Teach For America and English Language Learners: Shortcomings of the Organization’s Training Model

Teach For America (TFA) places novice teachers, referred to as corps members, in several regions across the United States that have among the highest English language learner (ELL) populations in the nation. In this paper, we present a policy and program analysis of TFA’s training related to ELLs, arguing that the organization inadequately prepares teachers to work with this student population even though it places corps members in regions with high ELL populations. First, we describe the current Elementary and Secondary Education Act amendment that allows TFA corps members to be considered highly qualified without ELL-related training. Next, we analyze TFA’s curriculum and teacher preparation approach specific to ELLs. We then describe alternative approaches, including an emerging residency model and a community-based program, which prepare teachers for specific local contexts and student populations. Drawing on these exemplars, we conclude with recommendations for TFA to modify its model in ways that would sufficiently prepare its corps to teach ELLs. Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Critical Education, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Critical Education. Critical Education is published by the Institute for Critical Educational Studies and housed at the University of British Columbia. Articles are indexed by EBSCO Education Research Complete and Directory of Open Access Journals. 1 9 C r i t i c a l E d u c a t i o n As the United States (U.S.) school-age population becomes increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, all teachers must be prepared to support the social, emotional, cultural, linguistic, and academic development (Wrigley, 2000) of students who are not yet deemed proficient in English (Bunch, 2013). Nevertheless, a disproportionate number of these students, referred to as English language learners (ELLs), are taught by teachers without standard certification (Cohen & Clewell, 2007), including those in Teach For America (TFA) (DarlingHammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Heilig, 2005; Kini, 2013). Founded in 1990, TFA’s aim is to close the “achievement gap” – a gap based on student scores on standardized assessments – that exists along racial and socio-economic lines (TFA, 2012d). The organization utilizes an alternative pathway to certification and enlists elite college graduates for placement as novice teachers, known as corps members, in low-income urban and rural schools (TFA, 2012d) in one of 46 regions across the United States (TFA, 2012a). Following a national, prescriptive curriculum for a five-week summer pre-service training (Farr, 2010; Teaching as Leadership, 2012), the model assumes that extensive teacher training is not necessary for graduates from top-tier universities to excel in the nation’s most underserved schools. However, empirical research shows that TFA corps members are, at best, only as effective as other new teachers in the same schools, and turnover rates after three years are as high as 80 percent (Heilig & Jez, 2010). Such high turnover negatively affects student achievement overall (Ronfeldt, Loeb, & Wyckoff, 2012) and represents an investment loss for school districts, universities, and taxpayers (Heilig, 2012). Based on this evidence, as well as on our experiences as former TFA corps members in Phoenix, Arizona, who felt vastly underprepared to meet the needs of our students, we believe that an overhaul of TFA’s model is necessary for the program to contribute meaningfully to education reform. Indeed, we have argued elsewhere that TFA should adopt a teacher residency model and require longer tenures for its recruits (Hopkins, 2008, 2011). For the purposes of this paper, we focus on one population of students who are disproportionately served by TFA corps members – English language learners – in order to demonstrate the lack of training corps members receive related to the specific communities in which they serve. ELLs are the fastest growing, yet often the most underperforming, student population in the United States (Gandara & Hopkins, 2010). As we will show, TFA’s placement regions include cities with among the highest ELL populations in the country, yet TFA corps members receive little to no preparation specific to teaching ELLs before they enter classrooms (Heineke & Cameron, 2013b). Thus, even though federal policy deems TFA corps members to be “highly qualified” teachers, program recruits begin teaching with insufficient awareness of ELLs’ educational needs and knowledge of pedagogical strategies that support ELLs’ language and content knowledge development. We begin our policy and program analysis by describing the nation’s ELL population in terms of growth and need and outlining TFA placement in high-density ELL regions. Then, we critique the current Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) amendment that allows TFA corps members to be considered highly qualified. We will show that, while TFA was heavily involved in the passage of this amendment, the organization has done little to ensure that corps members have adequate training to work with the very students they will encounter. To demonstrate this lack of training, we analyze TFA’s curriculum and preparation approach (Farr, 2010; Teaching as Leadership, 2012) specific to ELLs. In order to offer a more sound alternative to TFA’s model, we next draw from our work as TFA-trained teachers and as teacher educators T F A a n d E n g l i s h L a n g u a g e L e a r n e r s 2 0 and researchers (Heineke, 2009; Heineke & Cameron, 2013a, 2013b; Hopkins, 2008, 2012) to describe two alternate approaches for preparing teachers for the specific student populations they will serve, an emerging residency model (Schweig, Appelgate, & Quartz, 2010) and a community-based teacher education program (Ryan et al., under review). Drawing on these approaches, we conclude with recommendations for TFA to alter its model in ways that align with effective ELL teacher preparation practices. English Language Learners and Teach For America in United States Schools Eleven million students in the U.S., or 20 percent of national school enrollment, speak a language other than English at home (U.S. Department of Education [USDOE], 2010). About one-half of these students do not speak English well enough to be considered fluent and are therefore designated as ELLs. The numbers and percentages of ELLs are increasing in districts and schools across the nation. Specifically, several states in the Southeast and Midwest, such as Georgia and Wisconsin, have experienced dramatic increases in their ELL populations (National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition [NCELA], 2010), and even states with traditionally high proportions of ELLs, such as California and Arizona, have experienced growth such that ELLs are present in nearly every classroom (Samson & Collins, 2012). Notwithstanding rapid growth in the nationwide ELL population, five states have the highest percentage of linguistically diverse students and educate about 70 percent of the country’s ELLs: Arizona, California, Texas, New York, and Florida (Fry, 2008). Remarkably, these five states include the longest-standing and largest TFA regions, including Phoenix (started in 1994; 300 current corps members), Los Angeles (1990; 300 corps members) and the Bay Area (1991; 430 corps members), the Rio Grande Valley (1991; 140 corps members) and Houston (1991; 450 corps members), New York City (1990; 688 corps members), and Miami-Dade (2003; 300 corps members). In fact, among the 12 school districts in the U.S. with the highest ELL enrollments (Migration Policy Institute, 2010), 9 also have a large TFA presence (see Table 1). In addition, TFA places corps members in locales with rapidly expanding ELL populations (Cohen & Clewell, 2007), including Georgia (Atlanta Metro region) and Arkansas (Mississippi Delta region; TFA, 2012a).