This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 10, 2010 - In its two decades, Teach For America, the program that recruits recent college graduates to teach in hard-to-staff public schools, has grown substantially. Last year, a record 35,000 people applied for roughly 4,100 teaching spots across the country. This year, more than 50,000 people could apply for 4,500 positions, according to Scott Baier, executive director of Teach for America St. Louis.
St. Louis had a record-tying 100 incoming teachers in the cohort that began in the fall. This year's class is expected to have 110 teachers. Teach For America corps members sign up for two years in the classroom, and Baier said last year more than 60 percent of the St. Louis teachers stayed on for a third year, in line with the national average. Of the program’s 240 alumni currently living and working in the St. Louis region, 90 people are teachers.
To mark the program’s 20th anniversary, Teach For America’s chief knowledge officer, Steven Farr, is out with a book this week that is billed as a look at what distinguishes successful teachers in high-poverty schools. “Teaching as Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap” ($22.95, Jossey-Bass), looks at lessons learned from the program’s teachers (and those who have studied them) over of the past two decades.
The book is filled with advice on everything from how to develop a lesson plan to how to engage parents to how to ensure students are grasping classroom material. It also highlights the teaching methods of individual teachers who have helped raise test scores and boost graduation and college-going rates.
In this condensed interview, Baier speaks about how some of the book’s lessons played out in St. Louis.
A decade before you became TFA’s executive director in St. Louis, you were a corps member in Los Angeles. Do you wish you’d have had this book as a roadmap, and do you teach much of what’s included to new teachers now who are about to start in St. Louis schools?
Baier: Back then we didn’t have these (leadership strategies) as codified, so it was kind of like connect the dots on your own. A lot of what’s in here I saw firsthand as a teacher, like investing in students and their families, and setting big goals. This is basically a recipe book that outlines the different leadership strategies of highly effective teachers. We definitely align our training toward that, because we know that the top teachers share the qualities mentioned in the book.
One of those qualities is the ability to set measurable goals for students. We often think of goals in terms of what the federal government or the state or the school district determines is the way to measure student performance. And that conversation inevitably focuses on standardized tests. How much goal-setting, then, is really done by the teacher?
Baier: Whether we like it or not, the world has tests and our students will be judged from now until they graduate college on how they perform on them. We have to make sure we’re aligned with what the state requires, but it’s also important to take ownership of these goals and to personalize them. For example, some of our teachers have made it their goal to have students improve four points on the ACT between the time they take a diagnostic test at the start of the year to when they take the real test at the end of the year. A four-point movement could be the difference between being not ready to go to college to being a good college candidate, or being someone who gets into a community college to someone who can get a four-year scholarship.
Our teachers are told that students should learn test-taking skills, but nowhere in the state’s curriculum does it say students should raise their scores by this or that amount. They’ve taken this on personally.
This book has a lot to say about teachers needing to take responsibility for problems in their classroom. Is this a recurring problem for struggling teachers?
Baier: Teaching isn’t for everyone and teaching in really difficult situations is definitely not for everyone. You can’t afford excuses if you want to do your job. If you only have a 60 percent attendance rate in your class and you aren’t hitting your goals, it’s your job to work within your school to change that. At the end of the day the responsibility lies with the teacher. We’ve seen people in the roughest of situations excel, so we know any excuses you might bring to the table aren’t what the students need.
The book stresses the importance of involving parents beyond just the student-teacher conference. It mentions doing things like writing regular e-mails and calling home. But for your teachers, many of whom are right out of college and in their early 20s, can it be a challenge or even intimidating to deal with parents?
Baier: It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. We tell our teachers that the parents want to know what’s happening and you are the person who can do that. I always made an effort to call students within the first two days and speak to their parents. That way the student knows that the teacher doesn’t play around. Parents need to know where their children are growing and that someone at school cares about them, so getting them to come to school for events is an easier pitch than one thinks.
Your teachers don’t have much time to make a first impression on students and other faculty members, so what about the importance of getting involved in student activities?
Baier: It’s extremely important. How you are in class can be different from how you are after school. A lot of students are starting off two, three, four years behind grade level, so it’s essential to be there after school for these enrichment opportunities. All of our corps members do at least one after-school activity, and most do several, like leading a club or running the newspaper.
Finally, any thoughts on the recent study that questioned whether Teach For America was developing civically involved graduates? The report showed, among other things, that in areas like voting rates, charitable giving and civic engagement, people who were accepted to the program but declined or those who taught but then dropped out fared better than TFA graduates.
Baier: The study took a narrow definition of civic engagement. Working with students from high-poverty neighborhoods is the most political thing you can do, and to exempt them from what is considered politically minded is wrongheaded. We’re talking about a group of politically motivated people, so to note a discrepancy between the two groups that is measured with a small data set is disingenuous. If anything it’s validation that we’re going after the right kind of people.