Reflecting on My Teach for America Experience: First-Year Teacher Hell

Before I start this I just want to clarify a few things. I have nothing against the people I worked with personally, neither on the Teach for America side nor the school-site side, only with an education system and the Teach for America program itself. It’s aims (or lack there-of) are meant to set first-year teachers and their students up for failure. Any criticism is constructive and coming from a place of first-hand experience.

My first year had some very high highs and some equally comparable lows. Those highs were full of students that made the experience worthwhile, who had “aha!” moments, breakthroughs in their personal development as well as in my own professional and personal development. I have a lot of fond memories to look back on, including a supportive co-teacher staff and times when my students would make me laugh or even cry tears of joy. Above all, the wise-words of staff from this school-site would stick with me the entire year and, forever:

If you can make it a year here, you can make it anywhere.

I think it’s pretty well known that TFA exists solely to create a business around private education while at the same time engaging in the occasional “philanthropic” recruitment of new teachers into vacant spots in some of the most under-funded, poorly managed districts in the nation. That’s not an insult to my old school, but it’s pretty apparent that the schools TFA recruits are being stuck in ones that are made for veteran teachers—not kids fresh out of a bachelor's degree, some who don’t even know the half of a thing about the community their being put into. Some who don’t even care because they’re just some bougie college kid! There’s a wide array of graduates being pumped through these schools, and though I don’t have the numbers, my bets would be on that retention of these TFA teachers are lower than the national average of retention for teachers who take the traditional route towards certification.

So, why did you join TFA?

Why does anyone?

I joined because like most graduates, I needed a job after graduation and the anxiety of graduating and NOT having my life set out for me was petrifying. Of course I wanted to be a teacher before that, I actually have wanted to teach since my sophomore year of high school! While that was a major determining factor, I had bills to pay and housing to, well, be housed in. I didn’t join for the wrong reasons because I wanted to be a teacher to begin with and it was and still is my goal to stay in education for at least a solid 5 years before decided what I can potentially do next.

My experience within the public education system was not the best. I often felt pushed to the side and like my needs were not catered to. I knew first hand what it was like to have that one teacher that knocks you down and makes you feel like nothing—and that one teacher that builds you up and makes you feel like you can do and be anything. I wanted to be the latter in kids lives.

Coming from a history of title I education, I thought about what I would do differently or similar to those teachers. What I would have wanted as a student back then.

Of course, the infrastructure of public education has vastly changed since the last time I was in it. If things were unstable before, then things were crumbling now and the first victim would be the public schools in poorer areas. The harsh infliction of cuts to education in the legislative and public sector mean that if schools were already performing bad a decade ago, today they’re facing it even worse.

Educators in my state got a small raise after the RedforEd movement, but it was, if anything, an inflationary increase in quite literally the lowest paid professional position in the country. Teachers in 2008 were making sometimes at or less than 30,000 a year—since then inflation (sorry, PRICE GOUGING) has skyrocketed, along with price gouging in the housing market and base salary has increased how much?

Only a few hundred dollars more than back then, with salaries increasing to a WHOPPING!! $40,000. I started with a base salary of 48,000 at my district and that increased to 50,000 by a few months in. Those salary bumps are a godsend, but that’s not saying much seeing as there is no such thing as “saving” as a teacher in AZ if you have bills and rent due. You’re basically living check to check as a professional and all you have to show for it is some nice little coupons and rubber stress balls during teacher appreciation week! (What an insult.)

In education, you’ll hear a lot the phrase “we don’t do this for the money”. And that is honestly true unless you have a spouse who makes more money than you, in that case, yeah you’re doing it for the extra money. Legislators think we’re all a Mrs. by the end of our first year. Not true of independent girl-boss queens such as myself! We should be making enough to support ourselves. Isn’t that what our capitalist-eque feminism tells us is the goal?

So no, I didn’t join for the lucrative nature of teaching in public schools. I started teaching because it was a passion and because I needed a job.

Good Luck, Soldier!

When you’re first told of your school-site, you often don’t have much time to research—nor do you have much choice. TFA has a set list of partnerships with certain schools and districts. Most of these schools have the most vacancies because nobody wants to stay in them—for a reason. Which begs the question: if teachers don’t even want to stay, why would kids want to stay? What’s with that expectation?

I was first told of my school-site about a month mas o menos before the school year began. I was told I was going to be teaching high-school and that the position was ready for me, and then it was gone. Then an opportunity for middle school came up and I thought—please let it be 8th grade! Nope, it was 7th.

I got the creme of the crop. I honestly think the worst grade for all educators is 7th grade. Everytime someone asks, “Oh you teach? What grade?” the reaction is followed by a sour “ooo” or “damn”, as if I just mentioned that I committed a felony. Sometimes I even get an “I’m sorry” or “thank you for your service.”

Who’s braver than the troops? A 7th grade teacher.

Couple that with it:

1. Being your first-year.
2. Being in a severely underfunded district.

I was in for a nice treat for the year! I remember walking on to campus my first day and a thought popped up into my head “I bet a lot of bad stuff is going to happen here.”

It was anxiety talking but it was also reality.

Community Transplanting

I will be 100% honest and transparent when I say I am not from the community that I was put to teach at—but I did live there for a year and did some work in the area prior. Communities are solid and this community specifically was rock solid. I loved it and I loved the culture—but I lacked the real-life experiences that much of my students faced that while I could empathize and sympathize with, I couldn’t know at a certain level to reach them. To them, I was a white woman who happened to have Mexican roots— who happened to be from the opposite side of town.

While I feel like I personally did a good job of understanding my kiddos and learning from their experiences, some of the teachers that were the most effective in their practice at this school were teachers who were from the community themselves—which were few.

Our biggest concerns for the community transplants was behavior. It seemed like teachers from the area didn’t have much trouble with this, and it’s because they know their kids.

At the school I teach at now, I seldom have behavior issues because I literally went to this school and live and always have lived in this community. The demographic is very similar to my last school, but the community make-up is so much different.

At severely underfunded title I schools, the kids function off of how the system functions. They work how the system works, and the system works in a sporadic and dynamic way. Things are always changing. Staff is always changing, admin is always changing, rules are always changing—kids don’t do well with out structure and stability. When your district is too busy spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on extravagant up-to-date laptops for staff and a flashy new curriculum that students cannot even consume with a physical copy—but your schools are constantly under-staffed and over-worked, you have to ask “what the hell is going on here?”

A veteran teacher at my previous school once told me “it’s all politics here, always has been.”

And not politics as in, the teachers are all unionized and everyone's fighting for their rights, etc (far from!) — it’s about short-term diplomatic partnerships, ego-building and resume building. Schools which become a playground for adults too loosely run around and make some rules without any solid structure to back it up, without the money to hire supporting staff—like counselors, social workers, on-site therapists, actual certified R.N’s, parapros, etc. Subsequently, these schools become a playground for students to run the school more than the actual staff can do—staff is outnumbered and staff is under-developed due to a lack of solid infrastructure. The issue has always been the lack of money and nobody, not even a Che Guevara himself could come in here and tidy up an entire district. Because the foundation it’s sitting on has already begun to rot into the ground.

When you come to one of these schools as a TFA teacher, which is likely but not always the case (some have it better than others, for sure)—you’re told by everyone in your program that you alone can be the change.

You alone cannot and will not be the change.

Some TFA are okay with that: “it’s just a job!”

It’s a job that will run you to the ground if you do not have adequate preparation and one in which one of my fellow TFA corps members (who also quit TFA) said left her so depressed that she couldn’t even eat adequately for months.

New teachers that have no experience do not belong in these schools and what TFA is doing is advancing their own charter-business model for education that ultimately has no desire to save or maintain public education in anyway. Their coaches may have this idea, but the individual actors don’t represent the “conglomerate” that is TFA.

They entice poorer graduates with up to 10k in grants to help you survive a summer without a job—a nice perk, as long as you don’t resign before your years up. Another nice perk is a discount off your tuition for your masters, but in a lot of states such as AZ, some programs cover the full cost of your masters as an educator as long as you agree to stay in teaching for as long as you have taken money from them!

On-the-job training

Nothing can adequately prepare you for teaching than teaching itself. People who took a traditional pathway can tell you that writing 10 step lesson plans based on the whatever model of teaching for 2 years will also not prepare you for once you get inside that classroom.

However

Student-teaching within these communities can help to get teachers ready for the actual experience of teaching there. Why there aren’t more student teachers in these underfunded areas? Likely because you’d have the option to switch career paths after experiencing all that for no pay.

TFA offers you a pathway to a job after graduation. Point-blank-period. One that would be harder and far-off to get with the traditional pathway towards teaching. I think this reason alone is why I personally don’t regret starting in TFA because once I got my legs and decided to find a better opportunity, I RAN.

The alternative pathway exists without TFA too, but I personally didn’t know how to get into that because it was not advertised to me. TFA was advertised to me so that’s where I went.

When you’re on the job at your TFA partnered school, there is little sympathy for your endeavour. Only once was I ever recognized or given grace for being a first year teacher starting out in a difficult school, and that was from another teacher who left an anonymous comment. You are working hard, you are worked like any other teacher would be worked—nevermind the fact you’re trying to work hard for TFA and your masters program at the same time.

Despite my rigorous on the job training, I was not prepared at all for my school year. Especially with TFA’s “training” which I took for about a month, one month prior at a controlled-setting, a charter school.

Your TFA “training” consists of some zoom calls where you talk about being an anti-racist teacher leader and some occasional pedagogy talk. The classes were run by awesome individuals, but they did not have the tools to give us a proper run-around of the things that are actually expected of us as teachers: grades, state standards, behavioral interventions, ELL, SPED among other vital facets of teaching.

TFA starts off strong with their anti-racist teacher leader talks, which are super empty and most of the times run by an awesome individual who happens to be white and insanely guilty about it.

It is important to talk about race and being an anti-racist teacher, but even more capable of preparing all of these college kids for anti-racism in the classroom is actually having us read pedagogy from a book, styling a class in a way that class should be structured for college kids who know how to read books, etc. It would have been really nice to just read Paulo Freire and discuss it in class for these anti-racist teacher sessions rather than whatever kind of programing we had, which was not memorable nor helpful.

It would have been really nice to get a step by step course on lesson planning and integrating standards, how to create lessons that cater to the needs of your students, and how to integrate all the neccesary information students need to learn before their CFA.

Instead, the best you get is 30-so minutes a day with a few students during summer school. A tutor like experience more than anything. I had a lot of fun teaching these kiddos and they’re unforgettable, but the experience did little to prepare me for a class full of students.

So, what EXACTLY were you unprepared for?

Like I said, my first year was memorable and when the sun shined it shined! But when it rained it poured.

There were days when I would go in to work and suddenly I’d get hit with the biggest vertigo attack ever.

I had vertigo spells when I got really stressed. I managed to avoid vertigo spells for about 11 months until I started my first-year.

The pressure of having to perform a veterans job as, basically a kid yourself is what I was unprepared for. I have no doubt in my mind I’d be happier going back to this position in a few years once I spend some time training in easier grounds, but the behavior and lack of systemic/structural support is what will keep me away until that happens.

Knowing what it’s like at my school compared to my last school (where there is no TFA partnership)—I know now that I should have never subjected myself to started off at level 10 when I should and could have started at level 1.

I feel like I am at level 1 at my new school and am honestly so happy. Teaching every where is hard, but I needed to be here a few weeks before I wrote this.

I am still teaching at a title I school, but the differences in structure and an okay-amount-of-funding, management, organization and resources is stark. Being from the community creates a stark difference.

Do you regret joining TFA?

I don’t regret it but I wouldn’t recommend it. I feel like it was my only viable pathway towards a career and, coming from poverty, the only quick path to start building a savings for the first time in my life.

I had worked so many service industry jobs where managers found every which way to make you feel lesser, dumb, inefficient, and useless. My first job at Whataburger, my manager named Patty (STUPIDLY) told my own uncle (who she, obviously didn’t know was my uncle) that she thought I was an “airhead”. With a bachelors degree and masters on the way, who’s the airhead now, Patty?

Even before starting TFA I was working at a cafeteria—a job which I was definitively told I basically needed to quit (by TFA) or else I’d risk being out of “good standing” with the program. I told them that I needed this job to pay my bills and I was moving into an apartment to be closer to my school-site, and I was met with some mild sympathy but a clear “you need to do these TFA things or leave the program.”

I quit the job and spent a good couple weeks without income while I waited like a damsel in distress for TFA to send me my first transitional grant payment of $2,500, of which would total $10,000 by the end of the summer.

While I feel extremely lucky to have been afforded these transitional funds (because, in real life, if you’re out of a job you’re out of money, and … tough luck!). TFA kept me afloat while I tried to save some of the funds, it all went to rent, a security deposit, the insurance bill, phone bill and basically all the needed furniture items for my new spot.

Funny enough, I ended losing a big chunk of that security deposit due to some … wild issues at that apartment. But that’s another story.

Without TFA as my pathway, I honestly don’t know what I would have done. I have seen and been through the program where most corps members are coming from financial stability and security. Some coming from the midwest, west coast, SOMEHOW being able to afford rent without a job (COUGH,,,, PARENTS,, COUGH!). I always rip on rich kids, but it’s overall a really nice thing that you can be supported financially by family wherever you want to go. I have no problem with that concept. My problem is that TFA program assumes this of us all, leaving out the students who come from poorer backgrounds who couldn’t even afford housing during their undergrad. Let alone their graduate days, too.

Rich Kids

TFA spends a considerable amount of time trying to foster rapport with their corps members, putting us in family groups where the goal is to make everyone feel as close together as possible. You learn together, eat together and are encouraged to hang out together with people who came to your city from all over the country.

I have never got along with rich kids (except on a few occasions where they give me money). The same applied to this group of people. While I made some meaningful relationships with several people, I couldn’t help feeling like a lot of these corps members were just so detached from the reality of poverty—how would they even do with impoverished kids in some of the most low performing communities?

I saw first hand that the corps members who were the most affluent, and specifically white got the cream of the crop in terms of school site placement. Everyone else, primarily less affluent, working class women of color, got put into the worst performing districts.

While we can sit here and pretend we “don’t know why that is”—we most certainly do. I was an early admittance into the TFA program, and somehow I didn’t even have a stable job offer until literally a month before the contract date started.

The priorities in Teach for America’s higher ups follow the same line that any other place of business follows: rich whites in the front, poor everyone else in the back.

Why did we get the last minute hires? Why we’re we promised one school but got another, while other corps members got to be at higher performing areas? Their retention was easier: not a coincidence.

So when those affluent white corps members become TFA alums, they’ll likely be those that work for TFA and recruit more people, and become directors of such-and-such bullshit at the diversity and inclusion blah-blah-blah. So they’ll open their own poorly-performing charter schools and create more spaces for TFA to claim they truly care about education.

These rich kids have no problem climbing the latter even if it means stepping on the heads of others, calling their mission a noble pursuit, sticking to this fantasy that they “care so deeply” about education and marginalized students when they, infact, do not.

The family that TFA tries to build is no more than a resume circle. The real friends I made in TFA we’re able to get out of that circle of careerist-relations and actually create real bonds. TFA does no succeed in its claims of relationship building, nor does it succeed in its quest for “equity.”

Concluding Thoughts

While there are so many specifics that I didn’t touch on, in general, the consensus is to stay away from TFA unless you really don’t have another viable pathway into teaching—of which there are, like ATA in Arizona. ATA can get you into the alternative teaching pathway without TFA and they’re the ones who pay 100% of your graduate tuition. Not TFA. Other states may have adjacent programs.

The students at all of these schools I have been too have been the shining beacon of crumbling educational infrastructure. Many are at extremely low levels of reading and mathematical problem solving; it’s only an insult that a “savior” program like TFA would swoop in and pretend like they’re doing anything of value for those students. TFA is only creating temporary fills for vacancies at the lowest performing schools. So much so, that when you mention you’re TFA at these schools, very little if any staff will say they are TFA. I met no TFA alums at the school I was at, which had supposedly had a decent partnership with TFA. Where we’re all the alums? They went home, back to Minnesota, Sacramento, Washington, insert city/state here.

The only hope for education is increased funding and a complete structural overhaul of much of the cities worst districts with that funding. Money is the blood that runs through the structure of education, but you also need the oxygen (organization) to carry it and tell it where to go.