Teach for America will nearly double the number of its teachers in Colorado next school year to 270, sending its educator corps into five districts with an eye on adding even more.
The nonprofit organization, which places high-achieving college graduates in high-needs schools without traditional certification, is expecting to add 400 teachers a year by 2013 if the state wins a $175 million competitive federal education grant. A portion of the grant application is dedicated to hiring those teachers.
“Here in Denver and Colorado, you have an assessment system, student-centered focus and a state that has a lot of political will,” said Sean Van Berschot, executive director of Teach for America Colorado. “That is a huge window of opportunity for us.”
This week, TFA’s 155 new teachers — recently graduated from 50 universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale — are meeting for the first time before entering a five-week boot camp in Phoenix to prepare for the 2010-11 school year.
The teachers sign up for two years and get as much as 400 hours of professional development their first year.
In August, they’ll be placed in Denver, Aurora, Sheridan, Mapleton and Harrison school districts.
“I believe that it is a program that sets me up to make the largest impact, post-graduation,” said Roland Shaw of Placitas, N.M., who just graduated with a political science and history degree from George Washington University.
Shaw, 22, will be a special education teacher at Manual High School.
“I am dyslexic. I had a lot of help when I was a middle-schooler with learning strategies to overcome dyslexia,” he said. “I definitely think there is a huge debt to be paid back.”
If Colorado wins the federal Race to the Top grant, TFA teachers would be sent to schools statewide, including Pueblo, Greeley, Colorado Springs and the San Luis Valley.
This year a record 46,000 applied for about 4,500 positions across the country.
TFA this year hired 47 from Colorado universities and colleges, with 31 grads coming from the University of Colorado — one of the nation’s top 25 TFA schools, VanBerschot said.
The program’s mission is to close the achievement gap between rich and poor students or minorities and their white or Asian peers by bringing the brightest graduates to the poorest schools to teach the toughest subjects.
Critics say Teach for America sends woefully untrained teachers into tough positions and most leave after two years — creating a continuous churn in hard-hit schools.
Since the program began in 1990, two-thirds of TFA teachers have remained in the education field after their two-year assignments, Van Berschot said.
“For anyone to think this is a long-term solution, it is bizarre,” said Diane Ravitch, research professor of education at New York University and an increasingly loud critic of the latest education reforms. “We ought to be thinking about how do we improve the profession top to bottom. This is giving an aspirin to someone with a very serious illness.”
Research findings have been mixed about the program’s effectiveness.
A 2008 Urban Institute study found Teach for America participants in North Carolina in 2000-06 were “more effective, as measured by student exam performance, than traditional teachers” — particularly in science and math. And a Mathematica Policy Research study in 2004 found students taught by a TFA teacher made more progress in reading and math than would typically be expected.
But a study paid for in part by the teacher-union-funded Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice released Wednesday suggests TFA teachers should be used only when all other options have been exhausted because novice TFA teachers perform “significantly less well in reading and mathematics than those of credentialed beginning teachers.”
The review of statistical assessments by researchers at the University of Texas and California State University at Sacramento also concluded that the “high turnover of TFA teachers is costly . . . and the higher achievement gains associated with experienced teachers and lower turnover may be lost as well.”
Ravitch said expecting Teach for America to solve the nation’s education woes is like believing the Peace Corps will fix the problems of Third World nations.
“We aren’t the solution,” Van Berschot said. “We see ourselves as part of the solution.”
Jeremy P. Meyer: 303-954-1367 or email@example.com