HISD’s F for effort

Cutting Teach for America is district’s loss.

This week in Houston, a group of new educators will report to a boot camp of sorts, where they’ll prepare to work in some of the area’s most challenging schools where other teachers won’t go.

Sadly, Houston ISD schools won’t be among them.

For the first time in decades, HISD principals won’t be allowed to hire from the incoming class of Teach for America corps members. They’ll go to other districts and charter systems eager to accept them, such as Aldine, Fort Bend, Spring Branch, Klein, KIPP and Yes Prep.

HISD’s loss is their gain.

That’s become a depressing pattern for students, parents and education advocates in Houston, who have grown weary of watching talented teachers, star principals and even philanthropic dollars flow to other districts while the state’s largest school district flails in dysfunction.

The perplexing May 9 vote by HISD trustees to end the district’s contract with Teach For America after 30 years is just another example of instability and questionable priorities.

Approving the contract wouldn’t have mandated the hiring of a single TFA teacher. It would have merely given principals the option. TFA’s central mission isn’t producing career teachers; it’s infusing high-poverty schools with talented, well-trained young leaders whose impact goes beyond supporting students’ academic and personal growth to long-term education advocacy. The district pays their salaries, along with an additional $3,000 to $5,000 in fees related to recruitment and support.

It wasn’t surprising that some board members, who have long opposed TFA on philosophical grounds, voted no. TFA is sometimes depicted as elitist and short-sighted because the two-year program places highperforming college graduates from non-traditional teaching backgrounds in classrooms with low-income students. Trustee Elizabeth Santos says TFA “deprofessionalizes teaching, increases turnover and undermines union organization.”

While it’s true that TFA teachers leave the classroom at higher rates, retention has increased over the years. In the Houston area, 70 percent of corps members stay in the education field locally or work with a community nonprofit, according to Mika Rao, a Houston-based TFA communication director. About 250 alumni remain in HISD, she said.

What raised eyebrows is that the decisive vote that killed the contract came from Board President Diana Dávila, who has supported TFA for years.

Just last year, before voting for TFA’s contract, Davila spoke about how, as a teacher, she’d worked and trained with TFA teachers, and how, as a board member, she’d ordered a study of TFA teachers’ performance in classrooms across her district.

“I was surprised,” she told her colleagues. “Because corps members were making a difference.”

So, what changed?

Some blame politics. If Davila runs for re-election, she’ll face an opponent, Judith Cruz, a TFA alum. Like her colleagues, Davila is vulnerable given the board’s infighting and district’s disarray. She may be trying to shore up support from the teachers’ union.

“There’s no other explanation for cutting off a budget-neutral teacher pipeline,” says Jasmine Jenkins, a TFA alum and executive director of the nonprofit Houstonians for Great Public Schools. “It’s not just indicative of the dysfunction of our school board but of the post-fact era we live in.”

Davila, in her first comments on the vote, told the Chronicle editorial board that politics “had nothing to do with it.” She said she’s frustrated that TFA didn’t address dwindling numbers of corps members serving HISD: “You’ve gone to having hundreds of TFA corps members to only 35. Show me a company that finds that acceptable.”

TFA leaders, Davila added, also failed to leverage alumni working in other fields. Although Davila last year praised TFA alumni participation, now she criticizes TFA for not expanding those efforts.

Students won’t be harmed by the board’s decision, Davila said, because aspiring teachers can go through HISD’s alternative certification program. She said some have already inquired about it.

Davila’s explanation doesn’t cut it. Other alternative certification programs don’t provide the training and support TFA does. And TFA’s dwindling numbers seem in large part due to HISD’s budget-cutting decision to stop funding the program centrally, leaving principals to pay fees out of their budgets.

Will kids be harmed? If even one less TFA teacher means a classroom is stuck with a long-term substitute, yes. It serves no one to choke off a pipeline to talented educators motivated to make a difference.

What difference will we see when TFA is gone from HISD classrooms? Our most vulnerable students shouldn’t have to find out.