In just twenty-five short years—it’s scarcely older than most of its current recruits—Teach For America has gone from a grassroots edu-insurgency to the largest teacher pipeline in the country and a dominant voice in reform debates. How’d they do it? In this new white paper, Bellwether analysts Sara Mead, Carolyn Chuong, and Caroline Goodson use internal TFA documents and interviews with key past and present staff members to tease out how the organization was able to maintain high quality while scaling up for the last fifteen years. Turns out it’s not rocket science, just hard work. TFA relied on regular measurement of applicants, corps members, and students. They’ve been equally diligent in expansion planning, taking care to evaluate each new region’s need for teachers, potential funding base, and local politics—as well as TFA’s ability to attract talent to live and teach in a given area. Rigorous quality-control mechanisms during new-site development and deepening ties in the places they already serve have fueled an expansion from 1260 corps members in fifteen regions in 2000 to 10,500 in fifty regions in 2013. And much of this has been successful due to TFA’s operational agnosticism (there’s not a lot of, “We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way” in TFA) and commitment to continuous improvement. Particularly in a sector where so many actors elevate intentions over impact, the organization’s aversion to preciousness is both refreshing and instructive. There’s plenty for other nonprofits and ed organizations to learn from here. At the same time, the report highlights the growing pains that rapid expansion has caused, including wear and tear on organizational culture. The Bellwether report offers recommendations for where the nonprofit can go next, including even more operational flexibility for successful regions, a greater focus on getting corps members to embed deeply in local communities, recruiting (even) more teachers of color, and engaging more proactively with the media to combat anti-TFA pushback.
SOURCE: Sara Mead, Carolyn Chuong, and Caroline Goodson, “Exponential Growth, Unexpected Challenges: How Teach For America Grew in Scale and Impact,” Bellwether Education Partners (February 2015).
