TFA: Failure of Intention or Implementation?

In the McAdam and Brandt piece for this week, the authors considered whether in-depth service opportunities, such as Teach for America (TFA) lead to life-long shifts in attitude concerning civic participation and engagement. Paradoxically, the TFA graduates tend to have better attitudes regarding participation and engagement, yet, on average, lag behind people who are accepted into TFA and either drop out of the program before finishing two years or refuse the offer to participate.

To me, these findings point to one possible explanation: service opportunities such as TFA do have their intended consequences in fostering civic-mindedness, but fail to foster the feelings of personal efficacy that would allow their graduates to apply their new civic-mindedness after their service is finished. This finding is consistent with several of the stories I have heard from returning TFA teachers who graduated from college with my older brothers. Several of them found the work they were doing to be fulfilling and important, but they felt that the problems they were facing were too big or complex for them to personally make any difference. My favorite example is one friend of my brother who was assigned to a special education classroom. After arriving, he found that he loved working with the kids, but had no real clue what to do in many situations; he was not given any kind of training by TFA and left to find his own way by trying to get the other teachers to take the time out of their own schedules to train him. At the end of the program, he was left with the distinct impression that he wasn't really cut out to be a special education teacher, despite the fact that he still thought fondly of the idea of working with special ed students.

One important piece of information that would help to boost this interpretation of McAdam and Brandt's findings would be a measure of self-efficacy to see if the TFA graduates scored lower than TFA dropouts and non-matriculants. If this were the case, it would support this interpretation and the implication that programs such as TFA are beneficial in principle, but that their current implementation prevents them from providing their possible benefits; if TFA were structured differently (namely, to provide more support for its teachers and improve their self-efficacy), it could possibly deliver on all of its high-minded promises.