At the risk of shoving Teach For America down all of your throats... I gave my final CAS speech today, and because we were supposed to choose a nonprofit organization we cared about as our topic, I naturally chose TFA. And I crafted a damn good speech, if I do say so myself. I didn't practice it nearly enough, though, and so it did not come out as well as it was scripted - that, and it was supposed to be extemporaneous anyway. But at least it is over, and I am one self-critique and five peer critiques away from being totally done with the class! Next week is looking pretty good at this point.
Regarding my speech: I thought I would post it because it's the only substantial writing I've done in a while, and I quite like it.
Imagine yourself going to high school, with dreams of going to college, except there aren’t enough textbooks to go around. The lockers are broken. Two out of every four people in your class are dropping out. I'd say for most of us, this is something we'd only ever see on TV. For Allante Rhodes, a student at Washington DC's Anacostia High School, this is his reality.
It’s reality for millions of American students. Thirteen million American children, in fact, are growing up in poverty today. Only half of them will graduate from high school – high schools not unlike Anacostia, where there is a dire need for better teachers and better funding. Jonathan Kozol, a noted education writer, profiled the neighborhood of Anacostia, among others, in his 1991 book Savage Inequalities. In it, he described the stark contrast between schools in the DC system and those just miles away in the suburbs in Maryland and Virginia. Sadly, not much has improved in the years since Kozol's book was written.
A study published by Education Week in summer 2008 placed the graduation rate for DC public schools at 57.8%. The graduation rate for the Montgomery County public school system in nearby Rockville, Maryland is 90%. But if we don’t see this every day, in our college bubble especially, why should we care?
We should care because access to a quality education is a civil rights issue, and one of the most important of our generation. A child’s zip code shouldn’t dictate the kind of education he or she receives. If you care about social justice and equal opportunity, you should care about educational equity. It isn’t about affirmative action or preferential treatment – it’s about leveling the playing field so that students in DC or Philadelphia have an equal chance to succeed as their counterparts in Rockville or Radnor.
Think about the impact your education has had on you. The education one receives shapes his or her role in society, from civic engagement to earning potential. The “butterfly effect” absolutely applies: the education of Allante Rhodes and his classmates at Anacostia affects us all. As a whole, for example, American education is falling behind that of other industrialized nations, specifically in the areas of math and science. This could affect our future careers: who we will work for and where we will work.
It’s well established that educational disparities exist in America. So what is being done to correct them? One organization leading the way is Teach For America, a national teachers corps. Founded in the late 1980s by Wendy Kopp as her senior thesis project, Teach For America recruits outstanding college graduates to teach for two years in a low-income community in one of 30 districts across the country. Urban and rural, they range from Hawaii to DC, Chicago to New Orleans. Teach For America believes in the potential of all students to succeed with the help of motivated teachers in the classroom.
Critics say that it takes more than a few thousand bright new teachers to change what is wrong with American education, and they are absolutely correct. The short-term impact is that of the over 6,000 teachers in the classroom; the long-term impact is that of the over 14,000 alumni working in education and other fields to effect change. It is estimated that 440,000 students are currently taught by corps members, and around three million have been taught by corps members since 1990. In fact, over 40 members of the 2008 teachers corps were once taught by a Teach For America corps member. Teaching for equal opportunity is not a hopeless cause, and there are thousands of student – and alumni – success stories as evidence for that.
Perhaps the most notable Teach For America alum is Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of DC Public Schools. Appointed by DC Mayor Adrian Fenty in part because of her Teach For America experience in Baltimore, she oversees nearly 170 schools, of which Anacostia High is one, which educate nearly 60,000 students. Across the country, there are hundreds of alumni rising to leadership roles both in and outside the field of education, from the senior policy advisor to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the Director of Education for the City of Newark, New Jersey.
If you were a corps member, you could make a difference in the lives of hundreds of children over the two years you were teaching. If you were a corps member, you could work alongside the next Michelle Rhee. You could be the next Michelle Rhee. But what if you’re not intrinsically motivated? What if you’re thinking, Helping children is all well and good, but what can Teach For America do for me?
The network of alumni and the reputation of Teach For America give corps members access to many opportunities in academia and industry after their two years. Let’s say you want to go to law school. Each of US News and World Report’s top 15 law schools offers partnerships with Teach For America, which may include deferrals, application fee waivers, or scholarships for alumni. Many of the top medical schools, business schools, and graduate schools offer these as well because they see that corps members possess the leadership and management skills they are looking for, among other criteria. Several well-known employers such as Accenture, Goldman Sachs, and Google also offer deferrals and mentoring opportunities to Teach For America alumni, which might be part of the reason Teach For America is #11 on BusinessWeek’s 2008 list of the best places to launch a career.
Sure, it could mean putting your career plans on hold for two years, but most alumni agree that the experience benefited them both personally and professionally. Luis Alonzo, now a software engineer at Google, described his teaching experience in post-Katrina New Orleans as “life-changing.” “I’m constantly thinking about what I can do to push for change,” he said.
It is a challenge, certainly, to teach in schools that are failing, but we’re no strangers to challenges, right? We take honors classes, we get double majors or minors, we juggle classes with clubs and jobs. We can take on educational inequity, too. It is not enough to be aware of the problem and the solution. To effect change, one must act.
Applying to Teach For America is something everyone in this room can eventually do. You can do it during your senior year of college or later on in life, as long as you have a college degree, in any major, from any school. As with most applications nowadays, the process begins online at teachforamerica.org with the submission of a resume, a cover letter, and an essay and an interview process will follow. The application is non-binding, so if you are even remotely interested in teaching, there’s no harm in applying to keep your job options open. Financially, Teach For America is a reasonable option for college graduates, as corps members earn a full salary and receive full health benefits from their school district.
I wholeheartedly believe in the work that Teach For America does. I believe that educational equity is achievable in our lifetime. In the interest of full disclosure, I am working for Teach For America this year as a member of the Penn State recruitment team, and I do plan on applying for the corps next fall.
One in ten students growing up in poverty graduates from college. It isn’t that the other nine don’t have the potential. It’s because they aren’t getting the opportunities they deserve. Teach for equal opportunity. Teach for America.
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