Training for excellence

TFA is a contentious issue. The program maintains that it sends the best and brightest into the field to close the achievement gap, nurturing an interest in education and educational policy that turns corps members toward those fields later in life. TFA’s opponents argue that it places unprepared and under-qualified people in the very positions that require the most experienced, most dedicated teachers.

The reality of TFA is not as simple as either argument suggests, but the issue at hand is not the overall effectiveness of the program. Both TFA employees and the program’s critics can agree that the best way to ensure good teaching is to train new teachers as well as possible before sending them into the field. The summer after graduation, corps members attend the Summer Training Institute, an intensive five-week training program. McCarthy maintains that the Institute already adequately prepares corps members. “Teach for America has a comprehensive and outstanding training institute, which includes seminars, lesson planning and teaching. This ensures that corps members are ready to enter their classrooms by the day they begin teaching,” she says.

Yet one of the biggest critiques of TFA continues to be teacher unpreparedness. Many service organizations that attract young adults — Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, for example — simply don’t have the time to train students in a few weeks for all of the situations which they could encounter. TFA is no exception. Currently, TFA does not plan to provide additional training for accepted juniors, but this choice wastes the strongest advantage of an earlier deadline. Corps members accepted earlier could have even more time to familiarize themselves with curriculum-planning materials before they start the summer institute or to reach out to former corps members for advice and guidance. TFA could even consider allowing juniors to attend the training institute the summer before their senior year. Although they would not be certified to teach summer school with the recent college graduates, rising seniors could learn valuable lessons by attending the classes and observing the teachers-in-training.

Accepting juniors to the program would attract just the kind of students who would be eager to participate in extensive pre-training. An earlier deadline in junior year might attract more students who are truly interested in the program and view it as their first choice for post-graduation employment. Motivated applicants choosing to apply in their junior year would have first priority in the new process.

With this change in application policy, TFA has created an opportunity to improve its program and hire more motivated applicants. If accepting juniors can lead to the development of longer and more intensive training programs, corps members and their students both win. This model could benefit other service organizations that attract recent college graduates — programs like the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps. While the Peace Corps provides a longer and less classroom-based training period than TFA, it still is not ideal to undergo only a few months of training before entering one of these programs. TFA’s pilot program and others like it could lengthen the training period and send more prepared corps members into the field. Ultimately, the extra time and money spent on more training is a small price in exhange for these organizations to fulfill their missions — to best serve the populations in greatest need.

Sarah Schwartz is a freshman from Silver Spring, Md. She can be reached at seschwar@princeton.