Why does Teach for America (TFA) attract so much adulatory praise, so much vitriolic criticism, so much government and foundation money, and so much jealousy/resentment from other nonprofits? And did we mention so much money? Held up as the exemplar of social innovation and civic engagement, the TFA model merits closer attention as to what it really means for public education, to the nonprofit sector, and to society at large. TFA's positive press is so well known that this article focuses on the less-heard concerns and questions about the model:

It's hard to imagine a nonprofit entity that encapsulates the emerging definition of social innovation more than the Teach for America juggernaut. Founded in 1990 by young Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp, TFA now needs no introduction; it has nearly the same brand recognition enjoyed by nonprofits like the United Way and American Red Cross.

But as the nation moves toward defining social innovation and handing over the federal Social Innovation Program to private foundations, it cannot hurt to recognize TFA and other vaunted models for what they are: real-life nonprofit organizations with lots of good things going for them, but not without limitations, controversies, and trade-offs in what they purport to achieve.

It takes only a few moments on the Internet to find lots of positive stories about TFA, countered by relatively few negative ones. The common theme is the enthusiasm and commitment of the TFA teachers. The stories attest to a common finding about stipended volunteer programs: that AmeriCorps-affiliated youth service programs like TFA take pretty highly engaged young people and make them even more community minded.

(For examples, see the Abt Associates study for the Corporation for National Service and the stories of  TFA alums Chris Praedel of Kalamazoo who is running for the Michigan State Legislature and Brian Bordainick who is organizing support for the construction of a new high school stadium in New Orleans.

However, a recent study produced by a sociology professor from Stanford University (funded by the W.T. Grant Foundation) at the request of TFA suggests just the opposite:  that TFA alums' dedication to improving society did not seem to extend past their TFA service, and in fact, "In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years." This disconcerting research finding has the TFA leadership nonplussed and hits at a core element of the program's self-described benefits to participants.

$100 million in federal grants and $100 million in foundation grants

Maybe at its heart, critics simply don't like TFA's ability to glom more and more from foundations and particularly government, while school districts trim full-time employment and other education-focused nonprofits can only look at TFA's fundraising with envy. Based on an analysis of data from USAspending.gov, TFA secured over $80 million in grants between FY2001 and FY2008, including $44 million through the Department of Education, $32 million from the Corporation for National and Community Service, and $4 million from NASA.

And while health care reform, cap-and-trade climate protection, and other legislation in front of Congress have been viewed as largely Democratic Party initiatives, Teach for America has been politically ambidextrous over the years. A good chunk of this funding was achieved by earmarks under the Bush Administration, but the Obama administration seems to share the same eagerness to fund TFA. The President's FY2010 budget targeted a $15 million earmark for TFA.  That was less than the $25 million targeted by the House of Representatives for TFA.  

TFA's political flexibility has also proven remarkably successful with foundations as well, particularly important since the federal Social Innovation Fund will be  defined and administered by foundation regrant-makers (oh come on, we all know that! and if not, see Blue Avocado's recent article).  Grants from the politically conservative Walton Family Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the F.M. Kirby Foundation sit alongside philanthropic support from the more left-leaning Atlantic Philanthropies, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand.  The Foundation Center's online database suggests that TFA national and its local affiliates received $43.875 million in foundation grants in 2007 and, with totals still far from complete for 2008, $33.17 million in that year.  

With this kind of revenue, TFA hardly seems like a likely candidate for a federal Social Innovation Fund grant to help it "scale up." Whether or not TFA receives foundation re-granted SIF funds, it represents a model that foundations will be seeking to fund.

A brilliant cure or sending the least prepared to the most needy?

While successfully straddling ideological barriers in securing huge amounts in federal and foundation support, TFA has nonetheless encountered opponents in the course of its development, critics whose concerns cannot be dismissed as arising  from  jealousy over TFA's fundraising success.

One area of criticism centers on the premise that TFA teachers are better than credentialed, experienced teachers. [TFA teachers receive five weeks of training prior to classroom placement.] While an early goal of TFA was to meet teacher shortages, today credentialed, experienced teachers are being laid off in countless communities and newly credentialed teachers cannot find jobs, completing the TFA trajectory from one that fills gaps to one that claims to be better than the professionals currently on the job.

Stanford University's Linda Darling-Hammond is a high profile educator whose 2005 study compared TFA teachers in Houston with those coming to the profession with traditional training and credentials: "Uncertified TFA recruits are less effective than certified teachers, and perform about as well as other uncertified teachers. TFA recruits who become certified after 2 or 3 years do about as well as other certified teachers in supporting student achievement gains; however, nearly all of them leave within three years. Teachers' effectiveness appears strongly related to the preparation they have received for teaching."

Darling-Hammond is not alone in her concerns about the limited training of TFA teachers.  Suggesting that the good intentions of TFA participants are only half the battle, a not-unsympathetic observer from Minnesota concluded, "It is ridiculous to think that anyone with a five-week summer course and a license waiver is ready to teach . . . To put untrained graduates barely four years older than their students in a class without proper training does a disservice to education in Minnesota. Teach for America members should not have control of a class. They are not well-enough trained. They should serve as assistants to licensed, experienced teachers and help them give students the education they deserve and that we as Minnesotans demand."

Carlton College's Deborah Appleman offers a trenchant critique about the program, describing the "problematic assumptions" behind TFA, such as:

• "[the assumption that] anybody who is smart can be a good teacher." (Appleman says there is no correlation)
• that teaching is more instinct than knowledge. (Appleman says it's a combination of both)
• that students who are most in need will do the best with the most underprepared teachers in the country. (Appleman thinks that idea is crazy).

TFA has also had to navigate some accountability road bumps. For example, a 2008 federal audit of monies granted for summer training sessions found that TFA couldn't properly account for more than half of the $1.5 million in expenditures.

TFA's political apparatus

TFA is quick to challenge critics, for example, pointing to studies that counter Darling-Hammond's, including a 2004 study by Mathematica that purportedly concluded "that Teach for America corps members outperform even the veteran and certified teachers in their schools in a statistically significant way."

And TFA goes beyond debating the principles to taking political action against those it sees as detractors. For instance, when Linda Darling-Hammond was selected for the Obama education transition team, TFA was fearful that she would end up with a high post. Through a mass e-mail in late 2008, TFA alerted its network to the possibility of TFA critics emerging in the Obama White House, directing them to Leadership for Educational Equity, a 501(c)(4) TFA affiliate. Created in 2008 ostensibly "to support [TFA] alumni in the later stages of readiness for political activity" the Leadership for Educational Equity has become a fierce political defender of all things TFA.

This political arm of TFA struck out at Darling-Hammond with an article on its website titled "Education Secretary Fight Could Affect Teach for America's Mission." As one TFA blogger and board member of an "education reform" PAC commented about Darling-Hammond: "She's influential, clever and (while she does her best to hide it) an enemy of genuine reform." The result was that Arne Duncan, generally supportive of TFA, got the top job at Education over Darling-Hammond.

Unions vs. TFA

Part of conservatives' attraction to Teach for America, much like their love affair with charter schools, is TFA's existence largely outside of the control of unions such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA).  The union reactions to TFA seem to have steadily become more pointed over the years: witness sharply worded critiques on TFA from the Boston Teachers Union and Education Minnesota this year from  unions hardly comparable to the scandalously obstructive teachers unions in Washington DC and Miami.

In some localities, the unions have a solid argument. School districts are laying off credentialed -- and more senior, higher paid -- teachers and replacing them with TFA short-termers (usually signed up for two-year stints).  [Contrary to the commonly-held view that TFA teachers are volunteers or are paid stipends by TFA, TFA teachers are often paid by school districts at the same rates as beginning credentialed teachers.] Such situations have been reported in New Orleans, Boston, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, and elsewhere.

In individual schools, it appears that teacher opposition to TFA does not prevent good relationships from forming between TFA newbies and the teachers already there. But to union leaders such as John Wilson of the NEA, Teach for America is less an experiment in education than an effort to become a "political force" aimed at undoing traditional, that is, unionized, educational systems. With TFA's 501(c)(4) arm aiming to connect TFA alumni to the political world (29 alumni listed as holding public office and 4 more running for election), this does begin to feel like the political movement that Wilson fears.

Why is TFA so irritating?

But there are many nonprofits that neither compete with TFA nor participate in debates about public education that nonetheless find themselves annoyed with the vaunted TFA. Their concerns are not with TFA, but with the model that TFA represents. For example, one reason for annoyance may be because the praise of TFA's young teachers-for-two-years echoes the notion expounded elsewhere in the nonprofit sector that volunteers and near-volunteers can substitute for trained staff who earn professional-level salaries. Just as credentialed, experienced teachers with union-level pay resent the notion that they can be replaced by TFA'ers, nonprofit staff resent the idea that their work does not require much training, or pay, for that matter.

Another reason for nonprofit resentment may be due to the praise of TFA centering on the benefits for the young TFA participants, rather than the benefits for low-income students or schools. In a similar way, service learning is touted for its beneficial impact on the service-learner volunteers often without statistical evidence showing much tangible effect  on K-12 students or, perhaps more importantly, on those that these volunteers are enlisted to help. At a time when  the nonprofit and public agency host organizations often find themselves burdened with volunteerism that uses nonprofit resources for the benefit of the volunteer, nonprofits are suspicious of programs such as TFA that trumpet the positive effects on volunteers and stay relatively silent on the effects on the ostensible beneficiaries.

Perhaps it's because for many, a TFA stint has become just exactly the right thing to have on one's resume (for graduate school or political office) rather than the beginning of a lifetime commitment to teaching.

Or perhaps, like Appleman, what gets the nonprofit goat is the "overbearingly noble tone" in TFA's pronouncements. But the noble cause stuff is exactly what is so enthusiastically devoured by the mainstream press, the epitome being this encomium from the U.S. News and World Report: "Sooner or later change is coming to education and when it does Teach For America will have played an instrumental role in fueling it."

Questions raised by TFA's success

TFA  in many ways epitomizes the type of social innovation that has attracted former President Bush and his successor: building on the enthusiasm of its stipended volunteer participants to address the deficiencies of public school systems and their entrenched teacher unions. But despite its champions in the press and philanthropy, TFA's model merits examination by nonprofit and government agencies without its critics being demonized. Is social innovation that relies on large government and foundation subsidies really cost effective? Can two-year service terms by young Americans do more for low-income students than increased teacher pay and smaller class sizes? Is TFA a model for universal two-year service stints? Should we build TFA-like organizations in healthcare and higher education? Would a TFA model work to revitalize another industry with retrograde ideas and entrenched unions: the auto industry?

The overall, unfolding story of TFA is not contained in its funding, its political prowess, the odd negative audit finding, or even the stories -- some inspiring, some disillusioning -- from its participants. It will be played out as the nation defines social innovation and how socially innovative nonprofits supplement, revolutionize, subvert, or instigate social change.

P.S. As a follow-up to Rick Cohen's earlier story on the Social Innovation Fund, note that the Obama Administration has released its draft Notice of Funding Availability (NOFA) for the Social Innovation Fund.

See also:

• Social Innovation Fund: Where Is the Money Going? 

Rick Cohen is Blue Avocado's newest columnist; his columns appear in every other issue. Rick's background includes community organizing, municipal government, executive positions at LISC, Jersey City government, and the Enterprise Foundation, and eight years as Executive Director of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. He writes The Cohen Report for Nonprofit Quarterly, and lives in Washington, D.C. where he never has a shortage of things to be grumpy about.

 

You can get tortie/calico males due to genetic or developmental quirks.

The most common cause seems to be chimerism. Two embryos bump into each other in the womb and merge together. If one is black and the other is ginger and one or both are male the result may be a tortie tomcat (or calico tomcat if the embryos had white patches).

The next most common cause seems to be XXY genetic makeup (Klinefelter Syndrome). An embryo gets one X chromosome with the black gene, one X chromosome with the ginger gene and one Y chromosome that makes it male. This chromosomal abnormality used to be thought the most common cause, but recent research shows chimerism is probably more common.

The third cause is somatic mutation. A ginger male embryo devlopes black patch in the same way as some babies develop port wine stain birth marks.

Those with XXY makeup are infertile and often have other physical abnormalities due to having too many copies of some genes..

Those with chimerism are fertile but they can only pass on either the ginger colour or the black colour, but not both, to their offspring.

Those with somatic mutation are fertile because the black patches are just birthmarks.

In just about every speech at their 2008 convention, Democrats promised voters that a change in the White House would, in Barack Obama’s formulation, restore “our moral standing” in the world. Replace the unilateralist cowboy at the top with a humbler multilateralist, and the path would finally be cleared to fix vexing international issues such as curbing carbon emissions and dealing with the mullahs in Iran. Like many of the party faithful’s long-nurtured beliefs, this hope has disintegrated on contact with reality.

“America is losing the free world,” said a January headline in the Financial Times. While that statement is exaggerated, the sentiment behind it has been gaining traction around the globe, especially in the wake of the climate conference debacle in Copenhagen. It’s not just that the less confrontational American president has been unable to deliver results. He can’t even get his phone calls returned.

“On the last day of the [Copenhagen] talks, the Americans tried to fix up one-to-one meetings between Mr Obama and the leaders of South Africa, Brazil and India—but failed each time,” Gideon Rachman wrote in the Financial Times piece. “The Indians even said that their prime minister, Manmohan Singh, had already left for the airport. So Mr Obama must have felt something of a chump when he arrived for a last-minute meeting with Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, only to find him already deep in negotiations with the leaders of none other than Brazil, South Africa and India.”

It was easy for many Democrats to believe, during the nightmare years of “freedom fries,” that George W. Bush alone was to blame for the diplomatic prickliness between, say, Washington and Paris. But the basic conditions for American foreign policy have more to do with America’s outsized position in the world than with any particular politicians. Bill Clinton tangled constantly with the French, and now a visibly irritated President Nicolas Sarkozy has gone within a year from vying for Obama’s attentions to taking (in the words of a competing politician) an openly “anti-Obama position.”

Obama’s approach was supposed to produce a more cooperative Tehran and Moscow, fewer terrorists in the Muslim world, and vast new initiatives to fight global poverty. Instead, Iran has murdered dissenters while speeding up its nuclear program, Russia hasn’t discernibly budged even after the U.S. abandoned its missile shield in the Czech Republic and Poland, a Muslim suicide bomber was stopped at the last minute from blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas, and global gatherings have produced even less concrete action than usual.

These developments illustrate a phenomenon that has been playing out across a variety of public policy areas: Progressive Democrats, after being outfoxed by Ronald Reagan, triangulated to the policy margins by Bill Clinton, then routed under the first six years of George W. Bush, are having many of the nostrums they championed during the wilderness years tested in the real world for the first time in decades. The initial results of this long-delayed peer review have been a shock to the progressive system.

The Copenhagen crackup was a dream killer in more ways than one. Not only did the breakdown give the lie to the notion that a cranky Texas oilman was the single greatest impediment to international cooperation and enlightened environmental policy; it laid waste to the argument that yoking the developing world to a “do as we say, not as we did” policy of energy consumption will somehow prove to be an economic and environmental “win-win.” If that’s true, the leaders of India and China—the latter of which has been serially praised for its green-energy initiatives by the likes of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—certainly don’t believe it. No amount of international do-goodism is going to prevent countries from acting in what they perceive to be their own self-interest.

Obama and the Democrats have been peddling a similar win-win line about the creation of up to 5 million “green jobs” in America, through a combination of cap-and-trade carbon permits, home weatherization, clean coal, higher gas mileage standards, environmental regulation, and various renewable-energy mandates. The “green jobs” political juggernaut has been credited to Van Jones, who was obliged to resign as Obama’s “Green Czar” last summer after reports surfaced that he’d signed a petition supporting an investigation of Bush’s involvement in 9/11. What’s interesting about Jones’ beautiful-sounding concept is that even its chief supporters admit there’s no evidence the theory is true. Which is hardly surprising, since most of Obama’s proposed environmental policies involve making energy more expensive while using more tax dollars to subsidize expensive clean energy sources. As The New Yorker put it in a long, flattering profile of Jones in January 2009, “the mechanics of creating green jobs—or even what jobs should qualify for the title—have yet to be worked out.”

The debate over these phantom jobs, against a backdrop of double-digit unemployment, will likely suck up the political oxygen in Washington after the protracted health care debate finally wheezes to a close. But Americans already have found empty pots at the end of other Democratic rainbows. 

The $789 billion stimulus package of February 2009, thanks to a theoretical “multiplier” that would convert federal dollars into more than their worth in job creation, was supposed to (according to administration economists) “create or save” 3.5 million jobs and prevent unemployment from reaching as high as 9 percent by the end of 2010. Instead, joblessness shot through the 10 percent barrier before the end of 2009, and the government’s own tracking of the jobs allegedly created or saved has become a laughingstock with its double counting and imaginary ZIP codes.

What about the lobbying scourge that Democrats (like all good opposition parties) opposed so vociferously in 2008? Progressive theory holds that regulation of K Street, as opposed to a cutback in overall regulation, is the key to “change the culture of corruption” in Washington, as candidate Obama repeatedly promised to do. How’d that work out in practice? In December Politico reported that “Washington’s influence industry is on track to shatter last year’s record $3.3 billion spent to lobby Congress and the rest of the federal government—and that’s with a down economy and about 1,500 fewer registered lobbyists in town.”

In the truer-believing regions of the progressive political world, the broad agenda of carbon price hikes, centralized health care, greater regulation, increased taxes, and government-mandated diversity in boardrooms are not just sound and moral policy. They are inherently popular, if only the usual obstacles to justice and reform can be neutralized or removed. Back when he was still considered a plausible stand-in for “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (enough to win 2.7 percent of the presidential vote in 2000, much of it from progressives disgruntled at New Democrat policies), Ralph Nader insisted on a daily basis that his agenda was essentially “majoritarian.”

Such fantasies can serve as a salve when you live on the margins of the policy debate. And as long as you remain on the sidelines, the underlying proposals tend to go largely unchallenged. But now that progressive economic thought has its first real foothold in Washington since the 1970s, many long-marginalized ideas are being dusted off for real-world testing, from taxing stock transactions to “getting people out of their cars.” If we’re lucky, those debates will take place before the ideas are cemented into law. Better yet, maybe the growing unpopularity of central planning will dissuade the enthusiasts from inflicting their experiments on the rest of us in the first place. 

Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com) is editor in chief of reason.

"Families that are starved for quality time together don't have to take a three-week trek," says Jim Rogers, president and CEO of KOA Kampgrounds of America, the world's largest system of family campgrounds. "Parents and grandparents can plan several weekend trips close to home, yet still enjoy an authentic camping experience and save money too."

The size of the camping travel market in North America may be larger than you think. Private campgrounds accommodate 107 million overnight stays each year, and two-thirds of U.S. campers are RVers, according to KOA's comprehensive market research.

"People are prioritizing how they spend money," says Jim Lawrence of the Manchester Beach KOA, located three hours' drive north of San Francisco. "I've noticed an increased interest in families spending time together. If this is your priority and it costs $8 more for fuel this year, you're still going to take that RV camping trip."

Despite higher gas prices, RV sales continue to climb on the rising tide of retiring baby boomers and their appetite for active leisure time. There are more than 7 million RVs on the road in North America, and seven out of 10 RV owners surveyed by the RV Industry Association say they plan to use their RVs more this season, compared to last year.

For those families planning to hit the road this year, the camping experts at KOA offer these common-sense tips for saving even more while on a camping vacation:

• Tune up for the trip Vehicles that are well maintained reduce fuel consumption. While you're on the road, conserve fuel by driving at a steady speed, ensuring that tires are properly inflated and reducing the use of your air conditioner.
  
• Kiss the cook. Plan to cook many of your own meals rather than always dining at restaurants. Not only does this strategy save money, but it also allows children to participate. Use this as an opportunity to come up with some creative campfire recipes that are fun for all.