Dive Brief:
- Teach for America (TFA) is launching a pilot program, offering 500 college juniors accepted to begin teaching in the 2015-2016 school year the opportunity to take education classes their senior year and to practice skills in the classroom before entering it full-time.
- The alternative certification program places recent college grads in some of the nation’s toughest school districts. Since its inception in the 1990s, TFA has given recruits 5 weeks of training the summer before entering the classroom full-time. In recent months, the organization has come under fire by both outside critics and TFA members who feel training is insufficient.
- The announcement of the pilot-program comes in the wake of decreased applicant interest in TFA. According to the organization, to date they have seen a 12% drop in applications from last year, and they are unlikely to meet their goal of 6,300 new corps members for the 2014-2015 school year.
Dive Insight:
Let’s start by saying ‘Good for you, Teach for America.’ As stated by Olivia Blanchard, a 2011 corps member who quit after her first year and faulted the training model in an essay she wrote for the Atlantic last year, “Regardless of your position on TFA as a concept, I think most people can agree that the current training model is fundamentally inadequate, which is both harmful to students and insulting to ‘traditionally’ trained teachers.” So this is definitely a step in the right direction.
But before we go overboard commending Teach for America for its pilot-program, let’s wait and see what it looks like. As of right now it will only affect 500 juniors (remember the organization aims to get over 6,000 corps members in the coming year), and TFA is unsure where this extra year of training will take place.