THE TEACH FOR AMERICA CULT

The Economist’s education correspondent travels to New York to learn more about the city's new experiments in public education. She considers the "missionary-style language" used by some of the city's hardest working teachers ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

As The Economist’s education correspondent, I’ve been invited by Economist Conferences, one of the businesses in the Economist group, to chair a conference in New York entitled “Global Education 2020”. It’s just one day, but if I’m going to make the trip from London, I may as well stay longer and visit some schools. Those in the city’s poor neighbourhoods have long been known for having serious problems—violence, astronomical drop-out rates and abysmal standards of achievement—but in the last few years exciting things have been happening under Joel Klein, the chancellor of the city ’s department of education, and I want to see some of the success stories with my own eyes.

Monday morning, and I’m off to Starbucks on 93rd and Broadway to meet Wendy Kopp, the Princeton graduate who in 1990 founded Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit organisation that recruits top-notch graduates from elite institutions and gets them to teach for two years in struggling state schools in poor areas. I know the basics already—TFA has been widely copied, including in England. But I quickly realise that I’ve misunderstood TFA’s true purpose.

I had thought the programme was about getting more high-quality teachers—but that, it appears, is a secondary benefit. “This is about enlisting the energy of our country’s future leaders in its long-term educational needs, and eliminating inequity,” Wendy explains. It’s great if “corps members”, as TFA calls its active teachers, stay in the classroom—and many do, and rise quickly through the ranks.

But the “alums”, as she calls those who have finished their two-year stint, who don’t stay in schools often go on to lead in other fields, meaning that increasing numbers of influential people in all walks of life learn that it is possible to teach successfully in low-income communities, and just what it takes. “It means you realise that we can solve this problem.”

As she continues to talk I realise that TFA is—in the best possible sense—a cult. It has its own language (“corps members”, “alums”), recruits are indoctrinated (“We tell them that it can be done, that we know of hundreds, thousands, of teachers attaining tremendous success”), go through an ordeal (“Everyone hits the wall in week three in the classroom”), emerge transformed by privileged knowledge (“Once you know what we know—that kids in poor urban areas can excel—you can accomplish different things”) and can never leave (alumni form a growing, and influential, network). I have not seen the same zeal when talking to those on the equivalent programme in England, Teach First. In fact, one Teach Firster told me that in the early days the missionary-style language imported from America had to be toned down, because it just didn’t suit the restrained English style. But could that fervour be necessary for its success?

Chester, an alum, takes me to visit three TFA corps members in their second year of teaching at a middle school in the Bronx. They are impressive young people, and their zeal is evident. Two intend to stay in teaching; both want to open charter schools. One, a Hispanic woman, is working out with a friend how to educate migrant Hispanic labourers in Texas; the other would like to open a “green” charter, but in the meantime he has accepted a job with KIPP (“Knowledge is Power Program”; the largest group of charter schools in the nation) in Newark, New Jersey.

All three are tired. Their classrooms are not much like the rest of the school where they work, and their heroic efforts are only supported by Chester and each other, not by their co-workers. “The first year was unbelievably bad,” one tells me. “So many years with low expectations meant a lot of resistance from the kids. Eventually they saw the power and the growth they were capable of—but during the first few months we were just butting heads every day.”

Next I’m off to Bronx Lab, also a public school, but one that has been given a great deal of freedom as its results are so stellar. It’s as near to a charter school as it’s possible to be without actually being one, says its head teacher, Marc Sternberg. He, like nearly every one of the school’s teachers, is a TFA alum.

The cab drops me off at one of the most horrifying school buildings I’ve ever seen. It’s massive, nearly an entire block, and entirely swathed in scaffolding and black netting. I’m a little early, so I circle it, imagining arriving here on my first day of high school, how scared I’d be, how miserable. Then I realise that underneath the covering, it’s a lovely, grand old building. Presumably it’s finally getting a bit of attention after decades without proper maintenance. But the bad impression continues in the hallway—police, an X-ray machine for bags and a metal detector through which all arrivals must step.

This building used to house a single high school, Evander Childs, with over 3,000 students. As a behemoth it was a byword for public-school failure and violence, but it has now been divided into six smaller schools. Bronx Lab is on the fourth floor. Police still patrol the corridors, but they’re friendly and relaxed, and I quickly let go of my first impressions.

I’m struck by the informality—first-name terms, teachers in jeans, no uniform—and the air of purpose and calmness. As we walk around Marc grabs individual students and gets them to tell me about “the letter you’ve just received”—an extraordinary number of his graduating class, only the school’s second, have won scholarships to elite universities.

Picture credit: Shermee (via Flickr)

(This is a correspondent's diary about education in New York, published on Economist.com.)