Last week, I attended a panel on campus. As a Teach For America alum and special education teacher in Madison, I’m always glad to see our community come together to talk about issues in education. This event in particular had an element of personal interest. Deemed the “TFA Truth Tour,” it aimed to stir up opposition to Teach For America – the non-profit education program through which I first found my way to the classroom five years ago last fall.
My path to teaching began during my years as an undergrad. As a product of Title I public schools in Wichita, Kansas (Title I schools receive federal funding based on the percentage of low-income students they serve), I ventured off to college with very little preparation and a skewed reality of what it took to be successful (show up to class, turn work in on time, and stay out of trouble). Simply learning how to learn was a challenge in itself, let alone mastering new course content. As I got further along into my college career, I became increasingly intrigued by the discrepancies between my own preparation and that of my peers.
This interest took on deeper meaning as I gained exposure to the plight of incarcerated juveniles through my work-study research position. Astounded by the data, I began to realize that the career in law I’d been planning couldn’t get to the root of the problem. During my senior year, I decided that I could make a bigger impact as a teacher.
As a Political Science major, Teach For America served as my pathway to this work. As I began teaching, my own experience as a student served as a guide. I promised myself that I would do everything in my power to foster academic rigor and high expectations for my kids so that they would see college as an option and be prepared for it when they got there. From 2009-2011, I taught special education as part of Teach For America’s first-ever Milwaukee corps. I have been teaching in high-need schools ever since.
It’s absolutely true that Teach For America teachers have a wide-range of experiences – just as the experience of teachers from other prep programs varies. But the panelists would have you believe that the experience of a few who found that the program was not for them is somehow “truer” than that of tens of thousands of others – including the 10,000 alumni who continue to teach well past their corps commitment (a group I’m proud to be a part of), or the 80% of all alums still working in education or with low-income communities.
In offering their particular brand of “truth” they say nothing about the true progress my students have made over the last five years, or about the one in four Teach For America corps members who is the first in his or her family to graduate from college, or about the growing number of corps members who were themselves taught by TFA teachers before going on to join the program. They hold these truths, it seems, to be irrelevant.
It’s critical that we have vigorous, meaningful debate about how best to serve our highest-need students and to support the teachers in their classrooms. But the second we start proclaiming truths and denigrating an entire category of people choosing to join this work, we fall short. The training I received through Teach For America set me up to be successful in the classroom and to make a long-term commitment to teaching in high-need schools. In this, I’m no outlier. Across the country, 83% of first year teachers in low-income schools go on to teach a second year. Ninety percent of first-year corps members do. It’s not an earth shattering difference. But for the students in those classrooms, it matters.
Sitting in the audience last week, I was proud of the current students, and fellow TFA alums who expressed impatience with the finger-pointing, calling instead for a more productive, kid-centric debate. I hope we’ll follow their lead.
Brittani Hernandez Wolcott teaches special education in a Title I elementary school in Madison. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in Political Science and began teaching in 2009 through Teach For America. During her time as a corps member, she earned a Masters of Education in Urban Special Education. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
