Class action: what Clinton's national service program could learn from Teach for America

Washington Monthly, June, 1993 by Jonathan Schorr

For a guy who isn't known for making short speeches, President Clinton can pack a lot into a few words. In the State of the Union address in January, at Rutgers University in March, and again in New Orleans on the 100th day of his administration, Clinton boldly pledged to include the nation's public schools in his national service program. The plan, something of a G.I. Bill for the MTV generation, promises college grants and loans for young people, "and some who aren't so young," willing, among other things, "to serve in our schools as teachers or tutors in reading and mathematics."

The idea, like Boston's community service-oriented City Year and the Peace Corps in the sixties, is exciting, but it's not as simple as it sounds. Perhaps college students and recent graduates could easily serve as tutors and teachers' aides, but Clinton's plan calls for some to work as full-time teachers as well. Overall, the president is asking for one or two years of service; most teacher recruits would presumably spend most or all of that time teaching. And while it takes five years to qualify to teach in most states, Clinton proposes sending those national service recruits into the classroom with just eight weeks of training. That may be long enough to train neighborhood clean-up workers or even police auxiliaries, but is it enough for teachers?

Teach For America (TFA), the recent private reincarnation of the sixties Teacher Corps, says yes. Developed by Princeton undergraduate Wendy Kopp (with whom Clinton met during his Rutgers visit) and kicked off in 1990, TFA sends college graduates to teach for two years in understaffed schools. As Clinton looks for a model of a crash course for teachers, TFA's eight-week program is an obvious choice, and TFA in fact has submitted a proposal to the president's Commission on National and Community Service. But my own rocky experience in TFA's first corps of teachers tells me--and ought to tell the president's planners--that a quick course and a year in the classroom without the support to make that year successful is a waste of the enormous potential of a young, energetic teaching force. Unless teachers are smartly selected, trained, and supervised, little of use will be accomplished except the soothing of New Democratic consciences.

Training wreck

In many ways, I'm typical of the surprisingly large number of applicants who went after TFA's first 500 slots three years ago. One of a score of TFAers selected from over 100 Yale seniors who applied, I had had the best education money can buy. After nine years at Washington's Sidwell Friends School, which the president's daughter has made famous, and four years at Yale, I could have counted on my fingers the number of times I had been inside a public school. And despite volunteer tutoring in the City Lights school for emotionally disturbed and delinquent children in Washington and in the New Haven Juvenile Detention Center, I had never given serious thought to teaching. Yet, a month after I graduated from college, I found myself at Manual Arts High School in South Central Los Angeles as part of the TFA Summer Institute.

The eight weeks of TFA training were a jumble. Summer school practice teaching in the morning was followed by a mix of classes, seminars, and discussions in the afternoon at the TFA Institute at the University of Southern California. As is so commonly--and problematically--the case, our student teaching roles in the classrooms varied widely. Many TFA student teachers were consigned to the back of the room, observing the "master" teacher at work and occasionally making cameos before the class. Other so-called "mentors" dropped the full load of planning, teaching, and grading on the TFA neophyte, sometimes even leaving the student teacher alone in the room. My experience was somewhere in the middle: I taught one two-hour class solo and observed another. Due to an oddity of the schedule, I ended up with an English class with four students in it. Grading was a breeze, but planning lessons was not, and I was up far too late every night. Quickly, I developed a pragmatic approach to my classes. I tried to figure out what would get me through the next day, not what would make me a better teacher.

The afternoon's TFA Institute classes ran the gamut: classroom management seminars, methods of teaching particular subjects, prep courses for the many standardized tests we faced, lectures introducing us to the law, history, and theory surrounding education, and discussions of multicultural and bilingual education. Some of what we learned, especially classroom management and routines, was useful. But much of it--the fundamentals and general theory of education--had little relevance to our daily work. (If anything, theoretical training ought to be specific to the subject a given teacher is slated to teach.) All of it would have worked better if we had had the guidance of a strong mentor once we were in the classroom full time, perhaps with a reduced load the first year and then a second year at full speed.