Evaluation of the Teach For America Investing in Innovation Scale-Up

Teach For America (TFA) is a program that strives to reduce educational inequities through the provision of high–quality teachers to low–income schools. The program recruits and trains college graduates with strong academic backgrounds and leadership capabilities to commit to teach for two years in public schools in low–income communities. These teachers, called corps members, typically have no formal training in education but receive an intensive five–week training from TFA before beginning their first teaching job. They also receive ongoing support from TFA throughout their two–year commitment.

In 2010, TFA launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five–year Investing in Innovation (i3) Scale–Up grant of $50 million from the U.S. Department of Education’s (ED’s) Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII). This was one of four i3 scale–up grants, which were awarded to fund expansion of programs with rigorous evidence of prior effectiveness in improving student achievement. Through the i3 scale–up project, TFA plans to increase the size of its teacher corps by more than 80 percent by September 2014, with the goal of placing 13,500 first– and second–year corps members in classrooms by the 2014–2015 school year, expanding from 39 to 52 to 54 regions across the country, and accounting for more than 20 percent of new hires in high–poverty schools in these regions.

TFA has contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to conduct a rigorous evaluation of the i3 scale–up project’s effectiveness. This evaluation will include an analysis of the scale–up’s implementation as well as an analysis of the impact of elementary school TFA teachers recruited in the first and second years of the scale–up.

2012-08-01

2013-05-31

Student reading and math test scores

Students in grades pre-kindergarten-2: Study-administered Woodcock-Johnson III Normative Update (NU) Tests of Achievement: Letter-Word Identification (grades prekindergarten–2), Passage Comprehension (grades kindergarten–2) subtests, Applied Problems (grades prekindergarten–2) and Calculation (grades 1–2) subtests.

Students in grades 3-5: Spring 2013 state reading and math assessment scores from district records

All scores converted to z-scores using control group means and standard deviations.

Random assignment of students to class taught by TFA teacher or class taught by teacher from some other teacher preparation program in the same grade and school.

Randomization conducted by researchers using computer program.

Students

No

4,466 students

4,466 students

2,233 students assigned to TFA teachers, 2,233 assigned to teachers from other programs.

0.10 standard deviations of test scores

In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation scale-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education. To examine the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the scale-up, we recruited thirty-six schools from ten states and randomly assigned students in participating schools to a class taught by a TFA teacher or a class taught by a comparison teacher. We then gathered data on student achievement and surveyed teachers on their educational background, preparation for teaching, and teaching experience. The TFA teachers in the study schools had substantially less teaching experience than comparison teachers but were more likely to have graduated from a selective college. Overall, TFA and comparison teachers in the study were similarly effective in teaching both reading and math. TFA teachers in early elementary classrooms (grades 2 and below), however, were more effective than comparison teachers: TFA teachers in prekindergarten through grade 2 had a positive, statistically significant effect of 0.12 standard deviations on students’ reading achievement, and TFA teachers in grades 1 and 2 had a positive, marginally significant effect of 0.16 standard deviations on student math achievement.

Melissa A. Clark & Eric Isenberg, 2020. "Do Teach For America Corps Members Still Improve Student Achievement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of Teach For America's Scale-Up Effort," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 15(4), pages 736-760, Fall.

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