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Teach for America is recruiting record numbers of high-performing college graduates who want to save the world, polish their résumés, or both

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By SARA LIPKA

This summer another elite brigade of recent college graduates will set out to fix America's public schools. The 3,000 optimistic overachievers will constitute the largest-ever corps to join Teach for America, a 17-year-old program that sends twentysomethings to teach in underserved urban and rural schools. All have pledged to give their heart and soul to teaching — for two years, anyway.

They will complete five weeks of training before they report to classrooms from Baltimore to Los Angeles, where they will teach kindergarten through 12th grade in some of the nation's worst schools. Without them, thousands of classes would probably be staffed by long-term substitutes.

These college graduates are building a movement. Teach for America has become a household name, attracting ever more recruits, donors, and cachet. Its dogged recruiters prowl college campuses around the country, and each year more students line up to apply.

Last year Teach for America drew nearly 19,000 applicants from 397 colleges and universities. More than 10 percent of the seniors at Amherst, Claremont McKenna, Haverford, Kenyon, and Scripps Colleges, and at Notre Dame and Yale Universities applied to the program. The organization wants to become the top employer of all graduating seniors. At some colleges, it already is.

Teach for America is a tireless machine. A nonprofit organization with a corporate culture, it deals in frameworks and rubrics. It has 600 employees, not counting the teachers, and an institutional-research practice any college would envy. It is obsessed with feedback, self-evaluation, and measurable results. Employees analyze the traits and habits of the program's most effective teachers, and adjust selection criteria accordingly. The organization tracks what all alumni of the program are doing, and sets goals for how many of them should become school principals, superintendents, and elected politicians.

No one argues with Teach for America's mission: to help underprivileged students succeed. But some educators have questioned its approach. An unmistakable smugness guides the organization's presumption that smart novices can swoop in to save the day. Some education professors resent what they see as its hero complex and scoff at the idea that newbies can learn to teach effectively in five weeks. A handful of scholars have published articles showing that the largely minority students in Teach for America classes perform worse than their peers, spurring a data war.

Critics object most harshly to part of what makes the teaching corps so alluring to college students: its two-year commitment. Graduating seniors eager for something meaningful to do while they weigh future plans may jump to join Teach for America, which promises an intense, character-building challenge.

The two-year stint may help college graduates' personal development, but is it too fleeting to achieve real change for struggling schools or their students?

The program's numbers say no. A third of its 12,000 alumni have continued teaching after serving their two years, and another third have stayed in education, as principals, education-reform advocates, or Teach for America employees.

"No one has done more for creating quality human capital within public education than Teach for America," says Mike Feinberg, an alumnus of the program and co-founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program, a national network of public charter schools. Because of Teach for America's momentum, he says, "teaching has become a desirable, sexy profession among our most talented kids in college today."

As college seniors consider their options, teaching may now get a closer look. Whether that is as a noble diversion or a career pursuit is the crux of the debate over Teach for America.

Building a Brand

In 1988, at the beginning of her senior year, Wendy Kopp did not know what to do after graduation. Then, for her senior thesis, the public-policy major proposed a national teaching program, which she imagined as the Peace Corps of the 1990s. She graduated and quickly raised $2.5-million for her fledgling organization. In its first year, Teach for America trained 500 recent graduates in borrowed space at the University of Southern California, then placed them in schools in six low-income communities around the country.

As Teach for America grew, it inspired feel-good stories in major newspapers, as well as seething criticism. Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor of education at Stanford University, delivered an early blow. "TFA is bad policy and bad education," Ms. Darling-Hammond wrote in the Phi Delta Kappan in September 1994. The program's focus on public relations and recruitment over proper training, she said, would "prevent it from ever being an adequate or responsible method of preparing teachers."

Throughout the 1990s, the program struggled financially and considered shutting down. But since 2000, a banner year for fund raising, it has thrived. Its annual budget is now nearly $60-million, most of which comes from grants and government appropriations. Teach for America spends just over half that money on training and professional development, and nearly a third on recruitment and selection. The various school districts pay the teachers' salaries, as well as a $1,500 fee to the program for each person it sends them.

Much of Teach for America's momentum has come from students' asking themselves the same question Ms. Kopp did: What should I do after graduation? Many are seeking what the program offers: public service in a neat package. (The organization's Web site displays, along with statistics on the educational achievement gap, information about the 27 regions in which its recruits will live: average annual temperature, the cost of a gym membership, and a typical cover charge.)

The program's status makes it all the more alluring. Many students at elite colleges now mention Teach for America in the same breath as law or medical school, management consulting, or investment banking. The selection process, which includes essays, readings, and rounds of interviews, matches the rigor of applying to graduate programs. When students are accepted, their peers are impressed.

Teach for America employs 130 full-time recruiters, many of them alumni of the program. They fan out across the country in pairs, often working with campus "campaign managers" — students the organization pays to hype it and peruse Facebook for potential candidates. Though the program recruits on more than 500 campuses, it works elite colleges the hardest.

"The people we're looking for, the nation's future leaders, are not randomly distributed around the country," says Matthew Kramer, president of Teach for America. Still, he encourages recruiters to break new ground. "If there's a school you haven't really cracked yet, and you think it's crackable," he tells them, "you have to figure out a way to tell the story there."

The program's recruiters track student leaders on hundreds of campuses, aggressively pursuing those who fit their criteria. Jon Monteith, a 2007 graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was president of a student club his sophomore year when he started hearing from Teach for America. "Anyone who seems to be a good candidate is contacted by the program," he says. "It seems like you can't escape them."

When Mr. Monteith, a rhetoric major, returned from a semester abroad in Scotland, a recruiter invited him to coffee. He was undecided about the program until he got a persuasive e-mail message. Although he probably had many job options, it said, no one needed him as much as underprivileged children in poor public schools.

"It's really hard," he says, "to say no to that." Mr. Monteith decided to apply.

Teach for America's 2006 corps was more than 70-percent white, and many of the schools where its teachers work have minority populations of 90 percent or higher. Recruiters are trying to attract nontraditional applicants by going to meetings of minority student groups and contacting good candidates more persistently.

"We have to work extra hard on the sourcing side to make sure that we are getting in front of the very most talented students of color and persuading them that this is important," says Mr. Kramer.

The program does not consider race in its admissions process. What Teach for America does look for, according to its Web site, is "perseverance in the face of challenges," "ability to influence and motivate others," and "desire to work relentlessly in pursuit of our mission." The organization selects only those it predicts will fare well in a rough classroom. Last year that was only 17 percent of applicants.

Selectivity is one measure of prestige in higher education, and the proportion of applicants who accept offers is another. For each of the past three years, nearly 80 percent of Teach for America's successful applicants have joined the corps. Mr. Kramer is proud of his yield rate: "That's what Harvard's is, right?"

Boot Camp

After Teach For America harvests its crop, the program's employees spend the summer trying to turn bright students into good teachers. The intensive five-week training is known as "institute," and the participants say it prepares them for the stress and sleep deprivation that await first-year teachers.

Before they report to one of five training sites around the country, the corps members have logged several hours of classroom observation and started to read the program's extensive teaching manuals. During the training, they work 70-hour weeks — teaching summer school in teams of four and attending workshops on learning theory, lesson planning, and literacy development, among other topics.

The instructors, many of them alumni of the program, tell the new recruits they will not be good teachers right away. "You can't turn something that's fundamentally challenging into something that's not," says Mr. Kramer. But you can, he says, quickly expose people to some of the theories and strategies of teaching. In a report, one former staff member referred to the new teachers' summer training as a "shot in the arm that allows them to get through the rest of the year."

Teach for America officials say their training has become more sophisticated. New teachers used to get one three-ring binder of general teaching techniques, but now the program produces 10 texts, specific by subject area and grade level. Based largely on internal studies of its own teachers, the materials smack of professional self-help. They outline six strategies ("Plan purposefully," "Execute effectively") and 28 actions ("Sustain energy to reach ambitious goals") for good teaching.

Traditional teacher-certification programs or degrees in education take a year or longer. A prominent criticism of Teach for America is that it's impossible for anyone to learn to teach in five weeks. But the program's officials say their recruits are not just anyone.

Teach for America turns down plenty of applicants who would make good teachers with the traditional year of training, says Nicole Baker Fulgham, a consultant for the program's teacher-preparation team. Instead it goes for the high achievers who can juggle double majors and numerous activities. "For the type of people that we specifically recruit and select," Ms. Fulgham says, "I think the five-week training model works successfully."

Megan B. Hopkins was one of the chosen, and she is not convinced. After graduating from Indiana University, in 2002, she joined Teach for America and went off to Phoenix to teach bilingual first grade. But a state vote had prohibited bilingual education. At first her school district was granted an exception, but later that was rescinded. Ms. Hopkins was not ready for education politics, she says, nor for the realities of the classroom. Her students did not have enough books, desks, or chairs. Some of them brought weapons to school.

"I struggled the whole year," she says. "I was really underprepared. I had no idea how to teach a bilingual class, or manage a classroom." She says Teach for America did not train her well enough or support her once she got to Phoenix.

Still, Ms. Hopkins stuck it out for three years, and then went to Harvard University for a master's in education. She became fascinated with teacher preparation, and wrote a memo for a policy class recommending that Teach for America change its model. The program should increase its commitment to three years, she wrote, and make the first year an apprenticeship with a veteran teacher.

"I don't believe they should be putting thousands of underprepared teachers in classrooms every year," she says. "For the short amount of time they're in there, they should be good teachers."

Many professors of education have similar concerns. They also fault Teach for America's training model, pointing out elements of graduate curricula in education it lacks: extensive course work in teaching methods, for example, and a long-term, supervised student-teaching assignment. In short, they hate the idea of any kind of crash course.

"Just because someone is intelligent and has a 4.0 and graduated from Harvard or whatever, it doesn't make a difference when it comes to learning the pedagogy and the process and the development of a teacher," says Barbara Torre Veltri, an assistant professor of education at Northern Arizona University.

When Ms. Veltri was a doctoral student at Arizona State University, she served on a special team set up to help beginning teachers. She found the Teach for America participants particularly naïve, she says, and tried to offer them as much extra support as she could, including late-night telephone calls.

Although the new college graduates in Teach for America tend to work hard, applying for grants, going to school-board meetings, and running after-school programs, she says, "they don't really understand the state standards. They don't understand the systemic complexities of schooling."

And those are the specialties of education schools. With Teach for America, "you're talking about people who can walk in off the street and say, 'Your profession doesn't need any training,'" says David C. Berliner, a professor of educational leadership and policy studies at Arizona State.

Mr. Berliner published a report in 2002 on the effectiveness of undertrained teachers, including members of Teach for America. He found that their students showed about 20 percent less academic growth each year than did students of regular teachers.

"TFA may be a meaningful way for young college graduates to make some money and take a few years out of the ordinary path their careers demand," he wrote in Educational Policy Analysis Archives. "But they are hurting our young, vulnerable, inner-city students."

For Students' Sake

The question of how students fare with teachers who lack traditional credentials, in particular members of Teach for America, has generated a hefty archive of research. A few recent studies show that students in Teach for America classrooms do just as well as those with other teachers, even a little better in math. But who those other teachers are — veterans or other novices, with traditional credentials or not — is the subject of some debate.

In 2004, Mathematica Policy Research Inc. published a report that Teach for America likes to cite. The report found that Teach for America members had a positive impact on students' math achievement relative to all teachers, not just novices or those who also lacked traditional credentials. In reading, the scores were even.

A recent survey of school principals that Teach for America commissioned also produced some flattering statistics. Three of four principals said the program's teachers came in with better training than other beginning teachers. Nearly the same proportion said members of Teach for America were more effective.

The organization is also running a diplomatic effort alongside the data war. Five years ago the program sent its training binder to Ms. Darling-Hammond and some of her colleagues at Stanford's education school, soliciting their comments.

"They asked how did it compare with the Stanford curriculum," says Ms. Darling-Hammond. "That didn't seem productive to us, because they were really totally different animals."

A few Teach for America officials went to Stanford for a meeting, which Ms. Darling-Hammond says was polite. "We didn't want to say to them, 'Your curriculum is superficial, and it's clear why your folks struggle.'" Instead the Stanford professors pointed out a few areas the five-week training should emphasize, including reading instruction and cultural sensitivity.

"I felt like it was a political agenda for them to come to say, 'We came to Stanford,'" she says. "It did not end up being a deep conversation."

According to an e-mail message from a Teach for America spokeswoman, the professor's suggestions were "one component of an extensive and thorough review process" to revise the training program.

In 2003 the organization formed a "research advisory board" of five experts in the field, including Susan H. Fuhrman, president of Columbia University Teachers College, and Susan Moore Johnson, a professor of teaching and learning at Harvard's Graduate School of Education. "We don't meet very frequently, but when they have an issue, they call on us," Ms. Fuhrman says.

The organization has asked the advisory board how best to research its teachers' effectiveness, how to recruit better teachers, and how to improve their training. "We've advised them on how to be reflective," says Ms. Fuhrman, "how to gather evidence about their procedures so they can make improvements as they go along."

Ms. Kopp, who is chief executive of Teach for America, hopes the advisory board will ease tensions. "One thing we've realized recently is that we just need to invest more energy in communicating with the teacher-education world about what we're doing and how we're trying to do it," she says. "We're seeing that where we do that, we're finding real allies."

Ms. Darling-Hammond does not consider herself an ally. The professor supports nontraditional teacher-training programs that are designed to solve one of public education's biggest problems: a lack of well-prepared teachers who plan to stay in the profession.

"TFA," she says, "is not an answer to that problem."

Moving On

School's out for most Teach for America participants after two years. Eighty-eight percent of the 2004 class fulfilled their commitment. Over all, 44 percent stayed in their original schools for another year or more.

Andrew Elliot-Chandler decided to stay. A member of the 2004 corps, he is now wrapping up his third year at Mildred Goss Elementary School, in San Jose, Calif.

"I feel like this year I am doing so much more good for students than I did last year, and many, many times more than my first year," he says. "It makes me sad to see other corps members not returning on that investment for the district."

Mr. Elliot-Chandler thinks Teach for America should provide financial incentives, like loan forgiveness, for its teachers to stay in their original schools.

According to Ms. Kopp, participants in the program do have an incentive to keep teaching. "The most compelling pressure," she says, "is the one that they feel every day in their schools from their fellow faculty members and their principals and their kids and kids' families."

But not everyone who signs on to Teach for America wants to devote a whole career to education, and that is fine by Mr. Kramer, the president. "We do not push teaching," he says. "We do not say, 'You've got to stay in teaching, that's all that matters.'"

Mr. Monteith, the recruit from Illinois, decided to decline Teach for America's offer partly for that reason. He wants to go into politics, and he worried about joining for the wrong reasons — like to burnish his résumé: "I want to be someone who says he's the type to do it, but I didn't actually want to do it."

The program's aggressive recruiters nearly snagged him, though. "I felt like they were saying, 'Oh, that's perfect for Teach for America,' no matter what I was saying, even if I was saying, 'I'm not that interested in teaching.'"

"I just worry that in an effort to hire the top-tier student leaders, they're not paying attention to what these people will probably be like in the classroom," he says.

Many of the students who do sign on have other plans, and Teach for America's leaders say they do not want to interfere with those. That is the main reason the program will not increase its commitment to three years — doing so might rob it of some of its best applicants.

Someone might want to become an investment banker for Goldman Sachs, make a lot of money, and donate generously to education charities, Mr. Kramer says. "We are attempting to support a lot of options."

Teach for America has become increasingly entwined with the corporate world. Several companies, including some of the program's big donors, are hungry for bright, hard-working, prescreened Teach for America alumni. Goldman Sachs, for example, recruits them through the program's Office of Career and Civic Opportunities. Morgan Stanley and Google, among others, allow college graduates who join Teach for America to defer their job offers for two years. JPMorgan pays them a signing bonus of between $7,000 and $15,000 — the norm for college seniors — before they go off to teach.

Graduate and professional schools are also enticing Teach for America participants. About 150 degree programs in business, education, engineering, law, medicine, public policy, and social work, among other fields, give special treatment to members of the teaching corps. Most medical schools offer two-year deferrals, and several law and business schools have established special scholarships to woo veterans of Teach for America.

At Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, all alumni of the program are guaranteed a minimum annual scholarship of $10,000. "We have always valued students who participate in Teach for America," Bruce R. Kuniholm, director of the institute, writes in an e-mail message. "It serves as a catalyst for their interests and ambitions, gives them a focus, and spurs them on to want to make a difference in the world," he says. "I wish we had more aid to give because it is always well spent."

The organization also courts its own alumni. It taps its best teachers to counsel younger cohorts. It hires some of its greatest enthusiasts as recruiters. Taking them out of the classroom is unfortunate, Mr. Kramer says, but worth it if they can help the movement on a broader scale.

Regardless of where alumni of the program end up, Ms. Kopp's hopes their service will permanently change them. She believes that if Teach for America can generate a critical mass of movers and shakers with firsthand experience in low-income schools, they can help solve the problems that plague public education.

To nudge that plan along, the organization has set goals for how many of its alumni it wants to become school principals or superintendents (600) and win a political office (100) within the next three years. The current numbers are 268 and eight, respectively. But the "school leadership initiative" and the "elections initiative" are already seeking good candidates among Teach for America alumni and plugging them into the organization's powerful network.

Teach for America's staff members are also traveling around the country to scout potential new sites for the program. The Jacksonville, Fla., chamber of commerce has courted the corps. The school districts where its members already teach want more of them, and public-charter-school networks and other education-reform groups want more alumni.

Maintaining that momentum is necessary to sustain a movement, says Ms. Kopp.

"We have to grow," she says, "so that our corps members and alums feel like they're part of something that has a real chance to make a difference."

The program's critics wish it would slow down. Ms. Veltri, of Northern Arizona, says its energy and resources would be better spent trying to improve its model. But Teach for America has chosen instead to focus on expansion, she says. "They like their model the way it is."

MORE RECRUITS, MORE MONEY After a slight dip in the mid-1990s, Teach for America has grown substantially in numbers of participants and budget. (Each incoming class commits to two years, so the total number of teachers in 2006, for example, was 4,600.) Incoming Corps Members Operating Budget (in millions of dollars) SOURCE: Teach for America