Suing to Shut Down 'Teach For America'

Here's a thoughtful back-to-school gift for America's students. Last week, a California-based coalition filed a federal suit against the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Margaret Spellings, charging that the Department has violated the "highly qualified teacher" provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). An advocacy group called Public Advocates and the law firm Goodwin Procter LLP alleged that a five-year-old federal regulation for alternative teacher certification created a loophole that "harms children." If successful, the suit will shut down alternative teacher credentialing options, including Teach For America (TFA).

TFA, which this year is providing more than 5,000 teachers to over two dozen low-income communities, recruits talented young college graduates into teaching and offers an accelerated, alternative program that gets them into classrooms in just a few months after they graduate. A 2005 survey by Kane, Parsons, and Associates found that 74% of principals regard TFA teachers as more effective than other beginning teachers, and 63% regard these recent graduates as more effective than their teaching faculty as a whole. The talent drawn to public schools by TFA has included the founders of the heralded KIPP academies and the dynamic new chancellor of the Washington, DC Schools.

NCLB's "highly qualified teacher" provision sought to ensure that all teachers in core academic subjects hold a bachelor's degree, demonstrate content knowledge, and obtain a state teaching certificate or pass a state licensing exam. The law is ambiguous: To count as "highly qualified," a teacher must have "obtained full State certification as a teacher (including certification obtained through alternative routes to certification)." But certification requirements cannot be waived on an "emergency, temporary, or provisional basis."

The immediate question is whether receiving provisional certification while enrolled in an alternative program conforms with NCLB requirements (the Department of Education says that it does). The bigger problem is that the assumptions underlying teacher certification are themselves problematic. Certification does not ensure that teachers are effective and may in fact dissuade potentially effective educators from entering the profession.

The problem is that alternate routes, such as TFA or Troops to Teachers, are predicated on allowing teachers to work while completing a one or two year program. Most of the prominent backers of the NCLB legislation are avid backers of these programs and would recoil from the notion that they ever intended to put TFA out of business. But if a court finds that the design of these programs amounts to issuing "waivers," they could be decimated in one fell swoop—the teachers they supply would be deemed unqualified on the basis of federal law. States and school districts which used these teachers would face the loss of federal funds.

These programs typically target career-changing professionals or highly accomplished new graduates who did not pursue a teaching degree while in college. Requiring them to enroll as full-time students in a college of education for a year or more and pay full tuition while taking time out of the workforce is a recipe for convincing the talented to pursue more inviting alternatives.

This would be fine if the mandated preparation was essential for effective teaching. But education scholars are split on whether there is any evidence at all that credentialed teachers are more effective. The most reputable evaluations of TFA teachers have found that they are at least as effective as their peers—despite their provisional status and limited preparation.

In fact, research by University of Washington professor Dan Goldhaber has shown that the whole raft of criteria one might use to sort out teachers prior to entering the classroom—things like formal degrees, verbal acuity, and college major—can predict only about 3% of the variation from one teacher to the next. In other words, we know that teachers vary immensely in quality but we have great difficulty using formal criteria to determine why.

Meanwhile, certification does little to weed out unsuitable applicants. University of Texas professor David Leal has reported, in the only systematic inquiry on the subject, that teacher preparation programs weed out only about 2% of their candidates.

Once upon a time, ensuring teacher quality with formal credentials made sense. A large population of college-educated women had little choice but to teach, and no real means of assessing teacher performance existed.

That world has changed. We can no longer rely on an inflated supply of capable teachers produced by denying talented women access to other professions. And modern assessment systems are capable of providing feedback on student achievement. Because teachers—unlike doctors or psychologists—always work for institutions, there is always a manager responsible for monitoring performance and keeping an eye on a new teacher.

Four decades ago, the typical American college graduate could expect to hold four jobs before retirement. Today, the typical grad will hold four jobs before age thirty. The notion that schools can compete for talent while demanding costly preparation of no clear value is as dated as the expectation that future teachers should decide as college freshmen whether they want to teach for the next thirty years.

This misguided lawsuit highlights the need for reformers on both sides of the aisle to ensure that the looming NCLB reauthorization does not allow grandiose schemes for teacher credentialing to undermine real-world efforts to improve teaching.

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