HOUSTON'S FIFTH WARD has an abundance of overgrown grass fields and dilapidated chicken restaurants: chicken and barbecue, chicken and waffles and just plain chicken. Along railroad tracks that run past a string of cavernous warehouses is John L. McReynolds Middle School, a brick building with Art Deco flourishes that suggest a glorious past. Until 2006, McReynolds had been ranked "academically unacceptable" for three years running by the Texas Education Agency. Three principals had come and gone over five years. I went to McReynolds in early July to observe Teach for America, a program that promises to place America's best and brightest college graduates into the nation's neediest public schools for two-year stints. For three years, Teach for America has been working with the McReynolds summer-school program.
Hada Flores, a 22-year-old Texan of El Salvadoran origin, had tied her jet-black hair into a tight ponytail and was facing down a room of emphatically bored young people. Some weeks before, she marched in her graduation ceremony at Stanford. Now, while most of her friends were either at the beach or backpacking around Europe, she was teaching 12 kids the basics of writing in a trailer glaringly lighted by orange fluorescent lamps and chilled by an overzealous air-conditioner. Her students - ranging in age from 11 to 13 - were in various states of distraction, popping their pen tops open and closed, chatting in Spanglish (89 percent of the students at McReynolds are Hispanic; 10 percent are African-American), gazing at their open notebooks with blank intensity. One girl was completely slumped over in the back of the room, a hot pink hoodie shrouding her head and face.
"Who can give me a sentence with a but?" their teacher inquired.
A hand shot up. It was Enrique, a biggish kid, his spiky hair gelled upright, fancy Air Jordans on his feet. "You have a big butt."
Flores didn't smile. She read a sentence aloud. The students were to select the appropriate connecting word.
"Is it 'Maria likes cherry soda but the red coloring makes her head hurt' or 'Maria likes cherry soda and the red coloring makes her head hurt?' "
Arturo raised his hand. "But!"
"Good. Why did you choose 'but,' Arturo?"
"Because it's a contrast." Triumphant, he emphasized the final word.
The teacher lit up! Arturo beamed! Somewhere, a cellphone rang.
"Very good."
"Muy bien, Arturo," Enrique mimicked.
"Slide your name down the chart," Flores told Enrique. A behavior chart hung at the back of the trailer, its scale ranging from "excellent" to "trip to the office." Enrique's name now moved to a box marked "detention."
The clock struck 11:30; it was time to go home. The following day would be the Fourth of July, and there would be no classes. The kids' excitement was palpable. "What are you going to do for the holiday?" the teacher asked her students as they hurried toward the door.
Enrique announced, "I'm going to blow up my house!"
FLORES IS A walking advertisement for what is best about Teach for America. She was raised in Houston's Second Ward, where gang violence was the norm. Her parents fled El Salvador's civil war. In 1995, a charter program named Project YES was started a few blocks from her house by a tall, charismatic young man named Chris Barbic, himself just three years out of Vanderbilt and a Teach for America alum. At YES, Flores excelled. She eventually got into Stanford, where she studied international relations, did volunteer work in Ecuador during the summer and helped tutor the janitorial staff during the academic year. As graduation approached, she considered both the Peace Corps and Teach for America. She opted for the latter, and as of this fall, she will be teaching for YES as a member of Teach for America. Today Houston has five YES Prep Public Schools, serving about 2,100 low-income students across the city, where 65 Teach for America alumni and current members are teachers or school directors. YES's flagship school is the only Houston school to have been included in Newsweek's Best 100 High Schools in the country. "I wanted to give something back," Flores told me. "Having a good education made all the difference for me. And it started here, in Houston."
Seventeen years after its inception, Teach for America has become the gold standard of public service, proof that teaching in public schools can be prestigious, even glamorous. Teach for America seeks to rebrand public service more than four decades after the first group of college graduates rose up to meet John F. Kennedy's challenge to serve their country via the Peace Corps. But earnest as it is, T.F.A. is also shameless in its blue-chip ambitions. Its recruiters stand alongside Goldman Sachs at college job fairs, and its recruits - class presidents, varsity athletes, all with soaring G.P.A.'s - are part of a community marked by a unique blend of swagger and idealism. ("We look for the same things McKinsey consulting does," Matt Kramer, T.F.A.'s president, recently told me). In 2006 alone, as many as 10 percent of seniors at schools like Yale and Harvard applied to be part of the program. Across the country, 3,750 of 18,000 applicants made the cut, just a bit over 20 percent. Doing good has rarely been this hip - or this competitive.
THE KAPPA IV Middle School is in Harlem, just across from St. Nicholas Park (where George Washington positioned his troops in the Battle of Harlem Heights) and steps from the 135th Street subway stop. The students wear spiffy navy blue uniforms; their portraits line the hallways; their classes are named after Greek philosophers. At the end of eighth grade, the entire graduating class is invited on a trip to Greece. Strenuously progressive, Kappa is modeled on KIPP, a successful charter-school program started by two Teach for America alumni. Of the 20 teachers there, 7 are with T.F.A. One day in May, I walked into a sixth-grade science class taught by Alex Baranpuria, a bookish 2006 graduate of Duke whose parents reluctantly let him put off medical school when they saw a clip about Teach for America on CNN. Potato chips were strewn across the tables - Ruffles, Pringles, Lay's, Doritos - as part of a classification exercise: match physical characteristics to "species." It wasn't going too well; the students could identify the chips right off the bat. Baranpuria seemed frazzled.
I sat at a table with Dionne, the cute and collected class president (she takes modeling classes at Barbizon; her bangs are impeccable), and Joseph, a smiley kid who wants to play major-league baseball. I asked them what they thought of their teacher, whom they call Professor B. ("because his name is hard to say - he's from India.") Joseph recounted having found a dead baby rat in the playground some days before. "We brought it to Professor B.," he said. "He didn't even want to touch it. He was so scared! And he's our science teacher."
"But he makes science fun," Destiny, who had just joined us, added in her teacher's defense. As potato chips started flying, Professor B. smiled from the other end of the room.
Later that day, I asked KAPPA's principal, Penny Panagiosoulis, about her experience with T.F.A. teachers. "They are bloody young," she said, "and they have the excitement and the pathos." It sounded, like Panagiosoulis herself, pretty Greek. "The only problem is they leave," she added. "I have to retrain a new set of teachers each time and face the anxiety that they won't come back."
In some circles, there is a perception that Teach for America's corps of teachers do not come back, that many of them view their teaching stint as a résumé-burnishing pit stop before moving on to bigger things - that T.F.A. stands for "Teach for Awhile." The numbers are telling. More than a third leave after their two years, and another 10 percent drop out well before. T.F.A. says that more than 60 percent of its alumni stay in education, though its definition of education is a broad one. In the organization's view, it takes allies in every field to close the achievement gap. T.F.A.'s sights are set on the boardroom and Capitol Hill. This is what it calls "the second half of the movement," beyond the classroom.
One new program, for example, coaches alumni in how to run for political office. Their goal is to get 100 leaders into elected office by 2010. "We have to have advocates in every sector to work on educational inequity," Elissa Clapp, T.F.A.'s senior vice president for recruitment, told me in June. "It's naïve to think that we can solve this problem only through teaching. We are completely agnostic about what people do after their two years." T.F.A.'s agnosticism is central to its cachet. Most college seniors are blissfully without a clue as to the future, much less ready to sign on for a life in the classroom. T.F.A. soothes their qualms by emphasizing the two-year commitment. Recruiters have an impressive arsenal of statistics at their fingertips to prove that they can get you just about anywhere. "Our alumni," Clapp said, "are living proof that these two years could actually be a career accelerator."
Kilian Betlach is not your average T.F.A. teacher. After graduating from Boston College in 2002, he applied to the program. He was dealt a shock during the summer training: "I wasn't happy. I wasn't having success. I left feeling like this had been a mistake." That fall, he was assigned to a public school in San Jose, Calif., where, for the length of the first year, he felt in over his head. "I was just squeaking by," he told me. Despite the difficulties, he has stayed on far longer than most; he has just finished his sixth year as a teacher and doesn't see himself leaving anytime soon.
"Every day that first year," Betlach said, "I was like: 'Oh, my god, I'm a teacher. I'm not ready for this.' But I got better with time. We all do." Still, he is troubled by what he refers to as "T.F.A.'s message about teaching." In six years with T.F.A., he said, "I never was encouraged to stay on as a teacher. It's almost as if the program perpetuates the idea that if you went to Harvard, a teaching career is below you. As soon as you join T.F.A., the focus is on being an amazing teacher. Then, all of a sudden, it stops. And you start getting e-mails from Goldman Sachs."
AT TIMES, T.F.A.'S recruitment model, with all its emphasis on high achievement rather than a strong commitment to teaching, does suggest that great teachers are born, not made. But what it takes to excel in college may not be what it takes to command the attention of a class full of children, and making up the difference may require more than five to seven weeks of training over the summer. Traditional master's-degree programs in teaching tend to take at least one year, along with substantial time as a student teacher. T.F.A., however, usually responds to state certification requirements by having its teachers work toward certification during their first year of teaching. Still, the summer training program is an intensive indoctrination. Trainees are shuttled about in yellow school buses, fed box lunches and given frequent pep talks. Schedules run from early morning to late in the night. When I sat in on parts of the summer institute in Houston, I noticed that some trainees were nearly asleep. Others scribbled into their notebooks furiously. All of them wore nametags; it was like freshman year all over again. T.F.A. insists that its content is just as good as that of traditional programs. "It's a trial by fire," one current trainee told me. "If you can't handle the sprint, get out." Some do drop out.
The question of what it takes to be a good teacher has inspired a series of spirited data wars between T.F.A. and its critics. Most often cited (by the critics) is a 2005 study examining the links between student achievement and their teachers' certification status. In a study of more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers in the Houston public-school district, Linda Darling-Hammond, a professor at Stanford University's School of Education, and three colleagues found that students taught by certified teachers outperformed those taught by noncertified teachers in reading and mathematics. Uncertified T.F.A. teachers had negative impacts on student achievement on five of six tests. Tellingly, their effectiveness improved when they gained certification.
T.F.A. has called the Stanford study flawed, arguing that its sample sizes were small and questioning whether it was subject to adequate independent review. (The organization's P.R. team is formidable.) Teach for America points to a 2004 study carried out by Mathematica Policy Research that shows T.F.A. teachers' student scores matching those of a comparison group of novice and veteran colleagues in reading and slightly better in math. Over two months of talking to T.F.A. staff members, I was referred to this study no less than 13 times. Another study points to the fact that principals clamor for T.F.A. teachers; 74 percent considered T.F.A. teachers more effective than other beginning teachers.
Darling-Hammond's explanation for the numbers is not exactly flattering to T.F.A. "The principals who are saying 'I love T.F.A.' are responding to the fact that teaching standards in schools that hire uncertified teachers are typically low," she told me this summer. "This is a country that spends so little on the neediest, and here we are perpetuating a cycle of underprepared teachers. If one takes the lowest possible standard and accepts that as a goal, then Teach for America is great."
Megan B. Hopkins has considered these problems from up close. A T.F.A. alum (having served in south Phoenix), she is now in U.C.L.A.'s doctoral program in education. "Teach for America assumes that highly qualified people can come in and get immediate results in a failing classroom," she told me. "It just doesn't happen with a few weeks of training. The message is that you'll save these children, that they're empty vessels that we're going to fill. It's just not that simple." Last year, as an exercise, she drafted a memo on ways T.F.A. might improve. Her recommendations included extending the two-year program into a third, providing incentives for young teachers to stay longer and requiring a residency year in an experienced teacher's classroom. She also emphasized the need to ease teachers' transitions into communities in which, given the program's demographics (70 percent white) and the demographics of the nation's worst public schools (overwhelmingly people of color), they often stick out. "I didn't feel that T.F.A.'s diversity training adequately prepared corps members," she said. "I'm a white teacher going into a community where I'm not like everyone else. I wasn't prepared for that."
Wendy Kopp, the founder and C.E.O. of T.F.A., thought up the program as part of her undergraduate thesis at Princeton in 1989. When I sat in on the start of the West Coast summer training institute in Los Angeles, a reverential hush fell as she came to the stage, saluting the soon-to-be teachers. It is in part Kopp's savvy that has tied the organization to corporate America. (T.F.A. has partnerships with investment banks and consulting firms, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan among them. Some even offer deferrals and signing advances for those who do T.F.A. first.) She is social entrepreneurship's successful face and has created a model that has made T.F.A. a frequent case study at public policy, law and business schools throughout the country.
I had spoken to her some hours before her Los Angeles appearance. We talked about prospects for large-scale educational reform and about her own appreciation for the Peace Corps. In her first year out of college, Kopp raised $2.5 million for the fledgling organization by sending out hundreds of letters to C.E.O.'s and foundation heads out of a spare room at Union Carbide in Manhattan. Today T.F.A. has an operating budget of $120 million. "In order to have a real impact, you have to influence the consciousness of the country," she told me. "You will have to influence the priorities of a generation. We are completely redirecting students' paths."
T.F.A. is aware of its critics and is quick to call itself a work in progress. T.F.A. partisans are relentlessly goal-oriented, holding endless summit meetings, retreats, fund-raisers. They have plans to revamp an internal intranet resource system for alumni and the teaching corps. A glossy alumni magazine lists weddings, along with inspiring stories about members doing good things. Their network is an impressive and intensely self-reflective one. "We are always improving," Kopp told me.
They are also growing. When Elissa Clapp became head of recruitment in 1999, the organization had 10 people roaming the country's universities in search of converts. Today she directs a staff of 165. "Our objective is to reach out to every capable college graduate," she told me. By 2011, T.F.A. aims to expand its yearly corps from 3,000 to 8,000. It recently hired a former Coca-Cola and Burger King marketing executive to further bolster its image and is thinking about showing spots on TV. An informational section of its Web site caters to parents of would-be recruits.
Still, might it be more productive to try to alter the structure that produces failing schools and high teacher turnover rates rather than to spend those resources on pulling in talented young people who tend to leave teaching after a few years? And when T.F.A. points to the successful national charter-school initiatives that have been started by T.F.A. alums, does it risk contributing to the continued privatization of education and the belief that existing public schools are a lost cause?
For now, Teach for America is savoring its historical moment. One evening last spring, I attended a Teach for America fund-raiser at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, where some of the tables went for as much as $100,000. As the gala program began, one handsome young man marched out onstage, his face projected onto a gigantic video screen behind him, beaming down at the 1,100 or so guests. His name was Leslie-Bernard Joseph, and it was a circuitous route that brought him there. Raised in Queens by his Haitian mother, he had won a scholarship to a prestigious New England boarding school and landed at Princeton, where he studied politics and served as president of the undergraduate student body and head of the Black Student Union. Tonight, he was the face of Teach for America. Clutching a black-and-white Mead notebook, he began to read a story about one of his fifth-grade students at Public School 70 in the Bronx, one of the larger elementary schools in New York. The student, Tyrone, had long struggled with his course work, going as far as to plagiarize a poem for a class assignment, to his teacher's chagrin. Tyrone made gigantic strides. Most of Joseph's students did. By the end of the year, they had advanced one and a half grade levels in reading. Their teacher, proud as he was, took his class on a field trip to his alma mater in bucolic New Jersey. Prior to that visit, on the first day of school, Joseph had given each of them a mock university acceptance letter. From then on, he referred to his students as the Princeton class of 2018. "And that," he concluded, "is why I . . . teach . . . for . . . America!"
Later I caught up with Joseph and two of his students. Randy, whose parents came to the States several years ago from Guyana, was giggly and fidgety. His friend, Mohamed, had long eyelashes and was endearingly shy. His parents came from Africa. With Joseph's help, Mohamed's math score had shot up from 31 to 94 over the course of the year; Randy's, from 36 to 76. Both boys were clearly enamored of their young teacher - tugging on his arm, shooting him sideways glances, one climbing up onto his lap as we sat in one of those cavernous school hallways built at the turn of the last century.
"I'm trying to decide between Harvard and Princeton," Randy told me. "I like math. And I want to be a race-car driver. Or a firefighter." Mohamed, for his part, had settled on Princeton since their momentous class visit.
This fall, the three of them will part ways, each going to different middle schools. Joseph worried that their new teachers might not put in the care or the time that he did. His worries may be at the heart of the T.F.A. conundrum: no matter how heroic the small acts of its teachers, the problems plaguing public education in America are not much closer to being solved. Randy smiled playfully as we parted: "I'll call him when I need help with my homework. But I'm still not sure what I'll do without Mr. Joseph."
Negar Azimi is a senior editor at Bidoun, a cultural journal. She last wrote for the magazine about American influence in Iran.
