Teach For America brings the best and brightest teachers to St. Louis
By James Nicholson
While it is every American student’s right to receive free public education, there is little question that the education American students are receiving is disparate in the extreme. While the Wellston School District is minus State accreditation, the Clayton School District finds itself with little room to improve upon its test scores. While many St. Louis suburbs are attracting new residents because of the quality of the schools, the city of St. Louis is experiencing the opposite phenomenon—potential residents with school age children often are settling elsewhere because of the fading quality of the schools while many residents with school age children have left the city and its schools.
 Arianna Haut, teacher, Roosevelt High School (Washington University) |
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What if there was a miracle cure for the disparity in American Education? What if low achieving students and schools suddenly had access to the best and the brightest University graduates? What if those graduates were infused with a life-long desire to constantly improve American Education and to make certain all students had equal access to quality education?
Welcome to Teach For America—a 15 year old program which not only recruits, but is actively sought out by the aforementioned best and brightest graduating students and places them directly into the failing classrooms of America. In St. Louis, its effect is currently being felt in four grade schools, eight middle schools, six high schools and six charter schools.
Eric Scroggins, executive director of the St. Louis chapter of Teach For America, pulls no punches when it comes to the quality of its recruits. “Our program flips the conventional wisdom” of each year’s graduates searching out the highest paying jobs. “We have graduates competing for an entry level job and salary.” This phenomenon sends “a big message as our talent pool is enormous. Out
of 17,000 applicants (nation wide), we accept(ed) 2,100. We have 500 teachers in New York, 230 in Los Angeles, 80 in Chicago and 60 in St. Louis. We are the number one employer of Washington University grads.”
After they have committed to the program, Teach for America corps people undergo
an intense training program “The learning curve is very high,” according to Arianna
Haut who is currently teaching at Roosevelt
High School, “and we have an intense
support system.”
“Teaching,” Scroggins explains, “is leadership.” “Our teachers decide the measure of success in their classrooms. They invest in their students and their students’ parents. In the short term, we make a commitment to catch kids up (to proper academic levels). In the long term, we want to close the achievement gap (inherent in American public education), to influence both (academic) policies and practices and the people making decisions about education.” Scroggins, by the way, intimately knows the territory. After graduating from Washington University, he joined Teach For America and spent two years teaching High School in the South Bronx. (“He’s a lifer,” according to Haut.)
Talk to a Teach For America corps member and you’ll encounter an enthusiasm of near electric intensity. Arianna Haut discovered the program her sophomore year at Washington University and realized that, for her, “it was a perfect fit.” “I’ve been teaching in one capacity or another since I was twelve,” she explains. “I’m a product of the public schools and I wanted to give something back to the public schools. I want people to believe in public education.”
An English teacher at Roosevelt, she has taught a boggling array of courses running the educational gamut from Special Ed to Honors programs. The diversity has allowed her “to be able to see (academic) success in different ways. I now know that success is personal for each student. I want my students to not only be good, but to be wildly successful.”
“Teaching at Roosevelt,” she reflects, “has given me a real understanding of what it is to be a teacher. I’ve developed infinite patience.” She has also “added to the culture at Roosevelt” by being able to bring back some higher end courses, which she is staying to teach next year. “I’m a better teacher this year than I was last year,” she explains. “The third year should be very interesting.
Kermit Cook, a Physics teacher at Gateway High School, is currently completing his second year in the program. After graduating from Dartmouth, he worked as a Management Consultant in Boston before deciding he “wanted to teach.” “I went to a fabulous High School in Wheeling, West Virginia,” he explains, “and both my parents are educators.”
| Kermit Cook, teacher, Gateway High School (Dartmouth College) |
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“I really have had a fantastic experience”, he continues. “The biggest lesson I’ve
learned is that (education) is all about
setting expectations and I set the bar very high.” [This is a program mantra. “Teach For
America has taught me to have extremely high expectations,” says Arianna Haut.]
“I think I’ve been most impressed by the abilities of all students,” Cook reflects. “It’s exciting to see when a student suddenly gets it and then to see what they are able to do. Whatever it is that is broken in the (educational) system, we really have to have faith in the students.” Cook obviously possesses that faith as “I’m really excited to see how they did” is his response to his students taking a national standardized test.
Next year, Cook is off to Stanford for a MBA, but it will not be a standard MBA
program as he plans to combine it will a Masters program in Education. “(In the future) I want to have something to do with Educational Policy, to be a leader for the schools. It is impossible to become involved in this program, to see the challenges and not be inspired.”
Jodut Hashmi, a graduate of Cornell
in Public Policy and Management, is
completing her first year (“I can’t believe
one year’s over already.”) in the program
at Bunche Middle School. “The reason I
initially applied (for the program) was to
help minimize the achievement gap
(in public education). It really jibes with
my personality.”
| Jodut Hashmi, teacher, Brunche Middle School (Cornell University) |
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She finds the diversity (fourteen or so languages can be heard in the halls of
the school) at Bunche stimulating and credits the experience of teaching math as “unbelievably rewarding. It has shaped me in so many ways. I’m not the same person.” Because
of her Teach For America experience she knows she “will forever be bound to the education system in some way, shape or form.
I walk out of the school every day thinking‘Is this how strenuous it is to be a teacher?
How fulfilling?’”
Professional burnout is a hazard for educators teaching against the odds in systems that are failing. The Teach For America corps, on the other hand, faces each day and educational goal with an adrenalin rush of sheer altruistic enthusiasm.
Eric Scroggins points out that, once established in a system, the Teach For America presence grows incrementally—each year there will be more teachers than the year before. Arianna Haut points out that, unlike many a self-perpetuating program designed to maintain employment, Teach For America “eventually wants to make itself obsolete.”
That is the purest goal to be found in contemporary American education.
FRONT ROW:
Holly Knights, University of Iowa; Nicole Gealy, Indiana University at Bloomington; Alison Bordeaux-Preston, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Emily Angle, University of Missouri-Columbia; Sarah Evola, University of Missouri-Columbia; Julia Roberts, University of Missouri-St. Louis; Lauren Fine, Claremont McKenna College; Cara Cicarelli, Claremont McKenna College; Laura Paisley, Columbia University-Barnard College; Lacey Hochman, Trinity University-Texas
Row 2:
Megan Kehr, Program Director, Washington University in St. Louis; Jennifer Cole, University of Puget Sound; Lisa Nuyens, Michigan State University; Julie LaBelle, University of Notre Dame; Sara Halliburton, University of Teas at Austin; Rachel Lockhart-Korris, Boston University; Lauren Bell, Rhodes College; Libby Nells, Bowdoin College; Katie Hench, University of Notre Dame; Morgan Kuhn, Northwestern University; Jennifer Virostko, University of Georgia; Tawana Hill-Williams, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Row 3:
Eric Scroggins, Executive Director, Washington University in St. Louis; Allison Putnam, University of Southern California; Jessica Walker, Washington University in St. Louis, Susan Chun, Smith College; Lindsey Elmore, Boston University; Nathaniel Lischwe, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; Johnicka Harris, Manhattanville College; Samantha Smith, University of Missouri-Columbia; Jane Argetsinger, George Washington University; Trevor Sierra, Illinois Wesleyan University; Mary McInerney, University of Notre Dame; Sarah Herold, University of Pennsylvania; Nicole Oelrich, University of Chicago; Braden Kay, Carleton College
Row 4:
Pat Mobley, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor; Adam Zmick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Matthew Katz, Amherst College; Chad Hull, Grinnell College; John Gilbert, Indiana University at Bloomington; Alissa Briggs, Grinnell College; Meghan West, University of California-San Diego; Katelyn Hipskind, DePauw University; Barbar Zarandy, University of Florida; Lauren Jacobs, Cornell University; Juliana Pernik, Washington University in St. Louis; Shannon McDougal, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Row 5:
Chris Cronin, Program Director, University of California-Los Angeles; Christine Brooks, Northwestern University; Courtney Ehorn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Katie Fisher, Milikin University; Sarah Sanborn, Dartmouth College; Emily House, Cornell University; Patrick Poston, Illinois Wesleyan University; Jeff Kahntroff, Washington University in St. Louis; Renee Racette, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Anirban Bhattacharyya, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Keith Zander, Emory University; Scott Boelscher, University of Kentucky; Paul Lapreziosa, Boston College; Mark Mozena, Rice University; Mitch Herz, Grinnell College
Not Pictured:
Katie Pollom, Indiana University at Bloomington; Michelle McLellan, University of Notre Dame
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