Who Joins Teach For America and Why? Insights Into the “Typical” Recruit in an Urban School District

Abstract

Building upon previous research on how personal and demographic characteristics of teachers are correlated with larger issues in teacher recruitment and retention, this study contributes unique insight into the personal attributes, characteristics, and career aspirations of new teachers brought into teaching in Los Angeles through the Teach For America program. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with 25 current Teach For America teachers, this study finds that teachers in this study perceive themselves as embodying personal characteristics that prior research would support as less common among teachers in urban schools: That is, they see themselves as being competitive, high-performing, and enthusiastically committed to ending educational inequality. However, these participants tend to come from privileged backgrounds and colleges and consequently view their time teaching in urban schools as an interim period before pursuing other more “high prestige” careers. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Teaching for All? Teach For America's Effects Across the Distribution of Student Achievement

“…This is important because, from a policy perspective, one of the key questions is whether TFA teachers are more or less effective at raising student achievement than the teachers that these students would have otherwise had access to. Other work has begun to examine the selection of teachers into and away from high-poverty schools, and the results of this study should be understood within the context of these findings (Boyd, Grossman, Lankford, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2009; Straubhaar & Gottfried, 2014). …”

Alternative routes to teacher professional identity: Exploring the conflated sub-identities of Teach For America corps members

“…Unlike most initial teacher education programs that require future teachers to complete content and pedagogical coursework in addition to multiple teaching practicum experiences, TFA utilizes its own corporatized criteria for selecting CMs, which situates leadership and achievement at its core (Kavanagh & Dunn, 2013;Straubhaar & Gottfried, 2014), rather than prior experience in the field of education (see Whitman, 2012). Indeed, the deeply ingrained logic of TFA positions the characteristics of CMs, namely "their elite education, leadership capacity, and idealism" as the secret to success in the classroom (Blumenreich & Rogers, 2016, p. 4).…”

Property Functions of Whiteness: Counter‐Narrative Analysis of Teach For America and Their Partnership With Black and Latinx Fraternities and Sororities

“…Vasquez Heilig and Jez () relayed that TFA is an organization that receives hundreds of millions of dollars and garners much public and political interest for sending college graduates, who do not typically have an education background, to teach in low‐income rural and urban schools. The impact of these temporary teachers, typically placed in schools for a 2‐year commitment, is hotly debated by those who see this as a way to grow the supply of “outstanding” graduates, albeit temporarily before going into other “high prestige careers,” (Straubhaar & Gottfried, , p. 627). However, critics see the temporary teacher program as a harmful dalliance into the lives of low‐income students who most need a highly trained, highly skilled, and stable teacher workforce (Darling‐Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Heilig, ).…”