Teach for America is attracting more followers, but is it actually helping close the gap?

I still am confident that recruiting inexperienced teachers isn't necessarily helping our education system. In the Teach for America annual report, TFA claims that 2006 corps members met their "significant gains" criteria at a faster pace than 2005 corps members. According to the annual report, 40 percent of corps members this year met TFA's "internal operating standard" which shows 1.5 years of academic progress. This is up from 27 percent of 2005 corps members (Teach for America Annual Report, pg. 11). First of all, 40 percent is not an incredibly striking figure. Second, what is the internal operating standard? For next year's corps members, it appears that corps members will be able to define significant gains themselves. Corps members will create a big goal at the beginning of the year, and if they accomplish the big goal then they will have made significant gains.
The goal can be measured by any method the corps member uses, including a self-created test. For an organization that is so data centered, there is little data that demonstrates that Teach for America is closing the achievement gap. The alarming part about all this is that more and more college undergraduates are signing up for the corps. There were 2,176 corps members in 2005. That number increased to 2,426 in 2006 and TFA's goal is to have 4,000 incoming members by 2010 (Teach for America 2006 Annual Report, pg. 4). Teach for America has a wonderful mission, but before it expands its corps, the organization needs to make sure it is actually helping students achieve. Are teachers with no education training who are incredibly overwhelmed the best teachers to put in our schools? Teach for America teachers may be filling slots in schools that principals are having difficulty filling. Principals may stop trying to address recruitment issues and may stop looking at teacher qualifications because they know they have a ready supply of teachers with good reputations. This is already happening at the school I teach at, and test scores aren't going up as we get a higher proportion of TFA teachers. We've got to start thinking about whether or not our schools our improving with Teach for America's help.