|
Influencing life paths is the theme of an early-evening meeting on Duke's campus, held around the time Baranpuria is starting his semester in New York: a Teach For America recruitment event. The room in Rubenstein Hall, part of the public-policy complex, is so packed that more folding chairs have to be dragged in. The start of the program is delayed while seventy or so students stand in line to add their names to a roster of attendees. While they wait, they nibble on mini egg rolls and vegetables with dip, courtesy of the organization. Posters provided for the occasion urge them to "Join the movement to eliminate education inequality." Directly across the hall is a recruitment meeting for Goldman Sachs; by comparison, it's only modestly attended.
Goldman Sachs, though, may be a less aggressive campus recruiter than Teach For America: TFA hires students as campus campaign coordinators to spread the word, an endeavor that includes fliers, Facebook announcements, online calendar listings, Chronicle ads, table tents in dining spots, cardboard coffee-cup holders, and class presentations. Those coordinators (three in Duke's case) aren't just publicists for the organization. They're also its eyes and ears on campus, and they work to identify student leaders—perhaps too relentlessly, in the view of some targeted with the organization's onslaught of e-mail messages—who might be good corps candidates.
Caroline Davis, a TFA recruiter, begins the program with a video of corps members who celebrate "making a difference" and observe that "all college graduates are looking for a role" that makes them feel "real and alive." Davis, a 2005 graduate of Northwestern University, then outlines the challenge behind the earnest cheerleading on the video: Just one in ten students from low-income communities will graduate from college, even as some 13 million children are growing up in poverty. The idea behind Teach For America, she says, is that a "measurable impact" on those students will come from inspiring "incredible young leaders to go into the classroom." The program has grown from a few hundred members in 1990 to some 5,000 teachers in their first or second year of a two-year commitment. Its long-term strategy, she tells her audience, is to "build a leadership force with the insight and conviction to effect change" in education.
She also points to pragmatic arrangements that support principled commitment to service: corporate partnerships with consulting and financial giants like McKinsey & Company, JPMorgan, and Lehman Brothers. Students who commit to Teach For America can get a deferred job offer to one of those partner organizations—with a signing bonus. Nationally, some 150 degree programs at various campuses, in areas ranging from business to social work, give special treatment to TFA veterans. Among them is Duke's Sanford Institute of Public Policy, where officials who oversee the master's program say corps members enjoy "a significant advantage in the competition for admission" and which guarantees corps alumni a minimum annual scholarship of $12,000. The institute has similar relationships with AmeriCorps/VISTA and the Peace Corps.
Teach For America says two-thirds of its former corps members are working or studying in the education field; among those in education, half are teachers. One is Andrew Lakis '04, a fourth-year teacher at Friendship Public Charter School's Woodridge Campus in Washington. (The Washington school system's superintendent is also a product of TFA.) It's a stormy fall day in Washington, and it's been a long day for Lakis: When it rains, his students get rambunctious.
Woodridge was his original placement school when he joined the corps as a fifth-grade teacher; he is now a mentor-teacher for first- and second-year teachers. He's also teaching sixth-grade social studies. When he started at Duke, Lakis was determined to go to law school, but courses in areas like social history drew him to issues of social justice. Through an education course, he tutored at a Durham elementary school; he continued as a volunteer after the course ended. He has stayed in touch with the student he tutored, now a ninth-grader.
The day after he graduated, he recalls, his grandmother said to him, "You're going to teach? I always thought you were going to amount to more than that." But at the end of his first year of teaching, in June 2005, he received a much different message when he traveled to New York to renew ties with some investment-banker friends. Lakis was fresh from the graduation ceremony of his fifth-graders; the I-bankers were fresh from receiving word of their $30,000 performance bonuses. One of them admitted that he would gladly trade jobs with Lakis. Like Lakis, he worked hard. Unlike Lakis, he earned little satisfaction from that work. "That was a turning point" in his thinking, Lakis says.
Lakis characterizes that first year of teaching—some seventy hours a week, plus graduate classes in the evening at American University—as filled with "growing pains." He adds, "Maybe you graduated from one of the top schools of education, but for that first year, you're still starting from scratch. If you can't relate to the class, you're going to have a hard time teaching." Lakis says he felt well prepared as a corps member—to a point. "They tell you it's going to be tough. But I'm not sure that people always understand what they're getting themselves into. There were days when I questioned whether I was good enough to do it. I'd have the lesson plan in hand, and maybe I just didn't do a good job teaching it, or maybe the students would talk over me, or maybe I didn't understand where the students were coming from." He now tells starting teachers that "it's completely natural to struggle."
Part of the struggle for Lakis when he landed at Woodridge was to overcome his youthful appearance and his racial identity. As one of only three whites in the school, he recalls being introduced at a parents meeting with the school principal; after the meeting, several of the parents expressed their concern to the principal that Lakis wouldn't be able to handle the cultural differences in the classroom. But he was accustomed to a multiracial school environment, having gone to high school in High Point, North Carolina, with a predominantly African-American student body, and then having taught in the Durham school system. In his Duke studies, he focused on African-American history and social movements.
In a letter to the school principal, one parent wrote about Lakis, "The first day of school I took a look at him and said that he looked like the kids were going to run all over him. I was very concerned about my child being in his class and was ready to pull him out." But she quickly revised her early impression, and, she added, "By mentoring and tutoring my child almost daily, he took [a student] with very low self-esteem and coached him to the point where he was on the principal's honor roll all year."
Without Teach For America, many young people would never be drawn to teaching, Lakis says. But the organization has changed, he adds—perhaps inevitably, as it's grown more complex, more influential, and more marketing-savvy. "It's a machine. The idealist in me wishes it were more of a grassroots organization. But it's a machine."
Duke's aspiring corps members, as they confront the Teach For America machine, find themselves again in a version of the college-admissions competition. In 2006-07, there were 149 applicants from Duke; 38 percent were accepted into the program, compared with 21 percent nationwide. The hike in interest is impressive over just a short period: In 2004-05, Duke produced ninety-five applicants.
Sheila Curran, Duke's director of career services, says TFA's program outshines that of not only other nonprofits but of heavyweight corporate recruiters as well. "They've built the brand," as she puts it. "They're competitive, and they're now going after the same people the investment banks and consulting firms are going for. Teach For America has become a prestigious alternative."
Over two consecutive days this fall, New York Times columnists attached themselves to the program: David Brooks ruminated on a new post-adolescent, self-discovery or "odyssey" phase that feeds into some social institutions, including Teach For America. And Thomas L. Friedman wrote about "Generation Q," the "Quiet Americans," quietly pursuing their ideals at home and abroad and channeling their national-service impulses into Teach For America, "which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine." According to Curran, even those who don't accord it prestige or root it in idealism recognize Teach For America as "mainstream," meaning that parents, who might otherwise discourage their Duke-educated children from entering a presumably low-status field, find it acceptable.
• continues on page
three. |
