took the time to interrogate the 90% claim made in the report: “With effective reading instruction, we could take that [student reading proficiency] to more than 90%” (p. 4)

That claim by NCTQ has a footnote to a few studies, but the most interesting evidence is the final citation to a blog post by Nathaniel Hansford.

Hansford analyzes the claim and finds the science lacking:

Some of the citations I was sent were policy papers, by authors and institutions that used this claim. However, these papers were not experimental and usually cited popular Science of Reading books, not experimental research. There was also, interestingly, one research paper sent to me from the 1980s, that made the claim, but did not cite any evidence to support it. So it appears that this claim has been in circulation for a long time. The most common source listed for this claim seemed to be Louisa Moats, who has written about this rule on numerous occasions. However, she does not claim that 95% of students can reach grade level, based on just core instruction, but rather in totality. Louisa Moats cites 4 sources in support for this rule. In Kilpatrick’s book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties; a 2009 paper by Lim, et al. on students with Down Syndrome; a 2005 paper by Mathes, et al, examining the rate of risk reduction for struggling reading, with intensive intervention instruction, and a literature review of risk reduction, by Joseph Torgersen. In my opinion, the last two citations provide some experimental evidence to support this claim.

Not only are the methodology and citations unscientific, but the reports are not peer-reviewed before being published. And, once they are reviewed, several external reviews have found the reports lack credibility:

Understanding Education: Series
education

At Substack: “Science of” Advocacy Fails “Science” and Teaching/Learning

“Science of” Advocacy Fails “Science” and Teaching/Learning

educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free