Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote

corps members were teaching in fifteen different placement sites. Over the decade, more than thirty thousand applicants had competed for five thousand teaching jobs in low-income communities across the country. On firmer footing, the ten-million-dollar organization began an ambitious five-year plan to grow in size and impact. Money flowed in as corporations and foundations lined up behind Gap founders Doris and Donald Fisher to underwrite TFA’s expansion. What had started out as a small grassroots movement was poised to become one of the most successful—and sophisticated—nonprofits in the country.
    But did it work? And how could you tell? In the beginning, there was no measurable way to assess success in the classroom. You just knew it when you saw it. But sometimes appearances did not match reality. Sometimes the teachers who seemed most successful—those who had the greatest rapport with students—were not the ones raising kids’ test scores. Kopp knew that equal resources did not correspond to equal opportunity. In order to close the achievement gap, low-income kids needed to
achieve
at the same academic level as their more privileged peers. So TFA decided that student outcomes should be the barometer of a teacher’s success.
    â€œ[Kopp] shifted the conversation from input to output, from what credentials people have to what results they get with their kids,” observes TFA alum Dave Levin, cofounder of the successful KIPP schools, a chain of fifty-seven charter schools serving more than fourteen thousand students nationwide. “And that is a fundamental shift in the way education is viewed.”
    Such an approach flouted educational convention. To some, the idea of evaluating a teacher based on student test scores seemed to ignore the myriad factors that militate against academic success for children in disadvantaged communities. Teachers couldn’t and shouldn’t be held accountable for the broken homes, the poverty, and the violence that circumscribed student achievement in underserved schools. Education wasn’t about numbers and metrics; it involved many intangibles, making it much more complicated than a simple teacher-student binary. For lack of a better measure, districts and unions tied teacher salaries to years of service and academic degrees.
    TFA and some in the education establishment had been at odds since Kopp first wrote her thesis. Over the years, the issue of how to improve teacher quality has been the subject of exhaustive debate. While some, like Linda Darling-Hammond, have argued that the answer lies in improving the quality of teacher training, Kopp believes the answer is to be found in improving the quality of the teacher.
    To some, the presumption that smart kids with five weeks of training could do the job smacked of hubris. “You probably wouldn’t want to be injected by someone from an organization called Nurse For America,” says UCLA’s director of Urban Schooling Jeannie Oakes. “But we tend not to balk at someone inexperienced and untrained being put in some of the most challenging classroom situations in the U.S. TFA is at its root a stopgap measure.”
    â€œI guess we’re asking two different questions,” explains Kopp.
    â€œSome people out there believe that what we are doing is flying in the face of traditional notions about what needs to be done to improve education. For them, the starting question is how do we strengthen the profession of teaching; recruiting people to a short-term commitment seems like not the way to go.
    â€œThe question we’re asking is: How as a society are we going to finally step back and make real progress to address the disparities in the educational opportunities [between the rich and poor]? We think the magnitude of the problem justifies out-of-the box solutions. We need to channel the energy of our most talented people in that direction.”
    Even as her organization