Richmond is looking at becoming the first district in the commonwealth to welcome Teach For America (TFA) to its schools, hoping to alleviate the teacher shortages Richmond City Public Schools have been facing. At a school board meeting in November, the board voted 5-2 in favor of beginning negotiations with Teach For America, which has been around for over 20 years and tries to “eliminate educational inequity by enlisting high-achieving recent college graduates and professionals to teach."The alternate licensure program places these newly licensed teachers in schools in low-income communities through a two-year contract.
Teach For America's Community Engagement Director for Virginia, Eva Colen, has worked for TFA for the past five years. Colen is a Virginia native and has been in her current position since June. “Historically, Virginia has had some of the most restrictive teacher licensure regulations,” Colen said. “So last year the governor’s team actually reached out and said they were interested in pursuing legislative changes that would bring Teach For America to Virginia.” During the 2013 legislative session the “The Teach For America Act” was passed in both chambers of Virginia’s state government. According to Colen the new legislation “paved the way for Teach For America to become an alternative pathway to teacher licensure in the Commonwealth.” The law took effect on July 1, and these current negotiations being made between TFA and Richmond’s school board will make it the first to seek this alternative.
Kristen Larson (4th District) serves on the school board and is among those who voted in favor of bringing TFA to Richmond. “Richmond needs to, in areas, revamp the ways we recruit our staff,” Larson said. “Teach For America is just a small piece of that, so the agreement that we passed and what Teach For America has been looking at in coming to Richmond is not to solve all of our recruitment problems. They are not a silver bullet to fix that, but they are a piece of it.”
Shonda Harris-Muhammed (6th District) is another member of the school board, but does not see TFA as a well-suited solution for Richmond City Public Schools. Harris-Muhammed said she has several ideas why other board members voted in support of the program while she did not. “One is because [of] the current instructional state of Richmond City public schools... Our data is ... not very pretty right now, to say the least. And we have a lot of challenges,” Harris-Muhammed said. “Some school board members have said we have an issue; the issue is middle schools. Well, as a 16 year educator and the only educator on the school board, the issue is not middle schools.”
Harris-Muhammed said some of the issues Richmond’s schools face include building relationships with the families of children who reside in poverty, and the connection between the elementary curriculum and the middle school curriculum. “One of the things that I have learned as a classroom teacher, as an assistant principal, as a former central office supervisor, is that you cannot change the district until you change the culture in the district,” Harris-Muhammed said. “So whatever entity you bring in to implement change, the change must begin within the system. And we have not begun to have those conversations about how we’re going to fix what is going on within the culture of the system.”
Although Larson and Harris-Muhammed could not agree on whether or not TFA would be a successful approach to aid in Richmond’s chronic shortage of new teachers, they both recognize the city’s problem in obtaining enough new teachers annually. "This past August I got a list of instructional vacancies and this is a few weeks before school starts and that list was well over a hundred positions that were vacant,” Larson said in support of TFA which she sees as another recruitment arm. “They can help us so that we’re not in August with 170 something vacancies and no additional tools that are disposal to help recruit teachers.”
Harris-Muhammed has a different resolution. “I don’t think we took enough time to look at, well, what is TFA actually going to do for us besides fill some teaching slots? ...I am disappointed that we started the school year with maybe 33 slots empty, but we have a recruiting issue,” she said. “Our HR department needs to be revamped.”
Richmond Public Schools' human resource center has received much concern about how they recruit and whether or not they’re doing enough to fill vacant spots in a suitable time frame. “We should be recruiting now for those 33 positions that need to be filled,” Harris-Muhammed said. “But instead of going to visit local universities that feed into our school system, that we have a current partnership with, we have said, ‘Oh, you know, TFA is going to come in and give us what we need.’ But we don’t know that, because they receive five weeks of training for pedagogy, which ... takes time to develop, understand and implement.”
Christine Walther-Thomas, dean and professor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Education, said Richmond needs to do a better job at advertising and recruiting new teachers. “All of the school districts in the area have to recruit outside the area to find adequate supplies of new teachers coming in,” Walther-Thomas said. “I know our students, some of them who would have chosen to work in Richmond, took positions in other divisions in the area because Richmond was slow to make some key hires.”
Walther-Thomas and several of her VCU School of Education colleagues attended and presented at a school board meeting in opposition of bringing TFA to Richmond. “I don’t have specific concerns about the goals of TFA, I think the goals are great,” she said. “Young people I know who have been a part of TFA are talented, passionate, creative, and hardworking. I just don’t believe it’s an effective way to find solutions for our most needy schools.”
Walther-Thomas said working in schools is always a challenge and more than half of new teachers leave within five years under the best of circumstances. She said it takes teachers a number of years to get comfortable teaching, and in high poverty schools, it is difficult for young teachers to be successful. “So when Teach For America comes in and finds these really incredibly bright, talented, young people who want to make a difference, I applaud their efforts. And then they make them the teacher of record in classrooms that are among the toughest classrooms in America,” Walther-Thomas said. She expressed reservations about the program and the limited training it provides. “They’re not setting these teachers up for short-term or long-term success, and that is my biggest concern.”
Teach For America members attend a five-week summer training program in preparation for teaching. The brevity of this training has been the focus of much concern from the public. Walther-Thomas referred to an article in The Atlantic by Olivia Blanchard, who taught with Teach For America in Atlanta from 2011 to 2012. The article highlights many of the concerns Walther-Thomas and her colleagues have about TFA’s limited training.
“This is the experience that we hear about and that school districts report,” Walther-Thomas said of the article.
“There’s very little hard data that’s available on the long-term outcomes of Teach For America teachers. They may get some good test scores for one year, maybe two years, but I would argue that teachers who go through the type of program we’re offering could match them toe to toe--and we’re hoping to do more research to demonstrate that,” Walther-Thomas said, in support of programs like the Richmond Teacher Residency Program.
The Richmond Teacher Residency program (RTR) is the result of a $5 million grant VCU’s School of Education received from the U.S. Department of Education. The program is a partnership between VCU and Richmond Public Schools, and trains teachers for dealing with classrooms in an urban setting. "I would say in some ways some of the work that we have done here at VCU has helped pave the way for other alternatives,” Walther-Thomas said.
Teachers who undergo the process through RTR commit to four years of service; one year as a resident working under a master teacher, and then three years of teaching in a Richmond Public School. “Every year we have more people call wanting to be a part of it. But where we differ from Teach For America is that we will work intensively with these early career teachers for one year. And they are interns [during that year], not the teacher of record,” Walther-Thomas said. “Then, with continued support and guidance, they are making a commitment to stay in Richmond three years.” The program, which began in May of 2011, has had a 100 percent placement success within Richmond Public Schools and continues to look for bright young people to make flourishing Richmond teachers.
Harris-Muhammed said the presentation made by VCU’s representatives at their school board meeting provided them with a lot of information about RTR. She said the information the university provided was hard data and research which helped her in her attempts to see both sides of the argument. In contrast Harris-Muhammed said TFA only presented them with data which showed them in positive light, which should have signaled red flags. “I want to be able to make a rational, sound decision based on the facts that you present to me, and they just didn't have all of their ducks lined up,” she said.
She said the VCU presenters did a good job at being fair in protecting their program. Harris-Muhammed also pointed out her opinion on programs like VCU’s RTR and how society might not realize they are under attack. “They’re becoming less funded. Organizations are trying to circumvent the process, and it’s detrimental,” she said. “And I’m not saying that’s what TFA is trying to do, but there’s a reason why people need to be prepared to teach. And going to a summer camp for 5 weeks does not prepare you to teach.”
Since talk of bringing TFA to Richmond began, the feedback has been decidedly mixed. There is currently a petition on MoveOn.org to stop any contract between TFA and Richmond Public Schools. The petition was created by Jackie McDonnough, who is an associate professor at VCU, and currently has 397 signatures from people all over the country.
Another of the largest concerns people are having with the program is the expense. The school system must agree to pay a $5,000 fee per TFA teacher, which is paid on top of the initial salary. “Let’s talk about the number that we are going to agree to giving our teachers a raise,” Harris-Muhammed said in hope that the TFA vote will be revisted. “We are yet to do that, but we have said, ‘Oh, we’re going to bring in 20 to 30 TFA teachers and we’re going to give them this bonus,’ ... I just have a strong issue with that. And because I’m in education, I have been a classroom teacher, I can’t see turning my back on teachers.”
Larson said she believes the mixed reviews are stemming from the fact the program is new to people. She mentioned that, while Richmond schools employee 4,000 people, they are only seeking to employ, at maximum, 30 TFA teachers. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding out there about the $5000 that people thought it goes directly to the teachers," she said. "It doesn’t--it’s something that we pay to Teach For America.” But whether this is truly the reason for the objection to the additional $5000-per-teacher expense is an open question.
Walther-Thomas called the Teach For America program an expensive gamble. “TFA is great that it gets a lot of attention, but the reality is that it provides a drop in the ocean of school needs. And it’s a good drop, but it’s limited and it’s expensive.”
“We just really need to pull together," Walther-Thomas said. "We need to take the best of what we have, the resources and the commitment of this community, to ... figure out some really complex issues that have plagued this area for decades... That silver bullet won’t be Teach For America, it won’t be our teacher residency program, but it will be all of us working together overtime, trusting one another and supporting one another, to find good long-term solutions.”
While negotiations are being pursued, the final decision about whether to bring TFA to Richmond City Public Schools has not yet been made. Harris-Muhammed hopes the issue will be revisited by the beginning of the new year, and would like the board to receive input from the new superintendent of schools--a position that has not, as yet, been filled. She would also like the board to do a better job of considering the input of the community. "We really have to pay attention to what people are saying about this issue of TFA," she said. "Because if we don’t listen to the evidence that has been presented, to the people who support us and our teachers the most, I am afraid we’re going to lose some major support from some major people--our parents and our teachers."