Teach For America at 20: Add a year of training to the model

04-13-2011

Opinion by Megan Hopkins/Thoughts on Public Education

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.

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. (more...)

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