#1480 1989 · Teach For America · education
Fill the Hardest Classrooms by Making the Job Hard to Get
the problem
High-poverty schools couldn't attract strong graduates: the pay was low and the job carried no prestige on campus.
background
Teach For America was founded in 1989 to address the educational inequities facing the nation's poorest communities. It recruits recent graduates, trains them intensively through a summer institute, and sends them to teach for two years in low-income schools that struggle to staff their classrooms.
Whether such fast-trained recruits could actually teach was an open, contested question. Mathematica Policy Research designed a national randomized evaluation: within each of 17 elementary schools covering grades 1 to 5, students were randomly assigned to TFA teachers or to control teachers in the same school and grade. The final sample included 100 classrooms and nearly 2,000 students.
what everyone would do
Raise starting pay and lower hiring bars until the seats are filled.
what they saw
Scarcity, not salary, creates desire: make the unwanted position selective, branded and two years long, and ambitious graduates compete to fill seats no money could previously fill.
the move
TFA turned staffing's hardest problem into a recruitment brand: a selective two-year 'corps' that made an underserved classroom a milestone ambitious graduates compete for, rather than a job they settle for. The district gets teachers where none would apply; the graduate gets mission, identity and peers. The randomized evaluation tested whether the brand's promise survived contact with real classrooms.
why it works
Selectivity converts the job's stigma into status; a defined two-year term lowers the perceived risk of committing; a corps identity supplies peers and narrative; the district buys staffing without bidding up wages.
the payoff
TFA students gained in math (effect size about 0.15) over controls in the same schools; reading showed no difference (randomized study).
where it breaks
It fails where the brand outruns support: fast-trained novices without coaching can stall (reading gains here were zero); two-year turnover churns schools that need stability; and prestige fades if the corps stops being hard to get.
what came after
The corps model, selective short-term service programs that lend prestige to understaffed missions, spread across education, health and public service; the randomized evidence became a reference point in teacher-preparation debates.
references
- [1]The Effects of Teach For America on Students: Findings from a National Evaluation (IRP Discussion Paper 1285-04)Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004irp.wisc.edu