Virginia S. Lovison, Author at Education Next

Teach For America’s Fast Path to the Classroom Accelerates Performance Over the Longer Haul

Virginia S. Lovison — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:00:34 +0000

Since its founding 34 years ago, Teach For America has prepared nearly 70,000 recent college graduates and career-changers to teach in high-poverty schools across the United States. The selective program recruits mission-driven applicants, with annual admissions rates as low as 12 percent. Unlike traditional teacher-preparation programs, it places “corps members” in short-staffed public schools after an intensive summer seminar, before they are fully certified to teach, and provides additional support and training during a two-year stint in the classroom.

The program, which is part of Americorps and known broadly as TFA, has been both successful and controversial. Its theory of action is that bringing highly educated, mission-motivated “future leaders” into public schools in low-income communities will positively impact student learning, influence professionals to commit themselves to the issue of educational equity, and give educational equity a firmer foothold in the nation’s agenda. Prior research has found encouraging evidence on all counts. TFA teachers perform as well or better than their most likely alternative during their first two years in the classroom, and compelling quasi-experimental evidence suggests participating in TFA shapes alumni’s worldviews. As one example, TFA participants are more likely to view student achievement gaps as a symptom of systemic social injustices rather than a symptom of individual choices or behaviors (see “How Teach For America Affects Beliefs About Education,” research, Winter 2020). In addition, TFA alumni are well represented in state departments of education and have founded some of the nation’s largest charter-school networks (see “Creating a Core of Change Agents,” feature, Summer 2011).

The program remains controversial, however. TFA teachers are usually new to education, and critics worry that the program provides students who arguably have the greatest need for excellent instruction with the least-prepared novice teachers. In addition, TFA teachers commit to just two years in the classroom. In general, teachers improve rapidly during their first five years, which means that TFA teachers are scheduled to move on before they fully get the hang of the job.

These concerns, and the evidence base to date, overlook TFA teachers who continue teaching for five years or more. To learn how these teachers perform over the longer term, I look at estimates of value-added, or the estimated contribution to students’ test scores, of TFA teachers in New York City between 2012 and 2019, when about 25 percent remained teaching after year five. I compare that to the same estimates of non-TFA teachers working in TFA-participating schools, 43 percent of whom taught for at least five years.

TFA alumni who choose to keep teaching improve more rapidly over the first five years of their career than non-TFA teachers. The average TFA teacher who stays in the classroom for five years or more improves at more than double the rate of non-TFA teachers, at 13 percent of a standard deviation by year six compared to 6.3 percent of a standard deviation.

I then explore the question of whether regular turnover within the TFA workforce neutralizes or offsets these effects. To examine this issue, I compare student performance under two hypothetical scenarios: a district policy to continually hire TFA teachers to replace exiting corps members, or a district policy to never hire any TFA teachers at all. My results show a district policy of continuous TFA hiring would boost student achievement by an estimated 5 percent of a standard deviation relative to a policy of no TFA hiring. So long as exiting TFA teachers are replaced by new TFA recruits, student achievement will be higher, on average, than if the district did not hire any TFA corps members.

To be clear, hiring is complex, and teachers’ projected effects on student achievement should not be the only criterion driving staffing decisions. This research addresses a singular concern—that high turnover among TFA teachers drives down student achievement over the long run. Overall, I find that the data does not substantiate this concern, given the rapid rate at which TFA teachers improve on the job.

Assessing an Alternative Teacher Pipeline

TFA was launched in 1990 and rooted in founder Wendy Kopp’s undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University. The thesis called for the creation of a new public-service program to train college seniors who did not major in education to teach in high-poverty schools for two years, building on a wave of new alternative-route certification laws that had been adopted in 20 states. From TFA’s earliest cohort of 489 recruits, the non-profit has expanded to 50 cities and regions nationwide. Over that same time, the share of U.S. teachers trained through alternative-certification programs has grown to nearly one in five. By 2023, every state except Alaska, Oregon, and Wyoming had adopted an alternative-route certification law.

Kopp was inspired by the recruiters from investment banks and consulting firms, who aggressively scouted talent and offered promising students an impressive launching pad after graduation. TFA recruiters used a similar approach, and the program quickly became a sought-after post-collegiate option; in 2011, fully 18 percent of Harvard’s graduating class applied. The competitive nature of the short-term program and demographics of its idealistic, highly educated corps members, who were predominantly wealthy and white at that time, attracted skepticism and critiques. Over the last decade, the organization has shifted its recruitment and training practices to achieve a more diverse corps of educators whose background or ethnicity matches that of their students. Today, about 60 percent of TFA corps members are Black, Indigenous, or people of color, compared to 20 percent of all U.S. teachers. In addition, 45 percent of TFA corps members are first-generation college graduates.

Another important change is the growing number of TFA alumni who have continued to work in the classroom—nearly one in four, or 14,600 teachers nationwide. To fully understand the impact of TFA on student learning, we need to assess the performance of these alumni over the longer term.

The New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district, has hired nearly 6,000 TFA corps members since 1990. My analysis is based on New York City public schools that hired both TFA and non-TFA teachers between 2012–13 and 2018–19. These schools tend to have relatively lower standardized test scores, greater shares of students of color, and more students from low-income families. On average, student performance is 36 percent of a standard deviation below the citywide mean.

The data include teacher salary data, which I use to identify teachers’ years of experience. Because the district does not maintain the same data for charter-school teachers, those teaching at charters are excluded from this analysis. I further restrict the sample to teachers working in grades and subjects participating in state tests: grades 4 through 8 in math and English Language Arts. In all, my analysis includes 308 TFA teachers and approximately 40,000 non-TFA teachers.

I first look at retention rates. Overall, first-year TFA teachers are more likely than non-TFA teachers working in similar schools to keep teaching a second year, but less likely to remain in the classroom by year five (see Figure 1). About 88 percent of first-year TFA teachers persist to a second year compared to 82 percent of non-TFA teachers. However, non-TFA teachers are retained at higher rates in years three and beyond. Over the study period, 43 percent of non-TFA teachers kept teaching for five years or more, compared to 25 percent of TFA teachers.

Impacts on Student Performance

To estimate returns to experience for TFA and non-TFA teachers, I use a measure of value-added, or how much their students improve on annual tests in math and reading relative to expectations based on the students’ prior achievement and demographic characteristics. My calculations control for teacher and student characteristics and assume a “steady state” of the world, with no major changes in overall teacher supply or average teacher performance over time.

First, I look at teachers’ initial performance and find no average difference in first-year performance for TFA and non-TFA teachers. Then I look at teacher value-added by years of experience. Over the first five years of their careers, TFA teachers improve by 13 percent of a standard deviation compared to 6.3 percent for non-TFA teachers (see Figure 2). In particular, between their first and second year in the classroom, TFA teachers improve by 6.1 percent of a standard deviation, more than twice the rate of non-TFA teachers at 2.8 percent of a standard deviation. Non-TFA teachers catch up somewhat in year three, but TFA teachers continue to improve more quickly in the subsequent early-career years.

What do these results imply regarding the effects of TFA hiring on the teaching workforce over time? Because of their higher turnover rates, TFA teachers are about 1.5 times more likely to be in their first year of teaching than non-TFA teachers and only half as likely to have five years of experience or more. Nevertheless, I find that hiring continually hiring TFA teachers to replace exiting corps members, as compared to hiring non-TFA teachers, would increase student achievement by an estimated 5 percent of a standard deviation. This estimate assumes a constant turnover rate after year five and, consistent with my findings, assumes no average difference in performance for TFA and non-TFA teachers in year one.

This analysis may well understate the advantages for schools of relying on TFA. Given the staffing challenges common at schools that hire from the program, it could be the case that the best alternative to a TFA teacher is not the average first-year traditionally trained teacher, but rather a long-term substitute or a college graduate with an emergency certification who may or may not have any training in education or in the subject they teach. In that case, TFA teachers could perform better in year one than these likely alternatives and the estimates reported here would understate the true benefits of TFA hiring for student achievement.

Changing Demographics

While prior research has shown that TFA teachers perform as well or better than their most-likely alternative during their first two years in the classroom, my analysis additionally suggests that TFA teachers who continue teaching beyond year two continue to outperform their non-TFA counterparts after five years in the classroom.

This is a somewhat different result than that of a 2007 study of TFA teachers in New York City, which did not find meaningful differences in performance between teachers based on their certification status or preparation path. It also showed TFA teachers underperforming traditionally certified teachers in their first year before quickly catching up (see “Photo Finish,” research, Winter 2007). I find no difference between TFA and non-TFA teachers in year one, and faster performance gains for TFA teachers in years two through five. What could account for this difference?

One plausible explanation could be changes in TFA’s recruiting, workforce, and organizational strategy from its earliest days. These evolved dramatically between the two study periods to include an explicit focus on corps-member diversity. The TFA teacher workforce of the late 1990s and early 2000s skewed young, wealthy, and white; in New York City, TFA teachers were 82 percent white, and the median age was 23. By contrast, as of 2014, one-third of TFA teachers identified as first-generation college graduates, one-half as teachers of color, and 43 percent as growing up with a low household income. Research points to this increase in representation and instruction by teachers with backgrounds similar to their students as a powerful learning accelerator for students of color (see “What We Know About Teacher Race and Student Outcomes,” feature, Winter 2024).

TFA and other alternative-certification programs have grown rapidly over the past three decades. There are now more than 200 alternative providers, which prepare about one in five newly hired U.S. public-school teachers. While these teachers have higher rates of turnover after they are hired, they also are dramatically more racially diverse than teachers trained in traditional college-based programs. A review by the Center for American Progress found that in 2018–19, aspiring Black and Latino teachers accounted for 37 percent of all graduates of alternative-route programs based outside universities, compared to 17 percent at traditional teacher-preparation degree programs.

TFA, though a smaller provider, has influenced the national conversation about who should teach American students and how best to prepare those recruits. After several years of shrinking its workforce, the organization grew its corps members by 40 percent this year and is planning to grow by another 25 percent next year, with “an exceptional and diverse cohort” of 2,000 new teachers nationwide. A ripe area for future research is to examine whether improvements in the performance of the TFA workforce since the early 2000s continue and if they are a direct result of the organization’s efforts to recruit teachers who more closely resemble the students they serve.

Virginia S. Lovison is an Associate Director of Research & Policy at Deloitte Access Economics and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. This analysis is the author’s own, independent of Deloitte Access Economics.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Lovison, V.S. (2024). Teach For America’s Fast Path to the Classroom Accelerates Performance Over the Longer Haul. Education Next, 24(2), 46-51.

The post Teach For America’s Fast Path to the Classroom Accelerates Performance Over the Longer Haul appeared first on Education Next.

How Teach for America Affects Beliefs about Education

Virginia S. Lovison — Tue, 08 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

At Creekside High School in Atlanta, Teach for America corps member Jasmine Fountain teaches 9th grade geography and black history.

“Lead a life of impact . . . change starts with you.”

These are the pitches to aspiring corps members of Teach for America, the prominent alternate-route teacher-preparation program that trains promising college graduates to lead classrooms in high-need schools throughout the United States. And since its inception in 1990, many alumni of Teach for America, or TFA, have heeded the organization’s call to action. Former TFA teachers are ubiquitous at all levels of education policy and practice nationwide, from leading state departments of education to running for local office in hundreds of jurisdictions, as well as founding schools, charter networks, education startups, and consultancies dedicated to educational improvement and reform.

The organization also has attracted a backlash as its alumni’s influence and footprint have grown, with critics worrying publicly that TFA represents a specific and potentially suspect point of view on how to help schools improve. But does the experience of teaching in low-income schools through TFA affect individuals’ views on education policy and reform? And if so, how?

We surveyed TFA applicants for the 2007–15 cohorts to find out. Our survey targeted the set of applicants who had advanced to the competitive program’s final round of admissions, whom we separated into two groups based on their final scores during the selection process: individuals who scored just above the cutoff point used to admit candidates and participated in the program, and those who just missed the cutoff, were not admitted, and did not participate in TFA. The idea is that since candidates on either side of the admissions cutoff are likely to hold similar incoming beliefs, this approach allows for a rigorous, non-biased estimation of the impact of TFA participation itself. We then compared each group’s responses on a variety of questions regarding inequity, the teaching profession, and strategies for educational improvement. The differences were notable.

TFA participants are more likely to believe larger societal inequities perpetuate income-based differences in educational outcomes and favor investments in elevating the prestige of the teaching profession, early childhood education, and school-based wraparound services to address them. However, they are no more likely than non-participants to believe that certain politically charged policy levers—including school-choice policies, Common Core standards, teacher merit pay, and teachers unions—can effectively reduce inequity. On the whole, they believe it is possible to provide all children with access to a high-quality education, and that part of the solution is within the grasp of effective teachers. On average, relative to non-participants, the corps of TFA teachers and alumni with classroom experience in some of the most struggling schools in the country appear to be more optimistic that the challenge of educational inequity can be overcome—though not necessarily along the lines that either reformers or critics might have predicted.

Preparing to lead in the classroom—and beyond

Since its launch in 1990, Teach for America has fielded more than 680,000 applications and trained 68,000 teachers, who have taught more than 10 million American schoolchildren. This national-service program launched with a two-pronged theory of change: in the short term, TFA teachers are to effect positive change in the classroom during their two years of service; in the longer term, TFA strives to have a systemic impact by influencing the values and future careers of those who participate.

The program differs from other teacher-preparation providers in its selectivity, duration, and organizational mission. TFA recruits primarily high-achieving college seniors to serve as teachers for two years in low-income schools. Applicants undergo a rigorous selection process, with an acceptance rate of roughly 12 percent, currently comprising two rounds: an online application and a daylong in-person interview. Our analysis includes only applicants who advance to the interview stage. Per TFA’s selection criteria, these are applicants with a strong academic track record, demonstrated leadership skills, and a commitment to service.

Once accepted, TFA participants are assigned to one of roughly 50 regions nationwide; their subjects and grade levels vary. After summer training, TFA teachers lead classrooms in high-need schools. In the average TFA placement school during our study years, 80 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and 90 percent of students identified as racial or ethnic minorities. Participants receive ongoing training and support from both the organization and local higher-education institutions during their two-year commitment.

Such alternative hands-on training programs, which quickly place teachers in the classroom, are in contrast to traditional programs, in which years of college or graduate-school coursework culminate in a classroom teaching experience. The “alternative” approaches have grown in popularity and now account for 30 percent of the 26,000 teacher-preparation programs in the United States, such as those run by The New Teacher Project, the YES Prep charter network, and the Relay Graduate School of Education. While the annual enrollment for each of these programs is not publicly available, our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest there are collectively at least as many alumni of these TFA-like programs as there are alumni of TFA itself, if not more.

However, teaching through TFA may be a different experience than teaching through other alternative pathways, in part because of its robust alumni network and explicit goal of influencing education from both inside and outside the classroom. A spinoff organization, Leadership for Educational Equity, encourages and supports alumni looking to run for office or gain decisionmaking power in their communities through board appointments or other public-service roles, for example. In sum, TFA alumni are supported with alumni programming and networks that aim to position them to influence politics and policy through various leadership roles: in classrooms and schools, in state legislatures and departments of education, in startups and charter networks, and in unions (see “Alumni With Influence”). Our study is the first large-scale empirical investigation of how participation shapes alumni views on education policy.

Data and Methods

To assess these attitudes, we asked applicants who advanced to the final stage of the TFA admissions process between 2007 and 2013 to take part in an online survey, which launched in 2015. All of the TFA participants within these application cycles would have finished their TFA assignment at the time of the study. Of that group of 91,752 unique individuals, 27 percent started the survey and 21 percent completed it, yielding complete responses from 19,332 people.

The survey contained a wide range of questions on educational inequity and reform. In particular, we asked individuals to: share their beliefs on why there are income-based differences in educational outcomes; assess the promise of politically charged educational initiatives, including charter schools, vouchers, preschool, standardized testing, and teachers unions; and share their views on the extent to which we could reasonably expect teachers to help students improve under challenging circumstances. For example, survey participants were asked to rate their agreement on a scale of 1 to 5 with statements like, “In the U.S. today, students from low-income backgrounds have the same educational opportunities as students from high-income backgrounds.”

We then link those responses with TFA administrative data, including demographic information and scores they were assigned at the end of the selection process. Critically, a final-stage applicant’s chances of being offered a spot in the program depend heavily on whether his or her selection score is above a specific numerical cutoff that varies from year to year and is known to neither applicants nor the program staff. The vast majority of those with a score above that cutoff receive an offer, while only a fraction of those scoring below it do. As a result, the probability that an applicant ends up teaching through TFA also jumps sharply at that cutoff: those who score just above the admissions cutoff are 30 percentage points more likely to participate in TFA than those who score just below (see Figure 1).

It is this feature of the selection process that makes it possible for us to estimate the causal effect of TFA participation on the education policy preferences of applicants. In particular, we can compare the attitudes of applicants who scored just above the selection cutoff with those who scored just below it. When making this comparison, we take into account that not everyone scoring above the cutoff actually taught with TFA, while some scoring below the cutoff did. Because the actual difference in participation rates across the cutoff was 30 percentage points, this amounts to multiplying the differences between the two groups of applicants by a factor of roughly three.

Results

Overall, we find that TFA participants are more likely than comparable non-participants to believe that societal issues, not differences in the actions or values of students from low-income backgrounds, exacerbate income-based differences in academic achievement (see Figure 2). Relative to non-participants, TFA participants are about 10 percentage points more likely to disagree with the statements that “poor families do not value education as much as richer families”; that “poor students have low motivation or will to learn”; and that “the amount a student can learn is primarily related to the student’s family background.” Rather, TFA participants attribute income-based differences in academic achievement to larger societal inequities; for example, they were 8.5 percentage points more likely to agree that “systemic injustices perpetuate inequity throughout society.” Further, we find that relative to similar non-participants, TFA participants are more likely to believe in the potential of teachers to engender positive change and are more optimistic that the income-based educational opportunity gap is a solvable problem.

With respect to current policies designed to reduce educational inequities, we find TFA participation does not change individuals’ views on several highly politicized reforms. For example, we observe no difference between participants and non-participants in terms of support for unions, Common Core curriculum standards, performance pay for teachers, and allocating school funding based on student need (see Figure 3). However, an important exception is that TFA participation appears to decrease support for school choice. TFA participants are 12 percentage points less likely to support the “expansion of high-quality charter schools” and 11 percentage points less likely to support vouchers to allow low-income children to attend private schools, compared to similar non-participants.

Interestingly, TFA participants are less critical of standardized testing than non-participants: though a majority of both groups agree “we should reduce dependence on standardized testing,” participants are 8 percentage points less likely to agree with the statement than non-participants. In addition, we find evidence that TFA increases optimism about teachers’ ability to foster and support student learning, regardless of student background (see Figure 4). Specifically, TFA participants are more likely to express confidence in students’ and teachers’ potential: they are 8 percentage points more likely to agree that student intelligence is “capable of changing a great deal”; 8 percentage points more likely to agree that “if teachers try really hard they can get through to even the most difficult or unmotivated students”; and 7 percentage points less likely to agree that “in poor communities, there really is very little a teacher can do to ensure that most of his/her students achieve at a high level.”

These findings are at odds with what we might expect to observe if participating in TFA left teachers feeling jaded, and suggest that participating in TFA increases optimism about the role of teachers in reducing income-based differences in academic achievement. Consistent with this view, TFA participants are 11 percentage points more likely to agree that “it is possible for all children in the U.S. to have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” and 6 percentage points more likely to support policies that elevate the prestige of the teaching profession. They also are more likely to support investments in wraparound services. Specifically, TFA participants are 7 percentage points more likely to support the broadening and improving of wraparound services, such as counseling and nutrition support.

Are these opinions really a function of teaching through TFA, or do they result from merely being admitted to the program? We further analyze our data in order to isolate the effect of the TFA teaching experience itself on alumni views.

First, we use the same cutoff-based research design to study the effects of being admitted to TFA, regardless of whether those who were admitted actually participated. If it is TFA participation, rather than admission, that causes shifts in participants’ views, we would expect this analysis to reveal smaller effects across the board. That is exactly what we find. Second, we focus only on applicants who were admitted to TFA and directly compare the views of those who did and did not participate. In making these comparisons, we adjust for observable differences in the demographic and educational backgrounds of individuals in the two groups, including their age, gender, college grade-point average, socioeconomic status, and religiosity. We detect statistically significant differences in the views of participants and non-participants across 15 of our 19 outcomes that are broadly consistent with the differences we documented above when we compared applicants who were barely admitted to those who were barely rejected. On the whole, this suggests that experience in the classroom through TFA, not just admission, shapes individuals’ views on education.

Conclusion

To our knowledge, our study is the first to examine how the experience of teaching through TFA in underserved communities shapes individuals’ views on educational inequity and reform. Because TFA teachers work in exactly the type of schools where educational disparities between low- and high-income children are most prominent, these teachers hold important perspectives on what causes, and can close, inequality in academic achievement.

In a separate analysis, our survey data also reveal how teaching through TFA affects participants’ understanding of economic fairness. We find that TFA teachers, who all have the social and economic advantages of being high-achieving college-educated adults, are more able to see through the lens of the disadvantaged as a result of their TFA experience. They take on attitudes that are closer to those of the economic “have-nots” in the United States regarding a perceived lack of fairness of the social and political status quo, and tend to maintain these attitudes over time.

After nearly three decades, the impacts of this national civilian-service program’s focus on education are far-reaching, with alumni leading state education departments in Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Rhode Island; founding prominent charter school networks like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), IDEA Public Schools, and YES Prep Public Schools; and working to develop education and other policy as elected officials in states like Colorado and Nebraska. These alumni hardly share identical points of view. Our research makes clear, however, that the kinds of experiences they had with TFA do influence beliefs about inequity and the tools by which to advance change.

The next step is to examine whether these attitudinal and belief shifts translate to behavioral changes, such as being more likely to vote and be active in civic life. It remains to be seen whether the perception that there is greater social injustice translates to greater activism on a broader scale, as well as efforts to build a sturdier economic and social ladder for disadvantaged individuals to climb.

Katharine M. Conn is senior research scientist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Columbia University; Virginia S. Lovison is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at University of California, Berkeley.

Alumni with Influence

Former Teach for America corps members hold prominent leadership roles in education, public policy, and advocacy organizations.

Jeff Riley, Class of 1993
Former school principal and receiver-superintendent of Lawrence, Mass., Public Schools.
Current Role: Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary & Secondary Education.

Penny Schwinn, Class of 2004
Former member of the Sacramento Board of Education and founder of the Capitol Collegiate Academy charter school.
Current Role: Tennessee State Education Commissioner.

Tony Vargas, Class of 2007
Former member of the Omaha Public Schools Board of Education.
Current role: Nebraska State Senator, District 7.

John White, Class of 1999
Former deputy chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, former superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District.
Current Role: Louisiana State Superintendent of Education.

Brittany Packnett, Class of 2007
Former executive director, TFAin St. Louis.
Current role: Activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero.

Jason Kamras, Class of 1996
Longtime teacher in District of Columbia Public Schools. 2005 National Teacher of the Year.
Current Role: Superintendent of Richmond, Va., Public Schools.

Angelica Infante-Green, Class of 1994 Former superintendent of instruction in New York State.
Current Role: Rhode Island Commissioner of Education.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, Class of 1990
Longtime teacher at Compton High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Current Role: President of United Teachers of Los Angeles.

Photo credits from top to bottom: New Bedford Public Schools, Tennessee Department of Education, AP Photo/Nat Harnik, Advocate staff photo by Bill Feig, Courtesy Brittany Packnett, Dean Hoffmeyer/Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images, Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

This article appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Conn, K.M., Lovison, V.S., Mo, C.H. (2020). How Teach for America Affects Beliefs About Education: Connecting Classroom Experience To Opinions on Education Reform. Education Next, 20(1), 58-66.

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