Reading between the lines.

Teach for America Grows UpWhat TFA can teach the NCLB era.

By Sara MoslePosted Monday, May 19, 2008, at 7:23 AM ET

Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America by Donna Foote In the field of social entrepreneurship, there is hardly a more legendary success story: In 1989, Wendy Kopp, then a senior at Princeton University, submitted an undergraduate thesis in which she proposed a national teacher corps whose members would commit to spend two years in the nation's most hard-pressed schools. Within a year, her fledgling enterprise, Teach for America, was up and running, attracting 500 recruits (me among them) who gathered in June of 1990 for six weeks of boot-camp training prior to taking jobs at inner-city and rural schools across the country.

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However, after its initial success and publicity, as Donna Foote reports in Relentless Pursuit, TFA fell on hard times. Seed money (which is easier to raise than ongoing capital) dried up. Although the program received high marks from principals and school districts, it came under harsh criticism from an education-school establishment concerned about high turnover and lack of training among recruits. Corporate underwriters got spooked. For several years, it was unclear whether the organization would survive.

Needless to say, TFA has more than survived. This spring an extraordinary 24,700 of the nation's most sought-after college graduates applied for a record 3,700 TFA spots—800 more positions than last year. In other ways, big and small, the program has grown and matured and is far more sophisticated and rigorous than the one I joined nearly two decades ago. During the intervening years, the larger educational landscape has also changed, with the passage of the imposing federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind—which has, like TFA, placed a premium on results, rather than mere good intentions.

With reauthorization of NCLB looming, Foote's account couldn't be better-timed. Her inside view of TFA's self-reinvention—as well as anatomizing the organization's growing pains, she follows the struggles of several TFA recruits at Locke High school, one of the worst performing and most violent in Los Angeles—demonstrates what relentless reflection on, and revision of, a mission and its methods can accomplish. The lessons on display are especially important for an era in which a ruthless focus on student outcomes risks overlooking a key ingredient of that enterprise: inputs for teachers, who need all the help they can get as they face an educational culture of new pressures and expectations, along with age-old challenges.

In particular, Foote outlines how, starting in the mid-1990s, TFA bore down on a single, overarching goal: significantly boosting achievement (defined as a one-and-a-half- to two-year jump in grade level or 80 percent mastery of a subject) in corps members' classes. The organization began to gather data on recruits' experiences and to run this information through sales-force software and other programs of its devising; the aim was to identify the personal characteristics and classroom practices that seemed to contribute most to raising literacy and numeracy. In the process, Foote writes, TFA "took on many of the characteristics of a successful, results-driven corporation," even as it retained "the soul of a nonprofit."

For example, by analyzing corps members' personality traits, TFA discovered that those with an "internal versus external locus-of-control orientation" are less likely to drop out of teaching early and are generally more successful in the classroom. To translate into plain English, such a teacher typically takes "full personal responsibility for student achievement, refusing to blame outside factors, such as truancy or lack of parental support, for underperformance." It's worth noting that it doesn't really matter whether such teachers are, in fact, solely responsible for their students' progress. Teachers with such a mindset still get better results, TFA has found, presumably because they try harder to work around external problems and don't give in as easily to complacency or despair.

When one TFAer at Locke quits his first fall, defying expectations—he'd actually scored high in his recruitment interview for "perseverance"—Foote describes the cascade of second-guessing that ensues as TFA strives to understand what went wrong. It's a kind of follow-through that is absent from NCLB and often nonexistent on ed-school campuses, where responsibility for a graduate's fortunes ends with the bestowal of a diploma. This willingness to take corps members' professional satisfaction seriously reflects an awareness that teacher performance, unsurprisingly, hinges on it. And this scrutiny is what distinguishes TFA from so many other efforts at school reform: The program is constantly tracking, examining, and, when necessary, modifying its procedures and approaches.

Thus, while TFA partakes of NCLB's standards-driven ethos, it has done so with distinctive attention to the people responsible for actually implementing reforms: teachers. For TFA, as for NCLB, accountability is a mantra, yet it functions not as a threat hanging over the head of its recruits—which is how benchmarks loom in too many schools—but as a tool to help teachers achieve shared goals. Indeed, TFA is apparently the only supervisory presence—from the principal of Locke to the Los Angeles Unified School District—actually providing any consistent oversight or direction at Locke, even as the school faces the threat of a state takeover. Midyear, not a single administrator at Locke has visited one TFAer's classroom after his first weeks of school. When state officials observe another first-year corps member's class, they focus on the cleanliness of her room without ever mentioning the content of her lesson or methods.

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