Teach for America seeks more UW grads

Teach for America recruiter Garrett Bucks doesn’t particularly like to cite statistics, but there’s one he just can’t help but mention: Based on the number of students taught by its corps members, Teach for America is now the third-largest school district in the country.

The 17-year-old organization, which places recent college graduates into low-income school districts with teaching shortages, has grown from 500 members in its second year to more than 5,000 members for the 2007-2008 school year, Bucks says. These 5,000-plus corps members are teaching more than 440,000 students – making Teach for America approximately the same size as Chicago’s school district – in areas of the country ranging from New York City to New Orleans to the Rio Grande Valley.

And it hasn’t finished growing yet: Bucks is currently working to recruit corps members for the next school year from Wisconsin campuses, including UW–Madison, Marquette, UW-Milwaukee and Beloit College.

Teach for America has four different application cycles, with the next deadline coming up on Sept. 21. The first round of the application process consists of submitting a resume and two 500-word essays to the organization’s Web site. A portion of applicants are called back for a second-round phone interview, and again for a third, in-person interview that lasts the entire day and involves individual as well as group discussions of the program and current issues in education.

"Every stage that we have is there for a reason … We’re really hoping that by the end of that, we have a really good sense of who you are and you have a good sense of what we are and do as an organization," Bucks says.

Teach For America sees tremendous recruiting potential from UW–Madison, he adds, because of its combination of high academic standards and student involvement, including more than 700 student organizations.

"This is a campus with such an emphasis on social concerns, with such an emphasis on making a difference," he says. "Literally you cannot trip on this campus without stumbling upon an opportunity to do something great."

This passion for effecting change, he says, is one of the primary qualities Teach for America staff members look for in those who apply to work in the highly selective program. Last year, more than 18,000 college students applied to join Teach for America and about 3,000 were chosen to join the program and work as salaried teachers in the 26 regions it currently serves.

Basing their program on past successes, Bucks says, is another reason why the organization is targeting UW–Madison students. In the past three years, more than 100 UW–Madison students have been in involved in Teach for America, and many of them have been highly successful in it, he says.

One of these former corps members is Annemarie Ketterhagen, a 2003 UW–Madison graduate in education who spent 2003 through 2005 teaching 8th grade English in New York City. Ketterhagen has spent two summers working in Teach for America’s summer training institute for newly admitted members, and recently returned to Wisconsin to open a UW charter school in Milwaukee called the Milwaukee Renaissance Academy.

Ketterhagen says she heard about Teach for America through a friend during her senior year of college, and automatically decided to apply when she heard what the program was about.

"One of my friends went to an info session about Teach for America and came back from it and was like, ‘Annemarie, there’s this organization and it’s geared toward non-teachers, but it’s like you in an organization,’" Ketterhagen says. "She [told me], ‘All of the stuff that you talk about all the time were the type of things that they were talking about in terms of closing the achievement gap and putting high quality teachers in urban and low-performing schools.’"

Working for Teach for America for two years, Ketterhagen says, gave her a network of contacts to help her in creating the charter school. This network, Bucks adds, also helps first-year corps members by ensuring them they are not alone in the program.

Additional resources for corps members serving, he says, are other non-Teach for America teachers. By using non-corps teachers in their training process and emphasizing humility when entering a new school district, he says Teach for America aims to bolster traditional education rather than replace it.

"We’re not here to replace anybody, we’re not here to come in and say ‘We’re the only solution,’" he says. "We’re coming to say that we want to be part of any positive change that’s happening."

Being a part of change in the lives of lower-income students also can extend past a corps member’s two-year service. While many Teach for America alumni, like Ketterhagen, remain in education, others, such as 2004 UW–Madison graduate Rachel Eckenthal, go on to get additional degrees or work in other fields. This, she says, allows Teach for America’s mission to spread beyond the field of education.

"There’s such a deficit in good teachers in these urban and rural schools – I think [teaching] makes a huge difference, but again, it’s not the only variable," she says. "We need people in every discipline rallying around this cause and this movement because I think that’s what’s going to ultimately make change happen, is getting TFA alumni to infiltrate into every aspect of society."