Do Teach For America Corps Members Still Improve Student Achievement? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial of Teach For America's Scale-Up Effort

Melissa A. Clark () and Eric Isenberg ()
Additional contact information
Melissa A. Clark: Mathematica Policy Research Princeton, NJ 08543-2393
Eric Isenberg: Westat Rockville, MD 20850-3129

Education Finance and Policy, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 736-760

Abstract: In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation scale-up grant from the U.S. Department of Education. To examine the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the scale-up, we recruited thirty-six schools from ten states and randomly assigned students in participating schools to a class taught by a TFA teacher or a class taught by a comparison teacher. We then gathered data on student achievement and surveyed teachers on their educational background, preparation for teaching, and teaching experience. The TFA teachers in the study schools had substantially less teaching experience than comparison teachers but were more likely to have graduated from a selective college. Overall, TFA and comparison teachers in the study were similarly effective in teaching both reading and math. TFA teachers in early elementary classrooms (grades 2 and below), however, were more effective than comparison teachers: TFA teachers in prekindergarten through grade 2 had a positive, statistically significant effect of 0.12 standard deviations on students’ reading achievement, and TFA teachers in grades 1 and 2 had a positive, marginally significant effect of 0.16 standard deviations on student math achievement.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/edfp_a_00311 (application/pdf)
Access to PDF is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:edfpol:v:15:y:2020:i:4:p:736-760

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1557-3060

Access Statistics for this article

Education Finance and Policy is currently edited by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Randall Reback

More articles in Education Finance and Policy from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().