The middle school in South Los Angeles where Idin Kashefipour teaches is surrounded by steel and concrete.
A tall fence separates the school from the surrounding area, and school personnel stand by the front gate and patrol the school throughout the day.
Inside Kashefipour’s small classroom, the students study an essay about hip-hop. They come across the word “marginalized.”
Kashefipour asks them if they know what it means. One of them raises his hand and answers, “Forgotten.”
Kashefipour is a 2005 UCLA alumnus and a participant in Teach For America, a non-profit program that places recent college graduates into classrooms in poor, mostly urban K-12 school districts.
TFA hopes to improve the children’s education and help close the “achievement gap” between students in more affluent districts and those in poor districts.
For the 2006-2007 academic year, UCLA is the largest contributor of students to the program out of the universities at which TFA recruits, with 50 participants.
As those corps members finish their last weeks of education at UCLA, they will also be preparing to start training to become educators themselves.
TFA has won praise from businesses, non-profit groups and major media outlets, but the program also has its share of critics.
Professional educators and researchers question TFA’s training program, as well as its policy of sending in teachers for only two years before they move on to a different career.
They also say that TFA’s teachers are not diverse enough, with 27 percent of its participants being people of color.
But officials from TFA argue that their training programs and systems of support extend well beyond the five-week course, that teacher retention rates are already low, and that they are doing everything they can to increase diversity in their ranks, though they say part of the problem is a lack of diversity at the universities where they recruit.
Regardless of their opinions on TFA, critics and proponents alike agree that improving national education is a monumental task.
“I don’t think TFA prepared me for the classroom, but I really don’t know what could,” Kashefipour said.
Training to teach
Kashefipour said he has learned a lot, both about himself and the students he teaches, while participating in TFA.
“My experience has been great. There have been ups and downs; it really depends on how the week goes,” he said.
Now in his eighth month of teaching, he wakes up every morning and drives 20 minutes to get to his first class, which starts at 7:35.
Like all other TFA teachers, Kashefipour’s journey started with a highly competitive application process ““ the program only accepts 17 percent of its applicants nationwide.
TFA chooses participants based on criteria including academic and extra-curricular achievement, ability to overcome challenges, and critical-thinking ability, said Pearl Chang Esau, a TFA recruitment director.
Once chosen, participants undergo several months of training before entering the classroom to prepare for two years of teaching.
TFA also helps its teachers, called corps members, find a job and housing upon completion of the summer training.
During the TFA training program, participants take classes on teaching theory and leadership.
They learn education psychology and disciplinary tactics and receive diversity training, and many also pursue masters degrees in education on the side.
Participants are asked to observe classrooms and read several textbooks written by TFA before starting their formal training, said Jeff Wetzler, vice president of teacher preparation at TFA.
There is a five-week training program during the summer in which TFA highlights a training procedure called “teaching as leadership,” which shows teachers how to use leadership skills to set goals and improve their students’ achievement, Wetzler said.
Before and after the five-week program, teachers attend regional training sessions, where they are educated on specific school district policies and programs.
Though he came into the program anticipating moving on to a different career, Kashefipour now cannot see himself outside of the classroom.
“At first I hadn’t planned on being a teacher, but I think I will stay beyond the two-year commitment,” Kashefipour said. “Once you start doing it, the last thing on your mind is the masters degree, the first thing on your mind is staying afloat in the classroom.”
Criticism to TFA
One critic of TFA’s preparation methods for its recruits heads a teaching program at UCLA which takes a different approach to post-graduate teaching.
Eloise Lopez Metcalfe is the director of UCLA’s urban teacher education program, called Center X, which provides a full year of training to students interested in teaching in urban schools before they have their own classroom.
After that, students teach for a year before they graduate with a masters degree in education.
Metcalfe said that TFA’s training process is too rushed and can lead to sub-par teachers lacking proper knowledge of teaching theory and classroom management tactics.
“It’s one thing to be smart, and another to teach what you know. Children (in urban schools) come from unfavorable circumstances and it is difficult for them to come in and learn,” Metcalfe said.
In addition to problems with training, Metcalfe argued that there are broader issues with TFA’s program. She said that TFA’s two-year commitment is not long enough for teachers to become effective and forge meaningful relationships with their communities, which she said should be a goal of urban teachers.
By contrast, Center X aims to train teachers who plan on teaching as a career, Metcalfe said.
Eleven percent of TFA teachers expect to continue teaching as a career, compared to 69 percent of non-TFA beginner teachers, according to a study conducted by Mathematica Policy Research posted on TFA’s Web site.
“Teaching is not the Peace Corps; it is about changing circumstances, and you can’t do that if you’re in and out,” Metcalfe said.
But Elissa Clapp, vice president of recruitment for TFA, said TFA teachers can make an impact in only two years.
She also said the program addresses broader issues affecting national education by providing future professionals with a background in teaching.
“Solving the problems we are addressing requires a more long-term view. … We are not going to solve this problem among only educators,” Clapp said. “We need business leaders, lawyers, journalists who have been in the classroom and know the issues.”
“If someone participates in TFA and then goes to law school and runs for local office, they can help make policy decisions about education” using their experience in TFA, Clapp said.
Metcalfe said that regardless of TFA’s long-term goals, the money and training could be better spent on career teachers.
TFA receives funding from donations and federal grants, according to the TFA Web site.
“Teach For America has a lot of smart people with good intentions, but ultimately it is a resource drain because money is spent training people who will be leaving after two years,” Metcalfe said.
One of the standards to which TFA holds its recruitment directors is to find people who are diverse in race and socioeconomic background, Clapp said.
But that is another area in which Metcalfe is critical of TFA. Metcalfe argued that TFA teachers are not diverse enough, especially in a program that serves mostly minority students.
It can be hard for teachers who come from a different socioeconomic background, such as that of many of the university graduates TFA recruits, to relate to students who are growing up in a poor, urban environment, Metcalfe said.
“If (TFA) doesn’t pay attention to multicultural issues, it cannot be an effective program,” she said.
TFA has a long-term goal of increasing its diversity, but the universities at which it recruits have very low percentages of minority students, Clapp said.
Conflicting studies
A number of conflicting studies draw varied conclusions on the effectiveness of TFA teachers, many of whom earn their certification while they are teaching, compared to traditionally certified teachers.
TFA has posted two studies on its Web site that report that its teachers help raise standardized test scores among their students.
According to these studies, students of TFA teachers who took standardized math exams had scores that surpassed those of students of non-TFA teachers, both certified and uncertified.
TFA students scored similarly to all other students on reading tests. But two other studies both reported findings that are in conflict with the studies on which TFA relies, saying TFA teachers are no better at raising standards than other under-certified teachers and do not do as well as traditionally certified teachers.
TFA refutes one of those studies, conducted by Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of the Stanford School of Education, based on its sample size and methodology.
Abigail Smith, vice president for research and public policy at TFA, said that according to their records the Darling-Hammond study could not have had more than two to four TFA teachers in some of its comparisons, which she said was not comprehensive enough of a sample.
Darling-Hammond did not return calls or e-mails for comment.
David Berliner, a UCLA alumnus and professor at the Arizona State University School of Education, conducted another study that said TFA teachers were less effective at increasing test scores in the classroom compared to traditionally certified teachers.
But Smith said that the Berliner study failed to correctly trace the progress of students because it measured test scores at the end of the year, not the students’ yearly progress.
Berliner defended the validity of his study, saying it was published in a peer review journal.
The discrepant results in the various studies conducted on TFA could be attributed to differences in the definition of teacher certification, said Paul Decker, a vice president at Mathematica Policy Research and a researcher on Mathematica’s study, which found that TFA teachers raise standards more than certified and uncertified teachers combined.
Mathematica researchers defined certified teachers as those having a regular state certificate or in the final steps of completing state certification.
Uncertified teachers included all other teachers.
“Nothing can prepare you”
TFA corps members are often faced with the challenge of teaching students who are months or years behind their expected progress and sometimes are learning English as a second language.
Kashefipour’s sixth-grade class, which is almost exclusively black and Latino, studied an essay contrasting the positive and negative aspects of hip-hop.
When Kashefipour asked the students to find the main argument in the essay, they were able to do so despite relatively advanced vocabulary for that age group, such as “dissenting,” “lyricists” and “grassroots.”
“It’s about how hip-hop can be perceived as both good and bad,” one student said.
Kashefipour recognizes the effort his students put into each lesson.
“My kids are great. I got very lucky with my kids and school site,” he said.
Kashefipour says those working to improve education face a challenge which one has to experience to understand.
“A child’s education is in your hands, and nothing can prepare you for that feeling,” he said.