Literature Review

1 Running Head: TEACH FOR AMERICA AND CRITICS

Business Communication Sample Literature Review

2 TEACH FOR AMERICA AND CRITICS Introduction Teach for America (TFA) has been attracting criticism on teacher effectiveness since 2001. The criticism has increased since 2005 with peer evaluated research published by influential critics against our core product that is TFA Corps. The criticism is due to three main reasons: 1. 2. 3. A major concern towards lack of teacher training Attrition rate of recruits Small number of recruits

These concerns make our service questionable building negative perceptions in the minds of the audience resulting in loss of brand equity. Teacher training Many education experts have expressed their opinion on the correlation between teacher training and teacher effectiveness, however only few peer evaluated published studies exist. The findings are mostly to ourdisadvantage; however, scope of improvement is mentioned in all.Where our studies show that TFA teachers do as well as or better than teachers with traditionalcertification (Kopp, 2009), most published research studies prove this to be wrong. Laczko-Kerr and Berliner (2002) in their study conducted in Arizona found that students of certified teachers performed better than students of uncertified teachers, including our recruits. Thereafter, Boyd, et al. in 2006 examined the effectiveness of 3,766 new teachers in New York City. The study found that, compared with the students of new teachers who graduated from teacher education programs, students of new TFA corps scoredmuch lower.Another large-scale achievement study analyzed data from Houston, Texas (Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Heilig, 2005) representing more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers in grades 3-5 over six years. Scores were drawn from six achievement tests. The authors found “no instance where uncertified

3 TEACH FOR AMERICA AND CRITICS TFA teachers performed as well as standard certified teachers of...