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The Response from Teach for America

Over the past two decades, Teach For America has recruited more than 24,000 of our nation’s most promising young people to teach in low-income communities across the country. We have seen these corps members walk away from their experience inspired, informed and driven to become life-long leaders in efforts to expand educational opportunities.

Today, our 17,000 alumni (people who have completed their two-year commitments) are working in a number of sectors – including education, public policy and social entrepreneurship – to improve the lives of children growing up in low-income communities. These individuals demonstrate a high degree of civic engagement. In Doug McAdam’s study, “Assessing the Effects of Voluntary Youth Service: The Case of Teach for America,” all three of the groups analyzed – Teach For America alumni, dropouts and non-matriculants – “participate at very high levels in the forms of civic/political participation” as compared to their age peer group. This does not surprise us, given that during our recruitment and selection processes we target candidates who are likely to dedicate their lives to civic service. Contrary to early reports about the study published in Social Forces, data show that all three groups (alumni, non-matriculants and dropouts) are highly engaged, and differences between the groups are small. For example:

• The voting rate of alumni surveyed was 89%, slightly lower than that of the study’s control group, which was 92%. As a point of comparison, 35% percent of young people ages 18-24 voted in the 2000 presidential election.
• Alumni donated to an average of 2.2 charitable organizations each, while dropouts donated to 2.6 and non-matriculates donated to 2.

In presenting these findings, McAdam writes that “one of the organization’s main goals has always been to develop a core of dedicated alumni committed to ongoing educational reform. Our results suggest they are succeeding in this effort.” We are encouraged by this conclusion and do not see the comparisons between groups as a depression of civic engagement.

James Youniss points this out in his response to McAdam’s article: “TFA candidates in all three groups were destined to remain on a path toward civic engagement, and they did so well after graduation. As a result, there was little room for variation among the three groups.” Youniss goes further to say that Teach For America alumni are “deeply engaged” politically and civically, and are channeling their involvement toward education, more so than the other two groups. He writes that the vast majority of Teach For America subjects surveyed seemed to have “found civic sustenance by working for an organization which promoted equity in educational opportunity.” We know this to be true from our annual surveys of alumni.

McAdam found only 28% of his sample of Teach For America alumni to be working in what he labeled at “pro-social” jobs (e.g., teaching, working for a non-profit, etc.) as compared with 31% of non-matriculants and 39% of the drop-outs. According to our 2008 alumni survey, nearly two-thirds of our 17,000 alumni are working fulltime in education. About half of those are classroom teachers. We don’t know why McAdam’s results are so different from our own. His sample was taken from 1993 through 1998 with a response rate of 44.7% of alumni, 38% of drop-outs and 46.2% of non-matriculants for a total of 1,124 respondents overall. Our 2008 alumni survey had a response rate of 57%, and the employment results have been consistent over years of surveying our alumni.

Our own data suggest that we are succeeding in influencing the career paths of our recruits. Of our alumni in the education sector, more than 440 serve as principals, founders of charter school networks, and superintendents. KIPP, IDEA and Yes Prep – charter networks that include some of the most successful schools in the country – were all started by Teach For America alumni.

Further results from our annual surveys over the past few years show:

• 93% of alums report that they support ending educational inequality through career, philanthropic, volunteer work and or/graduate study
• 91% of alumni who currently work in schools serve low-income communities

Overall, McAdam’s study focuses on a set of civic participation measures that are not directly related to Teach For America’s central mission of closing the achievement gap. Rob Reich points this out in a commentary he posted recently (http://www.stanford.edu/group/reichresearch/cgi-bin/site/2010/01/03/teach-for-america-and-civic-engagement/) and concludes: “My guess is that TFA alumni would do better on these [educational] dimensions of what we could call educational civic engagement.” But we would also point to those alumni who are not working in education as civically engaged. Survey results in 2009 highlight the degree to which Teach For America alumni working outside of the education sector continue to be dedicated to our mission through their employment choices:

• 64% of alums NOT working in education agree with the statement, “My job relates to the field of education or issues affecting education”
• 64% of alums NOT working in education agree with the statement “My job relates to improving the quality of life in under-resourced areas”

Finally, McAdam theorizes that where Teach For America participation is lower than that of non-matriculants, this can be attributed to the 15% of corps members who had a negative experience. Certainly, we would agree that the corps experience has important long-term effects on those who participate in our program. We are deeply committed to tracking corps member satisfaction and engagement as a way of holding ourselves accountable to continuous program improvement. In a 2008 survey of our alumni, 93% of respondents reported that overall, they were satisfied with their Teach For America experience. In 2009, when asked how likely they would be to recommend Teach For America to a friend or family member, 89.3% of respondents rated a score of 7 or higher on a 0-10 scale. We are pleased to see these results, but still see room for improvement on many fronts.

We welcome well-designed, rigorous independent studies that evaluate the extent to which Teach For America accomplishes its mission. We will continue to work relentlessly to ensure that students in the schools that we serve and our corps members have a positive experience in the service of ending educational inequity.

Teach for America

Assessing the Effects of Voluntary Youth Service:
The Case of Teach for America

Doug McAdam, Stanford University
Cynthia Brandt, Stanford University

We use survey data from all accepted applicants to Teach for America 1993-98 to assess the longer-term effect of youth service on participants’ current civic attitudes and behaviors. While TFA “graduates” score higher than the two comparison groups – “dropouts” and “non-matriculants” – on a broad range of attitudinal items measuring civic commitment, these differences appear to be less a byproduct of the TFA experience than a reflection of current involvement with the TFA organization. Moreover, the attitudinal differences are not reflected in actual civic behavior. Specifically, graduates lag behind non-matriculants in current service activity and generally trail both non-matriculants and drop-outs in self-reported participation in five other forms of civic/political activity measured in the study. Graduates also vote at lower rates than the other two groups. Finally, fewer graduates report employment in “pro-social” jobs than either non-matriculants or drop-outs. We close by speculating on what mechanisms may help explain variation in the long-term effects of youth service or activist experiences.

A Commentary: Why We Need To Learn More About Youth Civic Engagement

James Youniss, Catholic University of America

Teach For America is a program which provides college graduates the opportunity to teach disadvantaged students in schools with low resources under the supportive sponsorship of an organization built on the principle that all children merit quality education. In this respect, TFA surely represents a just cause around which youth can rally. It should not be surprising, therefore, that graduates of the TFA two-year experience think and act like especially engaged citizens. They hold positive attitudes toward civic engagement. They vote at exceedingly high rates. And, after serving, they remain committed to the TFA organization and, presumably, its guiding ideology about educational reform and equal opportunity.
    Thus, it is surprising that Stanford University's Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt, in their article, "Assessing the Effects of Voluntary Youth Service: The Case of Teach for America," find that TFA graduates don't live up to the aims and claims of the organization. It is clear that the authors reached this less-than-favorable assessment of TFA by comparing graduates from the program with participants who started to teach in the program but dropped out, and with non-matriculants who were vetted and invited, but for unknown reasons, failed to join.  A momentary step outside of the study itself seems appropriate here.

These articles appear in the December 2009 issue of Social Forces.

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