What Are the Effects of Teach for America on Math, English Language Arts, and Science Outcomes of K-12 Students in the USA? Campbell Systematic Reviews 2018:7
Author: Turner, Herbert
Date: 2018-06-00
Type: Information Analyses
Subjects: Alternative Teacher Certification,Beginning Teachers,Teacher Shortage,Program Effectiveness,Language Arts,Elementary Secondary Education,Outcomes of Education,Teacher Recruitment,Teacher Selection,Public School Teachers,Preservice Teacher Education,Alumni,Private Financial Support,Educational Finance,Disadvantaged,Low Income,Faculty Development,Outcome Measures,Mathematics Achievement,Science Achievement,Reading Achievement

Research shows that there is a shortage of effective teachers in many rural and urban K-12 public schools serving the highest proportions of high-poverty students across the United States. In the past 10 years, alternative route teacher preparation programs aiming to address this shortage proliferated across the United States. These programs seek to increase the supply of teachers more rapidly than traditional teacher preparation programs, and although their requirements vary widely, most are shorter, less expensive, and more practically oriented than traditional teacher preparation programs. Such programs however, vary widely. Teach For America (TFA) is a nation-wide alternate route teacher preparation program designed to address the shortage of effective teachers, specifically in high-poverty rural and urban schools across the United States. The authors assert that TFA should be reviewed for several reasons: (1) It is the largest recipient of philanthropic funding for K-12 teacher recruitment, with a present budget of $300 million through philanthropic and government support; (2) TFA is a significant source of new teachers for K-12 education: Since 1990, TFA has recruited, selected, trained, placed, and supported approximately 40,000 new public school teachers (or corps members) in the highest-poverty school districts in rural and urban areas; (3) Since it's inception in 1990, TFA has been one of the most publicly visible and widely debated alternative route teacher preparation programs; and (4) As there have been multiple quasi-experimental and experimental studies on the effectiveness of TFA in improving student outcomes, there is now a sufficient amount of evidence to be systematically reviewed and, if appropriate, meta-analyzed. and possibly enhance the generalization of this overall estimated effect. The purpose of this research is to systematically review the TFA literature on the effects of TFA corps members and alumni on student academic outcomes. The review used systematic procedures that limit bias in the retrieval, critical appraisal, synthesis, and reporting of quasi experimental and experimental studies that examine the effects of TFA on K-12 student academic outcomes in math, English language arts (ELA), and science as reported in the peer-reviewed literature and grey literature during the past 20 years. This review concluded that there is no significant effect on reading from teaching by TFA corps members in their first or second year of teaching elementary-grade students (PreK-grade 5) compared to non-TFA teachers who are also in their first or second year of teaching elementary-grade students. There is a small positive effect for early elementary-grade students (PreK to grade 2) in reading but not in math. Future research can contribute to this evidence base by designing, implementing, and reporting experiments and quasi-experiments to meet objective extant evidence standards and by comparing the same types of TFA and non-TFA teachers so that effect sizes can be included in a future systematic review and meta-analysis. A combined list of references to included studies, excluded studies, and additional references is included.