With a Jan. 7 application deadline looming, professors at the School of Education have begun taking aim at Teach For America, arguing that its poorly prepared teachers have little or no impact on the communities they serve, while program alumni expressed mixed assessments of the non-profit.

Teach For America takes recent college graduates and puts them through “teacher boot camp” before placing them in classrooms in impoverished school districts around the nation. In the morning, they team-teach summer school, and at night students take classes in subjects like classroom management, diversity and theories of education. Come September, students head off to rural and inner-city school districts with the goal of bringing underprivileged, often minority, students up to speed with their peers.

This approach has drawn the criticism of some across the nation, including many at Stanford’s School of Education.

Education Prof. Rachel Lotan, director of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP), a 12-month graduate program, said that while the students entering Teach for America are bright, that’s not enough.

“It’s not enough to know your discipline,” she said. “You need to be able to teach it, to make it accessible to students.”

Criticism of STEP has also come from Education Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond, who led a 2005 study conducted by Stanford researchers concluding, “certified teachers consistently produce significantly stronger student achievement gains than do uncertified teachers. These findings hold for TFA recruits as well as others. Teachers’ effectiveness appears strongly related to the preparation they have received for teaching.” Darling-Hammond was abroad and unavailable for comment for this article.

Teach for America vice president for Research and

Policy Abagail Smith, in response to Hammon’s study1, wrote a letter attacking the study’s methodology and lack of peer review, pointing to a 2004 Mathematica study that concluded that Teach for America had a generally positive impact on teaching effectiveness.

Many in the Education Department argue, with

Darling-Hammond and Lotan, that programs like STEP are

superior to Teach for America.

Like Teach For America, STEP begins in June with training at a summer school, but students say the Stanford program eases them into the profession, making the summer-school session almost purely observational.

“The majority of people taught only one lesson in total,” said STEP student Devin Ozdogu.

Ozdogu described the STEP program as built on the principle of scaffolding, where teachers are gradually given more responsibility over their students. When STEP students enter the classroom, they are placed as student-teachers under a “master teacher” vetted by the program. At the beginning of the school year, supervisory teachers do the teaching, and only in the last six weeks of the year does a student-teacher fully take over the classroom.

“There are 100 million people always ready to give you support,” said STEP student Laura Young.

In Teach For America, on the other hand, students are given responsibility for the class from the first day — and sometimes more than that.

Second-year law student and Teach for America alumnus Tim Hurley walked into his principal’s office on the first day of elementary school in the town of Marks, Miss., (pop. 1,500) and was told that he had been made fourth-grade department chair.

“I asked her, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? I’m fresh out of college and you are making me department chair?’” Hurley said.

Later, he discovered why.

“In our first meeting, I asked all the veteran teachers if anyone else wanted to be department chair, and they said, ‘Nope, it’s yours,” Hurley said. “They knew the job mainly just involved a lot of tedious paperwork.”

Teach For America members said first six months were particularly difficult.

“It hits you like a tidal wave,” says Chris Pope, a graduate student in education and a former corps member.

Still, some alums argued that concerns about limited training are overstated.

“If you’re asking if I felt thrown in the water and completely lost, I didn’t,” said Jacqueline Hoang, a 2005 Stanford graduate who taught in Watts and south central Los Angeles.

“The first year of teaching is your first year whether you’re in a rich suburb or south central Los Angeles,” said second-year Teach for America corps member Bianca Buckelew, Class of 2005. “It’s hard everywhere.”

Professor Lotan disagreed.

“Teaching is a profession, and like any other profession, it needs professional preparation,” she said. “You need to know how to approach students, you need to understand adolescents, or understand little children, as the case may be. You need to understand how to manage a classroom, how to orchestrate interactions in a classroom. [Teach for America members] will learn the hard way — if they stay.”

And yet alums said the hardships they suffered were all part of the experience. Buckelew spoke of visiting run-down inner-city schools with classrooms infested with spiders and cockroaches.

“If it weren’t for Teach For America,” she said, “those classrooms would be without any teachers.”

Hurley said that the situation in Mississippi was similar.

“If we hadn’t been there,” he said, “they would have had to hire uncertified substitute teachers, who would stay with each class for four to five weeks.”

Hurley said that students with Teach For America really had a chance to make a difference with the program. With the advice and help of veteran teachers, he moved the fourth grade from a system where students moved between six teachers each teaching only one subject to a system where students had only two teachers that taught three subjects each.

“It was one small thing that I was happy to change,” Hurley said.

But STEP student Ozdogu expressed skepticism over brand-new teachers having so much responsibility and argued that teaching internships like Teach For America should be run on the principle that “on Day One you make coffee, and you only gradually assume responsibility.”

Lotan agreed.

“Very bright people go to Teach For America because they don’t want to spend more money on education, but it’s not a responsible thing to do,” she said.

And though Ozdogu believes that the Teach for America’s selection process does enhance the quality for teaching provided, he expressed one significant concern.

“I’m worried about the not-brightest students looking at the example of Teach For America and then coming into the classroom to teach, thinking, ‘I don’t need any experience,’” he said.

Hurley sympathized with these problems, but said that those at the School of Education as well as administrators and corps members in Teach For America appreciated what was at stake.

“It’s a very real thing — you have a kid’s life in your hands, and if you screw it up then they lose a year of education,” he said. “This is real life. Being an average teacher is difficult, but it’s like any other job. If you want to be a great teacher, you have to bring it.”