 "Photo: Drew Smith")
Chris Brownson never expected to spend his honeymoon driving down Interstate Highway 10 pulling a trailer, but he was following a higher purpose. He met his wife when they were undergraduates at the University, and both knew they wanted to make a difference in the world.
The engaged couple applied to Teach For America together and were accepted to teach in New Orleans in 1993. But plans changed and a district budget failure put them on the road to a school across the country in Los Angeles.
For the next two years, the Brownsons would teach in Los Angeles, serving students in economically depressed, resource-deprived schools. Brownson said it was a struggle.
"There was a teacher shortage," he said. "There were no substitutes. If the kindergarten teacher was gone, I would get six or seven kindergartners in my room in addition to my fifth-grade class."
Last year, 31 more alumni from the University joined Teach For America.
The education line
W.E.B. DuBois famously said, "The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line." Teach For America believes that the problem of the 21st century is the education line.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, by the time they are 9 years old, children in low-income communities are on average already three grade levels behind their more affluent peers. Children growing up in low-income areas are seven times less likely to graduate from college than children from higher-income communities.
Teach For America plans to eliminate this gap by recruiting outstanding college graduates to serve for two years as full-time paid teachers in low-income urban and rural communities.
The vision is huge, but Teach For America began small; it was Wendy Kopp's senior thesis at Princeton University in 1988. That fall she secured a grant from Mobil Corporation (now ExxonMobil Corporation) to organize a group of college students to teach in low-income areas across the country. In 1990, 500 charter corps members began teaching at six placement sites across the country.
Today, 17 years later, Teach For America has 3,500 active corps members and an alumni network of over 10,000, with hopes to recruit 2,800 new corps members this year.
In the classroom
Last year, Nirag Kadakia, while a math and Plan II senior at the University, applied to Teach For America. Teaching had been in the back of his mind since high school, and he's now stationed at Camden's Promise Charter School in Camden, N.J., working through his first few months.
Kadakia went into Teach For America with no formal teacher training, but he said that Teach For America's summer institute made him as prepared as he could be for his first year. "My roommate was certified as a teacher before he came to Teach For America," Kadakia said. "Now he says that Teach For America taught him more in five weeks at the institute than he learned in all his time in school."
At the institute, teachers go through six core-area classes: Teaching As Leadership; Instructional Planning and Deliv-ery; Classroom Management and Culture; Literacy Development; Learning Theory; and Diversity, Community and Achievement. They also teach in a summer school program.
During his summer institute, Kadakia taught at William Penn High School in Philadelphia, an economically depressed, 99-percent black school. "The administration was very inconsistent," said Kadakia. "The hardest part was motivating the students," he added. "They all really want to learn."
The first year of teaching is hard. Audrey Simmons, a 2002 UT graduate who served in the Houston corps, remembers how she and the school janitor, Mrs. Ortega, would often close the school together in the evenings. "I had so much to learn, that I had to work longer than everyone else," Simmons said of her first year.
Angie Hobbs used special events to make learning fun. "Every Friday I would do a 'Fun Fact,'" Hobbs said. "Some of the kids would pretend that they were too cool for it, but it was really inspiring when a few months later they would just bust out with some random bit I had said."
Every Teach For America corps member and alumnus seems to have a whole repertory of "special kid stories." Chris Brownson, a 1993 corps member who taught in Los Angeles and now serves as assistant director of UT's Counseling and Mental Health Center, tells an especially moving tale.
His "special kid" had a father who was in jail for shooting his mother and youngest sister. "He was just a 10-year-old kid," said Brownson, but he made a family of his three other siblings and held them together. He would check on their homework and make sure they stayed safe, all while remaining a straight-A student and being active at school. Brownson calls him "a study in resilience," and said that many other students also stood out in his mind.
Hobbs worked with another Teach For America teacher at her school to start an informal Girls Camping club to expose the students to new experiences. "Many of them had recently immigrated, and then they just stayed in Houston," said Hobbs, "When we went camping, they had never seen rocks before. They were so excited."
After the corps
Though Brownson himself has not remained a teacher, he is working in the second sector of Teach For America's plan to eliminate educational inequity: alumni serving in other sectors to effect systematic changes that will address the causes of educational inequity.
After his two years, Brownson chose to return to graduate school in counseling psychology. "After seeing the difficulties my students brought in, not just academically but also emotionally, I wanted to learn skills to intervene and to prevent those problems from starting," Brownson said.
Some companies, including Accenture, Bain & Company and Goldman, Sachs & Co., actively recruit Teach For America alumni. Many graduate schools also give special consideration to Teach For America alumni - offers range from two-year deferrals, fellowships, course credits and waived application fees.
Angie Hobbs said that her Teach For America experience actually helped her to find a job. Potential corps members often worry about ruining their career paths by taking two years to teach, but Hobbs said she had no regrets.
At AMD, Hobbs finds herself using communications skills she learned from Teach For America. "I learned to be very sensitive to others, because the kids won't tell you what they are thinking or what they need," Hobbs said.
About 60 percent of Teach For America alumni remain in the field of education. Marie Kunthara, a 2003 graduate from the University, taught for two years in Miami then chose to remain a teacher. She now works at KIPP Austin College Prep, a charter school in a program founded by Teach For America Alumni. "I guess I ended up here because I'm still committed to that original desire I had in college," Kunthara said. "I still want to help kids who have not had equal opportunities in life, educational or otherwise."
Joining Teach For America
Teach For America places special effort on recruiting math, science and engineering majors.
In recruiting corps members, Teach For America strives to reflect the diversity of the students they teach. Ninety five percent of students taught by Teach For America corps members are black or Latino/Hispanic. Teach For America has no quota of teachers it will hire for any particular year's corps; every applicant who meets Teach For America's criteria will be accepted. Those criteria include demonstrated past achievement, perseverance, critical thinking skills and ability to motivate.
Last year a national average of only 16 percent of Teach For America's applicants made it through the rigorous selection process. Of UT graduates who applied, 23 percent were accepted.
The application and interview process is rigorous, but the chosen corps members are obviously effective. The Mathematica Policy Research Institute, Inc. did an independent study on the Teach For America corps in 2004. Their report found that "despite working in the highest-need classrooms in the country, Teach For America teachers advanced students against the national norm in both reading and math."
Every alumnus interviewed encouraged as many people as possible to apply. "You find yourself among a group of talented, energetic, visionary corps members all working toward the same goal," Brownson said. "It gives you a chance to be a part of something big."
Marie Kunthara also encourages everyone to apply. "The educational gap that exists in this country is not just the responsibility of lawmakers and other people," she said. "If we truly want to set our children up for the opportunity to have successful lives, then we must take an active role."
Teach For America will be hosting an information session in the Texas Union Governor's Room Thursday night, Sept. 28, at 6 p.m. Audrey Simmons will speak about her experience in the corps and answer questions.
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