Does the Impact of Teach For America Teachers Last?

• In Event: Teach For America: Impacts Beyond the Classroom

Abstract

Teach For America (TFA) is an influential part of the teaching landscape in low-income schools throughout the United States. TFA has recently extended its goal from producing short term learning gains to enacting longer-term change in students’ academic trajectories. A growing body of work examines the same-year effects of TFA on student achievement in a variety of contexts, yielding contradictory results, with some finding that TFA teachers outperform their non-TFA counterparts (Glazerman, Mayer, & Decker, 2006) and others finding the opposite (Darling-Hammond, Brewer, Gatlin, & Vasquez Heilig, 2005). However, no studies have examined whether the impact of TFA persists beyond the year students are in TFA classrooms. This study addresses this gap in the literature by examining not only whether TFA teachers have an impact on students’ short-term test scores, but whether there are long-term impacts on student achievement. It examines whether TFA teachers impact student math and reading achievement in grades 4-8 in the same year they have a TFA teacher, as well as whether impacts persist up to two years after students had a TFA teacher.
To examine the impact of TFA teachers on short- and long-term student achievement, I use data from 1999/2000 through 2010/11 from the state of North Carolina provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC) at Duke University. I use OLS regression with student fixed effects, comparing students who had a TFA teacher at some point to themselves in other school years. This approach attenuates bias resulting from characteristics of the student that are fixed over time, such as early childhood experiences or race.
Results indicate differing patterns for math and reading. In math, there were small positive impacts in both elementary and middle school, but these effects did not persist beyond one year. In reading, the pattern differed in middle and elementary school. In middle school, there were small same-year impacts on reading achievement which faded out in the following year. In contrast, in elementary school, there were no immediate impacts on reading achievement, but a small positive impact emerged in the year after students were in TFA classrooms. No impacts in reading or math persisted into the second year post-TFA.
These findings differ somewhat from other studies comparing TFA teachers to other novice teachers in North Carolina using a different analysis strategy and fewer years of data (Henry et al., 2010), which found positive effects for math, but not reading, in middle school, and no impact on achievement in elementary school. Nevertheless, they have important implications for thinking about the broader effects of TFA and whether they persist over time. These results suggest that some TFA effects fade out. However, the results also identify latent impacts not identified by previous research. The results also suggest that, where elementary reading is concerned, TFA teachers impact student learning in ways that spill over into other non-TFA classrooms within the same school.

Author

• Emily K. Penner, University of California - Irvine