Doug McAdam and Cynthia Brandt, Stanford University
Social Forces
February 2010
If you read only the coverage of this study, you’d come away with a vastly more negative view of TFA graduates than you should. So let’s put the record straight. The study asks whether the TFA experience “make[s] citizens”? The authors seek to compare the “civic engagement” of TFA “graduates” (those who finished two years of TFA), “dropouts” (those who began the program but did not finish it) and “non-matriculants” (those who were accepted but declined). They find that though graduates display the highest attitudinal scores on civic awareness, non-matriculants actually perform the most service. They attribute this difference to such factors as post-TFA burnout and disillusionment with TFA itself. That may be so, but TFA is an organization dedicated to recruiting and keeping talent in our nation’s classrooms, not creating Mother-Teresas-in-training, even if Wendy Kopp commissioned the study herself. It is upon those metrics--and the effect that TFA teachers have on student achievement--that we should be evaluating the program. Even if you accept the premise of this inquiry, however, the findings are no black mark against TFA. For example, though “only” 89 percent of graduates said they voted in the last presidential election (compared to 92 percent for all three groups), that’s still 50 points higher than their similarly-aged peers. The lesson is that TFA doesn’t turn disengaged students into participatory citizens; rather, it tends to select the civic-minded from the get-go. You can order a copy here.