Teach For All and Social Sector Leadership

• In Event: Developing leadership at all levels of education for sustained development outcomes

Proposal

How transformative are service-teaching experiences? Can they shape the career ambitions or leadership skills of the participants? As partner organizations within the Teach For All global network, Teach For India and Teach For America both aim to recruit and develop highly-qualified candidates to teach in their nations’ under-resourced schools and communities, and with this foundation, to work with others, inside and outside of education. Using causal methods, we examine the impact of Teach For America and Teach For India on a variety of participant outcomes and find that overall these programs seem to influence participants propensity to work in socially-oriented sectors, often in leadership positions.
In the case of Teach For India (TFI), we use a propensity score matching design and find that serving in this type of environment increases the likelihood that participants will choose careers in education (55 percentage point increase, p<0.01) or a socially-oriented field (26 percentage point increase, p<0.01) after the completion of their service. Education careers noted by participants include directors or program managers of education non-governmental organizations, teacher team leaders in high-schools, and education leads at various for-profit organizations. Further, the TFI experience also seems to shift the ambitions of participants towards “ideal careers” in the field of education (14 percentage points, p=0.03), suggesting that the program may also shift the career values and aspirations of its participants. And while participants are no more likely to become entrepreneurs by starting a legally incorporated organization or businesses, the organizations started by participants are 5.5 percentage points (p=0.027) more likely to focus on social issues.
Likewise, we see a shift in the career ambitions of those that participated in Teach For America (TFA). Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that TFA participants are more likely to aspire to a career in politics and that the experience causes women to be more politically ambitious. Further, we see stronger effects among women of color. In addition, the TFA experience has been shown to build empathy among its participants, a key quality in a public servant or a leader more generally. Specifically, TFA participants, have been shown to adopt beliefs that are closer to disadvantaged Americans and feel more empathy towards marginalized groups in society, from a both racial and class perspective.
While this research has demonstrated that Teach For America service can translate to increased perspective-taking, prejudice reduction, as well as political engagement, and that Teach For India service increases participants’ likelihood to pursue social sector careers, our research will continue to investigate how the effects of service-teaching differ across country contexts. There is also a need for new research on what aspects of leadership development programs --- recruitment, training, being part of a cohort, type of service work --- are most attributed to the observed changes in beliefs, mindsets, and career pathways.

Author

• Cecilia H. Mo, University of California, Berkeley