Abstract
Recruitment, preparation, and retention of graduates of elite colleges is considered an innovative approach to improve teacher quality and promote change in the neediest schools. While the debate over the effectiveness of such programs is heavily focused on programs like Teach For America, this paper considers three teacher preparation programs located at elite colleges that combine alternative and traditional teacher preparation. This article argues that teachers who were trained at elite colleges and who chose teaching in urban public, urban Catholic, and Jewish schools tend to (a) conceptualize teaching around broad issues related to social justice, educational change, and community revitalization, arguing they joined teaching to improve society, and (b) seek leadership positions in their respective school sectors. These findings carry substantial policy implications in the areas of teacher recruitment, preparation, retention, and teacher quality.
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Notes
The interview protocol is available upon request from the author, Dr. Eran Tamir, at: etamir88@brandeis.edu.
“Psychic or intrinsic rewards…consist entirely of subjective valuations made in the course of work engagement; their subjectivity means that they can vary from person to person. But they are also constrained by the nature of the occupation and its tasks…” (1975, 101).
“Extrinsic rewards…[include] what we usually think of as the “earning” attached to a role and involves money income, a level of prestige, and power over others…” (Lortie 1975, 101).
“Ancillary rewards are simultaneously objective and subjective; they refer to objective characteristics of the work which may be perceived as rewards by some…” (Lortie 1975, 101).
See, Tamir (2008) for an illustration of how the notion of “the best and the brightest” was incorporated into the first alternate route to teaching when it was established in New Jersey in the mid 1980s.
Note that TFA recruits from all Ivy League schools, top private colleges, and top public universities, like the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, the University of Texas-Austin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and many others (TFA website 2011).
The programs we study do not fit neatly into the categories of traditional or alternate route programs. Like some alternate routes (e.g. Teach for America), they attract academically able students from highly selective colleges. They also offer extended opportunities for mentored learning to teach, as do some urban residency programs. Unlike most alternate route programs, however, the three programs provide a coherent professional curriculum organized around a vision of good teaching in a particular context. We call them “hybrids” because they have some features of reform-minded, university-based teacher education (Howey et al. 2006; Darling-Hammond 2006; Zeichner and Gore 1989) and some features of innovative alternate routes (Humphrey et al. 2008). In keeping with recent calls for needed research across pathways to teaching, the programs are especially interesting to study and learn from.
This section is partly based on a previous article by Tamir (2009) that focused solely on UTEP teachers’ decision to become teachers.
This is an illustration of Bourdieu’s notion of ‘distinction,’ which is practiced by social agents to signal their values and moral preferences, as well as sophistication in style, taste, and consumption of art, food, and entertainment, which in turn are used to validate their social positions and privileges.
Critics argue that early attrition of TFA teachers does more harm than good. In order to hire the many teachers that leave every year, districts need to increase budgets for recruitment, hiring, mentoring and induction. Schools hit by attrition are unable to build and maintain a strong stable professional culture. Finally, perhaps the most daunting effect of attrition is that the neediest students are often those who are denied the long-term care of experienced effective teachers. Research on TFA shows that the majority of TFA teachers leave their low-income classrooms after 2 years (Donaldson and Johnson 2011), which partially supports the claim that TFA contributes to inefficiency and has a harmful impact on schools and students. Only a handful of TFA teachers (14.8 %) stay longer than 5 years in their initial placements, but some of those who leave continue to serve as teachers and prominent educational leaders in urban settings.
As I have noted earlier, emerging research on teachers who graduated from a number of elite colleges, including private and public institutions, seems to confirm this finding.
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Acknowledgments
This publication is part of the Choosing to Teach Project, which has been directed by the author and is supported by grants from the Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education at Brandeis University and the Spencer Foundation. I like to thank the Journal of Educational Change anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Conclusions and interpretations are those of the author.
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For more information on previous papers and our upcoming book, Inspiring Teaching: Context Specific Teacher Education for the 21st Century (under contract with Harvard Education Press), go to: http://www.brandeis.edu/mandel/research/choosing/index.html.
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Tamir, E. Choosing teaching as a career in urban public Catholic and Jewish schools by graduates of elite colleges. J Educ Change 15, 327–355 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-013-9222-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-013-9222-9