HOUSTON – State budget cuts are threatening the future of Teach For America in the Houston area and throughout Texas.
The national nonprofit organization selects top college graduates to teach in urban school districts. The Houston area alone currently has about 525 participants, the most in the nation.
Both the House and Senate have proposed slashing the $4 million that Texas sets aside for TFA. The teachers’ salaries come from local school districts, while the state pays for training.
In the Houston area, a cut would wipe out about $2 million a year from the local TFA branch, or roughly a quarter of its budget, said Terry Bruner, TFA’s executive director in Houston.
The program started in 1990 and has grown considerably in the past two decades. Many college students view it as a prestigious way to spend a few years after their undergraduate coursework before deciding on graduate school.
In Texas, TFA places recruits in the Houston area, Dallas and the Rio Grande Valley.
TFA’s supporters say that the program matches energetic, motivated and intelligent young educators with low-income students that are desperate for positive role models. They say both the students and teachers learn from each other.
"I’ve learned that I’m not as patient as I thought I used to be," said Jason Thomson, a second-year TFA recruit at Sharpstown High School who teaches physics. "But more importantly, I’ve learned that every kid has the potential to learn."
Thomson grew up in Atlanta and said that while he initially wanted to go to medical school after the program, he is now pursuing a master’s degree to become a school administrator.
But TFA’s critics argue that many participants simply use the program to pad their resumes as they seek admission to more prestigious graduate schools. Also, they contend that while the recruits may be energetic, their enthusiasm doesn’t always translate to good teaching skills since most of the recruits are fresh out of college and don’t have much experience.
Tara Lee Vaughn, another TFA recruit at Sharpstown, said that while she plans to leave the program eventually to enroll in law school or medical school, the opportunity to teach inner-city students is invaluable.
"The idea of cutting it seems almost atrocious to me," she said. "It attracts the people who are going to be leaders in the country."
Gayle Fallon, the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, said she supports the program. But she also admitted that some of the union’s more experienced members have been skeptical.
"There’s an attitude that districts would rather hire (the TFA recruits) because they’re cheap and push the older teachers out," Fallon said. "I think there’s more myth than reality to that."
But since the majority of TFA recruits only teach an average of two to five years, some teachers wonder whether the money used to train them should be spent on educators willing to make a longer-term commitment.
"Our biggest problem is a lot of them don’t stay—and really never intended to," Fallon said.
Last year, state lawmakers asked researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas to study the effectiveness of TFA teachers. The Texas Education Agency was scheduled to release that report on Monday, but still hasn’t done so.
TFA announced last week it received an endowment worth $100 million from private donors, including $25 million from the Houston-based Arnold Foundation. Bruner—the executive director in Houston—said that while that could help the program expand nationwide, it won’t make up for the potential loss of state money locally.
