This year marks Teach For America’s 20th anniversary. The nonprofit serves as one of the most prominent educational innovations in the last two decades, recruiting graduates from top universities and placing them for two years in classrooms across urban and rural communities in the United States.

I was one such recruit. After five weeks of intensive summer training in 2002, I enthusiastically took over a bilingual first grade classroom in Phoenix. My enthusiasm waned as I realized I was sorely underprepared to manage a classroom of 25 six-year-olds, much less teach them how to read. My training also never addressed how to teach in two languages or how to navigate the politics of teaching bilingually in an English-only state.

I began my TFA experience nearly 10 years ago, and the organization has arguably evolved considerably since that time. They’ve expanded their reach geographically and enhanced their training methods through the creation of a Teaching as Leadership (TAL) rubric. Yet, TFA’s pre-service preparation still pales in comparison to other innovative training programs that focus on preparing teachers to work in urban schools. These programs, referred to as urban teacher residency models, recruit diverse individuals to teach in urban communities and place them as residents in experienced teachers’ classrooms for a year while they complete certification training. Residents are then assigned to their own classrooms for two years, during which they receive ongoing mentorship and support. Their total commitment adds up to three years, although most teachers remain in the classroom for much longer, unlike most TFA teachers.

On TFA’s website, the organization claims: “Research over time has conclusively shown that Teach For America corps members’ impact on their students’ achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers. Moreover, the most rigorous studies have shown that corps members’ impact exceeds that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools.” Not exactly. A growing body of research has focused on the impact of TFA teachers on student achievement, with mixed results.*

Overall, this research indicates that new TFA teachers are about as effective as other underprepared teachers and less effective than regularly certified teachers. TFA teachers’ effectiveness improves once they gain certification, where TFA teachers who stay in the classroom after completing their certification are about as effective as similarly experienced regularly certified teachers. Thus, the second sentence from TFA’s website should more appropriately read, “Once corps members have been adequately trained, their impact is about the same as similarly experienced and certified teachers.”

Follow lead of Finland and Japan

For Teach For America to contribute to meaningful educational reform, I firmly believe the organization must think more deeply about its approach and how it prepares its teachers. As a country, we need to value and support teachers and prepare them in ways that match other leading nations. In places like Finland and Japan, teachers are often paid to complete extensive preparation, continuously supported and given leadership opportunities throughout their careers, and compensated for their work at levels equivalent to other professionals. TFA can be a part of more lasting education reform by aligning its preparation model with these approaches, and the teacher residency model would be an excellent way to do so.

TFA should pilot a residency model in one or two of its sites, increasing the two-year commitment to three. Results from residency models indicate that this model would better prepare TFA recruits to enter some of the nation’s toughest schools, and they would likely stay in the classroom longer. Perhaps more importantly, TFA teachers would have greater understanding of and deeper commitment to the communities they serve.

Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, has argued that increasing the two-year commitment would make the program less attractive, especially for minority recruits. In fact, a TFA executive director once told me there is “just something magical” about the two-year time frame. Yet, teacher residency programs tend to be much more diverse than other preparation programs, including TFA. Thus, I would ask: for who is the two-year commitment magical? For the graduates of top-tier colleges and universities or for the students they teach? So what if only 5 percent of seniors at Harvard and Yale apply instead of 10, if the extra year could produce committed teachers who make a difference in student achievement?

Even though TFA supplies a very small proportion – just 0.2% – of the overall teacher population in the U.S., it remains one of the most well-funded and attention-grabbing innovations of the last 20 years. Although the organization lauds itself on creating a supply of leaders who continue to engage in education reform, TFA should position itself to making lasting change in the classroom. This lasting change could be accomplished by proving the value of urban residency programs and motivating their adoption in districts across the U.S.

* See Heiling and Jez’s 2010 report, “Teach For America: A Review of the Evidence,” for a thorough review of research on TFA. The report may be found at: http://epicpolicy.org/publication/teach-for-america.

Megan Hopkins is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and a Research Associate for The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles. As a former bilingual teacher and Teach For America corps member in Arizona, her current work focuses on building teacher capacity to work with English learners, and her dissertation project examines bilingual teachers’ pedagogy and policy implementation. She holds a B.A. in Spanish from Indiana University and a Master’s degree in International Education Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.