Wendy Kopp
Wendy Kopp, founder and CEO of Teach For America, spoke at Wednesday's Tulsa Metro Chamber luncheon.
Teach For America is the innovative education reform movement that takes top-flight fresh college graduates (who weren't planning to be teachers and who don't have any Education College classes) and places them in high-challenge classrooms for two years.
I wrote about the program, which will be coming to Tulsa next year, in this Sunday column.
Kopp told an inspirational story about a TFA teacher in New York who took a class of low-performing 10th graders preparing for a graduation exam in global studies and pushed them through with remarkable success.
Early on the teacher determined that 20 percent of the students weren't reading at grade level, but by the end of year he got 55 of the 58 students to pass the exam. The other three passed it the next year.
She said the three lessons from the story were: 1. the education problem is a solvable problem; 2. the same characteristics of successful leaders in the rest of the world – goal setting, single-minded dedication to mission, etc. – make for successful leaders in the classroom, and 3. (and this was the surprise) a force of heroes can't solve all the education problems in the nation.
Strange, huh? The lesson is that you can't rebuild school districts with nothing by TFA kids.
What's broken in the schools requires "fundamental systemic change" that can be facilitated by TFA, but not performed by putting its teachers in the place of other teachers.
At some point – five to ten years, she said – TFA will have created a critical mass of alumni that will force to the fundamental change. There's already examples to be seen in the KIPP movement and the Washington D.C. schools, both of which are led by TFA alumni.
This same point came through indirectly in the way she struggled with one question from the audience: What can Education Colleges take out of TFA to make all teachers as effective as the hero of her anecdote?
The question was asked twice in different ways and she never really answered it.
She didn't say this, but it's true anyway: TFA relies on things Education Colleges can never have -- highly selective entrance requirements and a two-year commitment.
If you have highly enthused Ivy League graduates for a couple of years, you can indeed work wonders in individual classrooms.
But unless you can populate Education Colleges with kids who pull 35s on the ACT tests and tell them that they can go on the Wall Street jobs after a couple of years, the mass of school teachers aren't going to be able match TFA results.
TFA's ultimate promise isn't that it will repopulate the teachers lounge. It can't do that. It's promise is that it will create a new elite corps of education advocates – graduates of top schools who have two real years of experience to draw on – who will reshape school boards, Legislatures, school superintendent's offices and the top levels of the bureaucracy.
