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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Fair enough, but another way to look at it is that good schools do not get TFA teachers. If you are truly a great school, with high morale, and excellent PD- then you are not left with spots to fill when the TFA kids roll around. So, if you see a lot of TFA at a school- its because they school has high turnover.[/quote]

Hi. TFA alum and current DCPS teacher. This is a pretty good assumption.

Honestly, often the purpose of hiring loads of novice teachers (either from TFA or ed school) is because you're trying to mitigate a seemingly unsolvable problem. The majority of schools that hire TFA teachers are poorly managed and low performing. When these characteristics are combined, it makes working at the school INCREDIBLY difficult. If you have teaching experience, your pool of potential schools at which you could be hired is more extensive than people new to the profession. Therefore, you're going to avoid these chronically low performing schools. Administrators and district officials who work at said schools want to keep their jobs and fill their teaching vacancies, and the only people left are the fresh meat TFA recruits. They're typically willing to work hard for those test scores, and as soon as they're burned out or have enough experience to move to another school, along comes another crew of new TFA kids to take their place.

Solving this problem doesn't lie in the kind of teachers you recruit (honestly, TFA recruits and ed majors perform about the same under similar circumstances), but in how you're managing a school and district. So, look for things that the PP mentioned - high morale, excellent PD, happy teachers.

Being poorly managed and being low performing are not necessarily mutually exclusive characteristics of schools, so I wouldn't suggest avoiding a school just because it doesn't have the most appealing scores. I still work at a Title I public school that gets decent scores, but the culture of the building is wonderful, which makes me want to work extremely hard for my students, families, and administration. Scores will continue to rise as long as a school is well managed.[/quote]

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