Teach For America in North Carolina: A Solution to a Shortage of Highly Qualified Teachers?

• In Event: Teach For America: Local Hiring Practices and Privileges

Abstract

Currently, in North Carolina, TFA is the sole state-financed solution to the stated problem of teacher shortages in hard to staff districts. TFA has been in North Carolina since 1990 and currently places over five-hundred corps members in over twenty school districts each year. While North Carolina has had historical difficulty recruiting and maintaining teachers in the rural northeast region and in the urban district of Charlotte and Durham, this has been greatly exacerbated by recent political shifts, budget cuts, and teacher pay freezes. Multiple universities have unsuccessfully applied for state funding to assist in alleviating this problem. Instead, in North Carolina’s proposal for Race to the Top funds, it was specified that money would be earmarked to increase the number of highly qualified teachers in low-income rural areas and high-need urban schools. The proposed method for this was two-fold; 1) developing the North Carolina Teacher Corps (NCTC) to recruit and develop recent graduates from North Carolina colleges and universities, as well as mid-career professionals, to teach in schools not served by Teach For America (TFA); and 2) expanding the TFA program in eastern North Carolina (TFA-ENC) (Stallings, Howard, Kellogg, Maser, Smart, Stanhope, & Townsend, 2012, p.5). In its inaugural year, 34 recent college graduates began the indepently run NCTC program, went through a three-week training, and then a two week practicum experience. After a review of the NCTC program was conducted in comparison to Teach For America (Stallings, Howard, Kellogg, Maser, Smart, Stannhope, & Townsend 2014), it was decided that management of the NCTC program and budget would be handed over, along with $12 million dollars to use over two years, to TFA in 2014 as the state budget simultaneously terminated funding of the North Carolina Teaching Fellows.

At the same time, the North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program (NCTF) was entirely defunded and university-based teacher credentialing programs received no additional financial support from the state budget. Prior to this, each year since 1986, NCTF had recruited 500 highly talented high school seniors from North Carolina through a scholarship program that provided four years of college tuition to attend university-based teacher education programs, in addition to summer and extracurricular enrichment programming in exchange for a promise to teach for four years in a North Carolina public school. A study comparing NCTF to all other sources of teachers found that students in the classrooms of NCTF teachers outperformed their peers in nearly every subject and grade and that NCTF teachers were more likely to remain in the classroom for five or more years than their peers (Henry, Bastian, and Smith, 2011; 2012).

These authors draw on critical theory to analyze the memorandum of understanding (MOUs) from over half of the twenty-three districts and charter management organizations with which TFA partners in the context of extant data on multiple teacher providers and current state budget policies to provide evidence that districts privilege TFA corps members in ways that potentially exacerbate teacher shortages and high turnover rates.

Authors

• Beth Leah Sondel, North Carolina State University

• Meghan McGlinn Manfra, North Carolina State University