Local school activist lambastes Teach for America

Everything DC Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee knows about improving school performance she learned from her three year stint as a Teach for America recruit.  Her formula for raising "student achievement" is a simple one:

Put a dedicated, hard-working teacher in every classroom and test scores will soar.  The achievement gap will gradually dwindle to insignificance. 

Forget about poverty.  In Rhee-world, in the Teach for America cosmos, there are no excuses.  Teachers just need to roll up their sleeves and work harder.  Those who don't share that zeal must be removed from the system, and the unions be damned.

Peter Campbell disagrees.  The local educational activist has written two long critiques of the Teach for America approach to school improvement.  He concludes that in the long run, and on a large scale, it just won't work.

In his first piece, Campbell takes dead aim at the underlying flaws in the Teach for America philosophy --good teachers can overcome all obstacles.  Not true, says Campbell:

"...success depends on teachers working much longer hours than they already do - while this might be reasonable to ask of young, ambitious, TFA teachers who are single, unmarried, and have no kids, it is not reasonable to ask this of older teachers who are married, have kids, and who must struggle in balancing work/life commitments."

Campbell says it simply won't work.  Such a commitment cannot be replicated on a large scale.  And because it "won't scale", he says,

"...the most it can possibly hope to achieve is modest, limited success in a certain number of schools populated with young, ambitious, 20-something TFA teachers."

Success by TFA standards, says Campbell, would mean that

"...becoming a teacher would not be all that different from entering a monastery, i.e., to become a teacher, you need to renounce all other connections to the world."

Another flaw in the TFA philosophy is that "academic success depends on students working much longer hours than they already do."  But what do they work on in those extended hours? 

If success is defined as higher test scores --that's how Michelle Rhee defines success-- it likely means that many of those extra hours of study are devoted to mastering skills in reading and math, the skills that students will encounter on those all important standardized tests.

In the second piece, Campbell writes that Teach for America may be inadvertently  influencing policy makers to think more "conservatively" about school reform.  In that sense, those who oppose No Child Left Behind and testing for accountability (and high stakes testing generally) may have something for fear from the perceived classroom success of TFA  recruits. 

More on that tomorrow.