Teach For America (TFA) is growing. In 2013–14, some 11,000 corps members reached more than 750,000 students in high-need classrooms around the land. Yet TFA-ers remain a drop in the bucket of 3 million teachers. This raises the question of how best to allocate them. Should corps members be dispersed widely across a district’s schools or “clustered” in targeted schools? Would a concentration of TFA members in high-need schools provide positive learning benefits even for students with non-TFA teachers (“spillover” effects)? This new study analyzes the impact of clustering TFA members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS), using district level data from 2008–09 to 2012–13. TFA altered its placement strategy in M-DCPS in 2009–10 and began to cluster members in a smaller number of turnaround schools. For example, among middle schools with a TFA member, the proportion of TFA teachers increased from four percent in 2008-09 to, on average, 18 percent in 2012-13. The researchers found, however, that the higher density of TFA members in targeted schools yielded no significant “spillover” benefits—as measured by test-score gains—for students with non-TFA teachers. Too bad. But this study also replicates the earlier finding that TFA teachers contribute significant value-added gains relative to the average schoolteacher, at least in math. The analysts estimate that Miami’s TFA members added the equivalent of three additional months of math learning. (The gains in reading were statistically insignificant.) Bottom line: TFA members aren’t contagious. The gains they produce in pupils don’t necessarily rub off on other teachers. But they’re doing a heck of a job teaching math.
Michael Hansen, Ben Backes, Victoria Brady, and Zeyu Xu, Examining Spillover Effects from Teach For America Corps Members in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, June 2014).
