The Hamilton County Schools system has served as a laboratory for education and teaching programs over most of the last two decades.
Unfortunately, the programs seem to come and go, receive funding and lose funding, find some success and then fade away. Meanwhile, the across-the-board academic progress for students in the district – especially for those in high poverty pockets – has been stubbornly slow. But every couple of years, a new program offering lightning in a bottle emerges, and the district grabs it.
On Thursday, the Hamilton County Board of Education approved in a 6-3 vote the latest elixir, Teach for America.
Now, it is our firm hope that the nonprofit program – which will cost $3.3 million over five years – will be everything the district hopes it can be. It will, at least in the first year, employ 15 top recent college graduates from across the country to teach in high-poverty urban schools. Here, that will be in the district’s Opportunity Zone, which encompasses the 12 schools in the feeder patterns for Brainerd and Howard high schools and which have not been the easiest places to recruit and retain teachers.
Now most of these soon-to-be-teachers – beginning in Hamilton County in the 2019-2020 year – are not schooled in accredited K-12 education programs but are said to be prepared for their jobs in an intense five-week summer institution. The Teach for America organization then supports its employees throughout the two years they agree to serve. Many then go on to other careers.
Schools systems in Nashville and Memphis have used the organization’s teachers for more than a decade. In Nashville, about 71 percent of the organization’s teachers stay for a third year in the classroom.
While the Teach for America program will cost the school district $1 million over four years, the rest of the $3.3 million will come from some of the money the state has set aside for Opportunity Zone schools, from $500,000 out of $1.5 million that outgoing Gov. Bill Haslam put into the budget for Teach for America, from local foundations and from private donors.
An official with Chattanooga’s Teach for America site says local foundations already have committed to funding the site, and a Benwood Foundation official says that organization has committed $400,000 over three years.
How much that leaves to be funded by other foundations and private donors is unclear. How much of the already agreed-to funding for the Opportunity Zone will be spent on the program per year is unclear. What would happen if Gov.-elect Bill Lee’s education priorities do not include more funds for the Opportunity Zone is unclear. What would be done if the next state budget zeroes out funding for Teach for America is unclear. If we were school board members, we would have wanted definitive answers to such questions before moving forward.
School board member Tucker McClendon, for one, did want to know.
“If the state money dries up, then we are … left to pick up the tab,” he said at Thursday’s meeting.
That’s a frightening prospect for a district that annually complains it doesn’t have enough money to give students the education they deserve.
As with many of the education and teaching programs that have come and gone in Hamilton County, we see the value in Teach for America. Its carefully recruited, bright students are likely to come with strong academic backgrounds, appreciate lifelong learning and have had teachable experiences that other students might not have had. They are experts in a wide variety of subject areas and have additional career aspirations to which some of their students might relate or want to emulate.
With two-year contracts, they’ll not flee the Opportunity Zone schools like some first-year teachers might. And, in addition to the district’s own teacher continuing education programs, they’ll receive ongoing support from the organization itself.
Nevertheless, with so many unknowns about funding, with teachers only guaranteed to stay for two years, with Teach for America’s national history that includes complaints about, according to a Huffington Post article, “inadequate training, demographics of corps members, connection to charter schools and corporate philanthropists, development of leaders with a market-oriented ‘brand’ of education reform, attempts to undercut unions, and [a] general arrogance and hubris in ignoring those critiques,” we hope the school board gets what it bargained for and will be able to say it finally found a program that is making a difference.