Teach for America Setting Sights on Preschool

03/02/2007

Teach for America Setting Sights on Preschool

You can never learn less, you can only learn more.
R. Buckminster Fuller

Founded in 1990 by then-college student Wendy Kopp, the New York City-based Teach For America has prepared 17,000 teachers through a program that includes an intensive summer training course and four weeks of student teaching. Teach For America occasionally has had its recruits assigned to prekindergarten in the past, but last summer was the first time the organization specifically trained recruits to work in public pre-K classrooms.

According in a story in Education Week (February 9, 2007), that move reflects both a growing demand for early-childhood teachers and a demand from TFA corps members themselves, according to Catherine Brown, the director of Teach For America’s early-childhood initiative. Over the years, she said, participants assigned to higher grades have often said of their students, “‘If only I could have gotten to them younger.’”

With the 65,000-student District of Columbia public schools, as well as most states across the country, pledging to increase enrollment in public pre-K programs — and teacher turnover in preschool classrooms a persistent problem — the availability of more college-educated teachers is likely to be well received. A recent study on the early-childhood workforce in California, for example, recommended that policymakers work to attract “well-educated young candidates” into the profession. So far, 12 TFA members are working in early-childhood jobs in Washington, and another 15 are spread throughout the country, in such disparate places as Camden, N.J., Houston, and an American Indian reservation in South Dakota. The organization’s goal is to have 150 corps members working in preschool classrooms by next school year.

Part of TFA’s ongoing support for corps members here, in fact, will be visits to highly rated preschools in the Washington area so they can observe experienced teachers. An online discussion group also has been created, with the help of corps members who already have experience teaching in preschool classrooms, as a resource to give the new teachers a place to ask questions and share comments.

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