24 with Teach For America in LR

Number of corps members in district smaller than envisioned

The Little Rock School District’s teaching staff this year includes 24 instructors from the national Teach For America program, which recruits and trains new college graduates with degrees in fields other than education to be teachers for two years in high- poverty communities.

The 24 Teach For America corps members — who work in nine Little Rock district schools — constitute less than half of the number of corps members envisioned for district employment in January 2016.

That’s when Gov. Asa Hutchinson and Little Rock business leaders announced that $ 3 million had been raised from private sources to place as many as 65 Teach For America corps members at Little Rock campuses.

Walter E. Hussman Jr., publisher of the Arkansas Democrat- Gazette, and Haskell L. Dickinson II of the Trinity Foundation were leaders of the fundraising campaign.

“Teach For America was a decision made prior to my arrival, but I’m so grateful that we have the chance to work with the Teach For America group,” Superintendent Mike Poore told the Little Rock district’s Community Advisory Board on Thursday.

The advisory board serves in the absence of an elected school board in the state- con-

trolled district. Decisions made by the advisory board are forwarded for final action to Arkansas Education Commissioner Johnny Key, who acts as the district’s school board.

“I think its made us better,” Poore said about the Teach For America partnership. “There is very little difference when I walk into a Teacher For America [ corps member] classroom compared to any of our other classrooms,” he said, adding that there are both “master” teachers and some “struggling” teachers among the corps members — just as there are throughout the education field.

Poore attributed the smallerthan- expected number of corps members this year to the district’s $ 3 million budgetsaving reduction in middle and high school teaching positions.

The district didn’t lay off teachers at the end of the last school year as a result of the budget cuts, but did have to reassign affected teachers to vacancies elsewhere in the district. That process of taking care of existing staff took a while and caused some Teach For America teachers, who were unable to wait on a possible Little Rock job, to go elsewhere for work, Poore said.

Poore said he expects that the district will again have to streamline its teaching staff at the end of this school year because the district’s enrollment has dropped by more than 400 students as compared with last year.

“But I think we will be much more proactive in getting a handle on all these opportunities to use the Teach For America candidates,” he said.

Mia Meadows, interim executive director of Teach For America Arkansas, told the Community Advisory Board on Thursday that the 24 teacher corps members are working with 1,800 students this year. Eighteen of the teachers are teaching in classes and in subject areas in which students must take the state- required ACT Aspire exams in the spring, she said.

In 2016- 17, the first year in which corps members worked in the district, the growth in student achievement in courses taught by corps members mirrored the growth in achievement shown by students taught by noncorps members, Meadows said.

“Of course there’s a lot of work to be done,” she said, adding that there have been lessons learned about how to positively affect student learning in the district.

Meadows said principals have reacted favorably to the corps teachers, saying that they have a good work ethic and are innovative.

The bulk of the Teach For America teachers are assigned this year to Baseline

Academy Elementary, Henderson Middle School, Forest Heights STEM Academy and J. A. Fair and Hall high schools, Renee Kovach, director of certified staff for the district, said.

The teachers are purposely put into schools in which high percentages of students are struggling academically, Kovach said. That’s because the teacher corps program is intended to make a difference for students in high- need schools.

About half the teachers are working in math and science courses, she said.

The 24 corps members in the Little Rock district are part of 63 Teach For America teachers working in Arkansas this year.

That state total is a decline from past years and reflects national trends.

As recently as the 2015- 16 school year there were 110 corps members at work in the state’s east and southeast regions, including Lee, Phillips, Chicot, Jefferson counties, as well as Union County.

In January 2016, at the same time Hutchinson and business leaders announced the $ 3 million for the program in Little Rock, the governor also said he would draw $ 3 million from the governor’s executive discretionary fund to add as many as 150 Teach For America corps members in eastern and southern Arkansas school districts.

Elisa Villanueva Beard, Teach For America’s chief executive officer, in April 2016 described on the organization’s website the decline in Teach For America applicants. There were 57,000 applicants in 2013, resulting in 5,800 corps members. The number fell to 44,000 applications and 4,100 corps members in 2015 and 37,000 applicants in 2016.

Beard attributed the decline in applications and corps members to better marketing by business and industry for new graduates anxious to get into jobs that can help them pay off college debts. She also said the “toxic debate surrounding education — and attacks on organizations that seek to bring more people to the field — is undeniably pushing future leaders away from considering education as a space where they can have real impact.”

Better targeted recruitment efforts, recruiting college students as early as their sophomore and junior years and simplifying the application process were among the strategies put in place to generate more corps members, Beard said.

In May, Beard reported on the organization’s website that application numbers had improved after three years of declines. Almost 49,000 applied for positions in 2017, producing 3,500 new corps members from 720 colleges and universities.

Teach For America began as founder Wendy Kopp’s 1999 senior thesis at Princeton University.