Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/396235
Feature credential. Upon completion of the credentialing program, corps members are eligible to file for a five-year prelimi- nary teaching credential. J O B T U R N O V E R A N D TA K E O V E R Spielberg, a Stanford grad who by all accounts was an excellent teacher, quit his teaching job this summer after four years and moved to Washington, D.C., where his fiancée attends medical school. He's not sure if he will continue teaching. He's considering some "policy-ori- ented" positions in the nation's capital. The high teacher turnover rate caused when TFA teachers like Spielberg leave has been a problem for San Jose Unified School District, says Tony Bontempi, a math teacher at San Jose High School. "All of the math teachers we've lost have been from TFA," he says. "It hurts our pro- gram when we have a lack of consistency." TFA's California placements are located in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Diego, and fewer than 20 percent of them are still in the teaching profession by year four. "This small yield comes at substantial cost to the public for recruitment, training and placement," says education expert Linda Darling-Hammond, chair of California's Commission on Teacher Credentialing, in an Education Week article. "A recent estimate places recurring costs at more than $70,000 per recruit, enough to have trained numerous effective career teachers." Districts pay thousands in fees to TFA for each corps member, not counting their salaries. In addition to unnecessary costs, TFA results in the "destabilization" of high-needs schools, says Caputo-Pearl, because poor students are negatively impacted from high turnover. However, due to the high turnover of TFA teachers, the recurring cost of hiring 100 TFA recruits is more than $6 million more than hiring 100 non-TFA teachers, according to "Teach for America: A Review of the Evidence." The study, published in January 2014, found that "despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and extensive lob- bying by supporters and prominent alumni, TFA appears to offer few if any benefits for improving teacher quality in hard-to-staff schools." In the beginning, TFA helped fill a need during a teacher shortage in high-poverty schools, but that's not always the case now. Spielberg notes that in San Jose, "TFA has placed a number of corps members at schools that are relatively low-poverty and easy to staff, which seems antithetical to the TFA mission." More alarming is that TFA alums with just five weeks' training are replacing experienced teachers — so districts can save money by paying lower salary rates for beginning teachers. James Cersonsky reports in the article "Teach For America's Civil War" in the July 2013 issue of The American Prospect: "Chi- cago, for example, is closing 48 schools and laying off 850 teachers and staff while welcoming 350 corps members. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans cut 7,500 school staff [and] converted the majority of its schools to charters. Over the past five years, TFA expanded its Greater New Orleans corps from 85 teachers to 375." This concerns some California CTA chapters. For example, the San Diego Education Association recently agreed that TFA mem- bers could be employed by the district — but only if the district was unable to find qualified teachers to fill positions. "Every year we're going to review the process to see if it's nec- essary," says Scott Mullin, an SDEA board member. "We need to make sure the district isn't overlooking other more qualified people, including subs." T H E R E A L A G E N D A B E H I N D T F A ? Both Loo and Spielberg say that during their TFA training, they were not exposed to anti-union, pro-voucher rhetoric. On TFA's website, there are no overt political views posted. Nonetheless, critics say TFA has a pro-corporate, union-busting agenda. While both of these teachers have been involved in SJTA, many TFA alums are placed in non-union charters and do not become active union members because they consider themselves short-timers in the profession, says Capu- to-Pearl. Some alums banded together to denounce TFA and held an event called Organizing Resistance to Teach For America and its Role in Privat- ization, which took place during the Free Minds, Free People conference in Chicago in July 2013. Pro-privatization and charter school foundations — including the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation of Walmart — have given millions to TFA. Alums "TFA was an overwhelming experience," says Leah Brosio. "The people running the organization didn't support us. But I became a teacher anyway through grit and determination and a great deal of help from my mom, a veteran teacher." Ben Spielberg T E AC H F O R A M E R I C A 20 www.cta.org