Did you know that Teach for America receives federal funding? Until recently, I did not, and I was surprised to notice that TFA had received an earmark for $18-million in last year’s higher-education authorization bill. I had always thought that the organization prided itself on being a philanthropically supported alternative to public teacher training/placement programs, but a recent article in the Washington Post notes that more than 10 percent of the $189-million annual TFA budget is derived from federal sources (including a $14.9-million grant last year). The article goes on to comment that the authorization of a noncompetitive grant to TFA is now threatened by Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s proposal to allocate $235-million of his department’s budget for “initiatives to recruit and prepare teachers for high-need schools.” TFA officials are quoted as being concerned about being moved from earmark to competitive status in next year’s Education appropriation: “We’re really hopeful that Congress will put us in the budget”; “It’s hard to plan [through competitive grants]“; “We have to plan so far in advance.” Welcome to the wonderful world of annual federal appropriations, TFA. I would be fascinated to know how much it cost TFA to secure the earmark, but that is not the important issue here.
Secretary Duncan is quoted in the Post article as saying that the new competitive process will offer an organization like TFA a chance to win an even larger grant from the $235-million jackpot, but it is easy to see why TFA would prefer the certainty of its earmark. The crucial subtext for all of this is Arne Duncan’s well-publicized criticism of teachers college “mediocrity” in preparing future teachers. Duncan is hardly an expert on the subject, but knowledgeable observers have contested the quality of university teacher preparation for many years. The difficulty is that TFA’s crash approach to the preparation of college graduates for teaching in tough environments is no less contested. But it seems to me that the crucial variable in the teacher preparation equation is the quality and potential of the future teachers. Colleges of education do not ordinarily attract the most academically talented students in their universities, so the actual comparative advantage of a program like TFA is that it can attract a fairly elite group of candidates, given the nature of the current job market for college graduates. Certainly some of my most promising seniors in recent years have been attracted by TFA.
But I have no doubt that if the current group of TFA teachers had been given a couple of years’ training in a good college of education (and there certainly are some), they would be better prepared to teach K-12. But of course that is not likely to happen anytime soon. Still, wouldn’t it be a good idea to establish more programs in our colleges and universities to provide enhanced teacher-training opportunities for students majoring in subject-matter fields other than education? My own university has a splendid Teacher Prep program that leads to public school teacher certification (and there are others), and I am confident that many alternative programs of this sort could be devised. TFA is right to think that part of the answer to improving the quality of K-12 teaching is to recruit more talented teachers, but I think we need to start recruiting them before graduation. I hope Secretary Duncan is considering that possibility. Wouldn’t it have been nice if Harvard College had provided him with such an opportunity 25 years ago?
