has challenged the status quo in education, Kopp has tried to avoid direct confrontation with the powers that be. Politically nimble, TFA has not directly criticized school districts or the powerful unions that often control them. âTFA doesnât want to piss off the districtsâthe employers of their teachers,â notes former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan, who was Californiaâs secretary of education from 2003 to 2005. âAnd it doesnât want to get into fights with the unions, which represent a mediocre bunch of people in a system with little or no accountability. TFA just wants to teach kids. So itâs not solving the whole problem. Itâs going to take a revolution to do that, because under union control, there is no accountability, you canât fire teachers or principalsâyou canât even flunk students.â
Though Kopp rejects the notion that the only path to the classroom is through campus-based teacher education programs and notes that many successful private schools employ noncertified teachers, TFA has formed strategic alliances with university credentialing and graduate programsâlike Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphiaâso that recruits satisfy state and federal teaching requirements. At the same time, she joins a growing number of like-minded education reformers, and the federal government, in openly encouraging the growth of alternative credentialing programs as a way of attracting more top-flight talent into the profession. A 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found that the vast majority of the countryâs university-level schools of education donât have the capacity to produce excellent teachers, and more than half of the teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standardsâsome of which accept 100 percent of applicants. Indeed, the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2004 reported that teaching attracts a âdisproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.â That year, the average combined SAT score for college-bound seniors was 1026; the average of those intending to major in education was 965. (Future elementary school teachers tended to come from the bottom of the class; aspiring secondary school teachers were on a par with their peers.)
The 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found wide variations in curricula and approaches, amounting to a training universe that author Arthur Levine, former president of Columbiaâs Teachers College, likened to âDodge City.â The obvious conclusion: nobody knows what it takes to make a good teacher.
But Kopp believes the essence of good teaching
is
knowable. It isnât magic. After nearly a decade of sending thousands of teachers into scores of districts, she developed a theory about why certain teachers produced better student results than other equally committed teachers. She came to believe that good teaching was, in essence, the exercise of good leadership. Her theory was dubbed âTeaching as Leadership,â or TAL. The idea was that excellent teachersâjust like great leadersâset big goals, invest students in attaining the goals, work relentlessly to meet the goals, constantly assess progress, and improve over time.
By the new millennium, TFA had distilled the twelve original selection traits down to seven âcompetenciesâ that it believed were key to effective classroom leadership: achievement, perseverance, critical thinking, organizational ability, influencing/motivating skills, respect for others, and fit with TFA.
This time around, there was no guesswork involved. The organization spent countless hours identifying its most effective teachers, observing them at work, and breaking down their performances into discrete capabilities. TFA set student achievement goals and began using those benchmarks
Though Kopp rejects the notion that the only path to the classroom is through campus-based teacher education programs and notes that many successful private schools employ noncertified teachers, TFA has formed strategic alliances with university credentialing and graduate programsâlike Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphiaâso that recruits satisfy state and federal teaching requirements. At the same time, she joins a growing number of like-minded education reformers, and the federal government, in openly encouraging the growth of alternative credentialing programs as a way of attracting more top-flight talent into the profession. A 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found that the vast majority of the countryâs university-level schools of education donât have the capacity to produce excellent teachers, and more than half of the teachers are educated in programs with the lowest admission standardsâsome of which accept 100 percent of applicants. Indeed, the National Council on Teacher Quality in 2004 reported that teaching attracts a âdisproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.â That year, the average combined SAT score for college-bound seniors was 1026; the average of those intending to major in education was 965. (Future elementary school teachers tended to come from the bottom of the class; aspiring secondary school teachers were on a par with their peers.)
The 2006 report from The Education Schools Project found wide variations in curricula and approaches, amounting to a training universe that author Arthur Levine, former president of Columbiaâs Teachers College, likened to âDodge City.â The obvious conclusion: nobody knows what it takes to make a good teacher.
But Kopp believes the essence of good teaching
is
knowable. It isnât magic. After nearly a decade of sending thousands of teachers into scores of districts, she developed a theory about why certain teachers produced better student results than other equally committed teachers. She came to believe that good teaching was, in essence, the exercise of good leadership. Her theory was dubbed âTeaching as Leadership,â or TAL. The idea was that excellent teachersâjust like great leadersâset big goals, invest students in attaining the goals, work relentlessly to meet the goals, constantly assess progress, and improve over time.
By the new millennium, TFA had distilled the twelve original selection traits down to seven âcompetenciesâ that it believed were key to effective classroom leadership: achievement, perseverance, critical thinking, organizational ability, influencing/motivating skills, respect for others, and fit with TFA.
This time around, there was no guesswork involved. The organization spent countless hours identifying its most effective teachers, observing them at work, and breaking down their performances into discrete capabilities. TFA set student achievement goals and began using those benchmarks
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