Question: How should Americans change the way they think about education?
Kopp: I guess I ultimately think we need to reach the point where not just a few of our nation’s leaders but many, many, many of them understand what you understand after you’ve taught successfully in a low income community, which is a couple of things. One, it’s just, you understand we can solve the problem, because once you realize that, then you realize we have to prioritize the issue and work relentlessly to actually reach the goal of solving the problem. The other thing is, I think you come out of this experience of teaching successfully rejecting any silver bullet theory. So, you come in and you think, it’s funding, or it’s maybe technology or it’s a curricular approach or whatever, and many people in our country are still searching for the silver bullet. You come out of this realizing, okay, it’s no one thing. It is everything. You know, there are no shortcuts, to quote a crew of our folks who have started this very high performing charter schools, the KIPP Academies. It’s about doing everything while just in the same way that success in any other sector. We always know in business, in government, whatever, it’s about doing everything well, you know? And I think that is a fundamental difference, so when I think about, for example, what’s happening in Washington DC right now, where, you know, a very courageous mayor assumed responsibility for the school system and appointed Michelle Rea, who’s a Teach For America alum, to run the school system. You know, the majority of her senior team are Teach For America alums, a growing percentage of the school principals, 10% and growing, including the principals of the fastest improving and highest performing schools are Teach For America alums, and what unites that crew is those two things, like, they are working with a level of conviction and a level of relentlessness that is hard to find, and, at the same time, you know, they’ve put all the basics at the center of their agenda. So, knowing that it’s not any one curriculum or it’s not any one, like, there’s no magic solution out there, they’ve said, you know what? Most fundamentally, this is about people, so we need to do everything we can to ensure that we have the most talented teachers, the most talented principals, the most talented school district officials. They’ve put that at the center of their agenda. They believe that those folks need to hold themselves accountable for results and continuously improve over time. I mean, it sounds mundane, but that is the name of the game, you know? And so, I guess what inspires me to your question around scale is realizing that every person in that picture and all of the Teach For America alums in various other communities where they’re at the center of real momentum around reform really came in to Teach For America in the ‘90s, our first decade, when in the whole decade we produced 3500 Teach For America alums. So, the fact that we’re at the point now where, you know, well over, we’ll bring in 4,000 core members this year alone, and I just think, gosh, you know, what will we be talking about five and ten years from now? I really believe we’re going to reach a point where we have a critical mass of leaders working from within education and also, really importantly, from outside of education as well, because as much as we’ll never solve the problem without long term committed, sustained leadership from within, we’ll never solve the problem if we don’t have a policy context and a kind of, I mean, think about the influence of our journalists and of our business leaders. If we don’t have folks in influence in other sectors who also share a deep understanding of the problem and of the solutions.
Discuss
Jesse Alred on April 18, 2009, 9:15 PM
Having captured district leadership positions in several cities, and having created two charter school networks, Wendy Kopp’s Teach For America friends are pursuing an approach to school reform based on the false premise that teachers are the cause of sub-par academic performance in urban schools,
They not only discount major factors like the degree of parent commitment, family stability, student habits and economic inequality, they underestimate the power these obstacles exert in the daily experience of urban schools.
D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s school reform recipe includes three ingredients: close schools rather than improve them; fire teachers rather than inspire them; and sprinkle on a lot of media-thrilling hype.
Appearing on the cover of Time, Ms. Rhee sternly hovered over the camera holding a broom, which she was using to sweep trash, the trash being a metaphor for my urban teacher colleagues. MS RHEE, MY COLLEAGUES WHO WORK IN SOME OF THE TOUGHEST SCHOOLS IN THE UNITED STATES ARE NOT TRASH.
TFA teachers are a welcome addition to our nation’s public schools, and TFA and its offspring, the KIPP and YES charter schools, provide valuable services, but no data exists proving they are closing the achievement gap, or that they (have a formula to close the gap, for the majority of low-income students. KIPP/YES teachers do great work, but they have students whose families apply to schools with longer school days, Saturday classes, an extra month of school in the Summer, and nightly loads of homework. Only a small minority of working-class families will allow schools to take over their kids’ lives that much.)
The TFA coalition implies poor schools and bad teachers create the achievement gap. They want the community to give them power because only they can bring“reform” by eliminating job security and diminishing teacher influence over policy.
This anti-teacher attitude derives from Ms. Kopp’s original vision when she decided, from her Princeton perch and without a day in the classroom, that inexperience was better for teachers than experience. They are launching an unAmerican Ivy League class war on those same veteran teachers who have dedicated their careers to the toughest schools in America.
shawn disney on June 25, 2009, 9:43 PM
Alec Macaulay on July 28, 2009, 1:52 PM
Jesse Aldred wrote: “TFA teachers are a welcome addition to our nation’s public schools, and TFA and its offspring, the KIPP and YES charter schools, provide valuable services, but no data exists proving they are closing the achievement gap…”
Not so, Jesse. A study published by the independent and non-partisan Urban Institute provides data that the exact opposite is actually true. In what is believed to be the first scientific study of Teach For America’s impact at the secondary school level, researchers found that TFA teachers had a greater positive impact on student scores than experienced traditionally-trained teachers did. This impact more than doubled when TFA teachers were compared with traditionally-trained teachers with less than three years of experience.
Perhaps the authors of the study say it best:
“The findings show that TFA teachers are more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers. Moreover, they suggest that the TFA effect, at least in the grades and subjects investigated, exceeds the impact of additional years of experience, implying that TFA teachers are more effective than experienced secondary school teachers.”
“Our findings show that secondary school TFA teachers are more effective than the teachers who would otherwise be in the classroom in their stead. While these other teachers are a diverse group in terms of background and training, for policy purposes they are an appropriate comparison group. Other things being equal, the findings suggest that disadvantaged students taught by TFA teachers are better off than they would be in the absence of TFA.”
Simply put, Teach For America IS working, and those who continually berate it for its radically innovative ideas are stuck in the same box that our educational system is trying so hard to get out of. If real change is to happen, we need the efforts of everyone, traditional and TFA alike.
The Future of Education – Blog Post: Teach For America
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