Teach For America Teachers Outperform Counterparts, Report Says

Teachers certified through Teach for America and Lipscomb University in Nashville outperform veteran teachers, according to the state card on teacher training released Tuesday.

The report, produced by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, shows which of the state's teacher programs tend to produce highly effective teachers and which do not.

Teach for America in Memphis and Nashville outshone traditional college programs and alternative certification programs statewide.

In Memphis, where TFA members make up 3 percent of the city schools faculty, the teachers showed "statistically significant positive difference" over both veteran and new teachers and ranked high in the top quintile of teachers across Tennessee in reading, science and social studies.

"Our research team is poring over this data, seeing all that it tells us and what the story is behind the numbers," said Athena Turner, executive director of Memphis TFA.

Nine teacher training programs, including Tennessee State University, University of Tennessee-Martin, Middle Tennessee State and the Memphis Teacher Residency were cited for failing to compete with the quality of new teachers from other programs.

Memphis Teacher Residency, which recruits college graduates from other careers and trains them to teach in the city schools, had the lowest composite score of 17 institutions reporting for grades 9-12.

But among teachers in fourth through eighth grades, it had the fifth highest composite scores.

"... our loss was far more glaring than our win, and we cannot accept any losses," MTR executive director David Montague told "stakeholders" in an e-mail Monday.

While University of Memphis graduates perform well against other new teachers, recent graduates compared poorly against teacher veterans in elementary schools, with the university showing significant weakness in reading scores.

Marty Alberg, assistant dean of pre-K through 12 programs at the university, says last year's data does not reflect the "revamped" teacher training curriculum, including a full-year teacher residency.

"Our feedback from schools where our students are doing their residency—what you may know as student teaching—is overwhelmingly positive from the teachers they are working with, the principals in those schools and the district administrators in those schools," she said.

Last year, U of M had 249 new teachers employed in schools in Shelby County, more than any of the 40-plus other teacher training programs in the state combined.

The state report card on teacher training programs includes data only on the 35 percent of teachers in state-tested subjects and grades. This year's report is based on test results from last spring.

Nationally, the Teach for America program admits only high-scoring college graduates who receive two years of intensive training while they also teach in high-poverty schools.

Last year, TFA and Vanderbilt scored highest in state teacher training results.

In 2009, the state began retooling teacher training in an effort to increase the state's pool of college graduates.