It seems counter-intuitive that a program designed to send high-octane college graduates into high-poverty schools would produce graduates with a limited sense of civic engagement. But a sweeping new study by two Stanford University professors suggests just that. The study is published in an academic journal and isn’t available on the Web.
According to a New York Times article on the study:
In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.
The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.
Wendy Kopp, TFA’s founder, counters that:
“It’s hard to see the incredible outpouring of interest among this generation and think of it as a lack of civic engagement,” Ms. Kopp said.
“Unfortunately,” she added, “it doesn’t seem as if this study looked at Teach for America’s core mission, by evaluating whether we are producing more leaders who believe educational inequity is a solvable problem, who have a deep understanding of the causes and solutions, and who are taking steps to address it in fundamental and lasting ways.”
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This seems a fascinating study that I look forward to reading. I do wonder if the NYT’s article did the study justice. My guess is that the findings are a bit more nuanced.
I’m very impressed that Doug McAdams, one of the nation’s leading social movement scholars would take on such an important and relevant study. For those not familiar with McAdams, check out Freedom Summer or Movements and Organizations. I’ve always thought TFA was more powerful as social movement for education reform than a solution for improving the quality of teaching though it certainly helps a great deal.
While I’m somewhat surprised by the McAdams conclusions given my experience with TFA graduates, I wonder if there are some lessons for all of us working on these issues. I’d also like to know more about what TFA graduates are doing more or less of compared to the comparison groups. Are TFA grads more focused on education at the expense of other kinds of civic engagement or are they just less engaged in all areas? Another really critical question is related to the influence of TFA on the education reformer pipeline. It seems TFA has had a powerful impact judging from the number of non-profit, school, district and now political leaders with a TFA pedigree.
This is interesting, but also seems sort of odd research to me. If Wendy Kopp asked for the study in the first place, that is strange because it seems framed inappropriately. And, the research seems to have some glaring methodological concerns.
I’ll caveat this by noting, like Van, that I’ve not read the actual report, just the newspaper article, so there are probably nuances I’m missing.
Still, it appears that the key research question is: did the people who were both selected for TFA in the 1990s, and who served with TFA later show higher levels of non-education civic engagement (voting, charitable giving, etc) than the people who were selected for TFA but declined that experience? The “treatment” tested is meant to be whether actually serving in TFA enhanced non-educational civic engagement, but it has all kinds of methdological problems.
Social scientists face thorny “selection problems” in doing this type of research. This one seems problemmatic to me, comparing those with TFA experience to those who applied but decided not to participate. Perhaps the non-TFAers decided not to join TFA because they had other civic or political interests they wanted to pursue (which would make them more likely to be civically engaged in future). This was not a charter school “lottery” where random choice determined who got the treatment – those treated selected themselves. This, by itself would throw the results into question.
Now the study apparently does show, as would be expected, that TFA graduates show higher civic engagement than others in their age cohort, just not higher than the people who rejected TFA.
This whole approach seems odd, in the sense that the big claim about TFA graduates is that they are disproportionately involved in education related engagement, which is apparently not included here. They start schools like KIPP, they go to work at Gates Foundation, or they become highly paid consultants or investment bankers who also serve on their local school boards. To focus on their general charitable giving seems somewhat besides the point, to me.
And, none of this seems parallel to studying people who engaged in political reform efforts in the 1960s, like civil rights or joining the Peace Corp.
This also reminds me of controversial research I have done, which showed that parents who made school choices were then more likely to be more involved in school and education activities, in a sense building social capital in the education arena. This work, published in the American Political Science Review in 1997, with a more layman’s oriented version in the 1997 The Public Interest, has been highly cited, but also heavily criticized on methodological grounds. My co-authors and I performed a two-stage instrumental variables approach to address the “selection problem” that parents who choose schools are also likely to be parents who want to be more involved in their child’s school activities. I think some of these methodological criticisms are reasonable, and they point out that there is no easy solution to these selection problems. Still, I think the question of whether the act of utilizing school choice (the “treatment”) activates parents to become more involved in educational activities is more important than whether actual TFA graduates give more money to charity than do those who rejected TFA service.
I couldn’t dig up a digital copy of the article either, but I did find a copy of the abstract oh the journal’s web page. I’d love to see how “pro-social” jobs were defined, and what the five measures of civic engagement were.
Assessing the Effects of Voluntary Youth Service:
The Case of Teach for America
Doug McAdam, Stanford University
Cynthia Brandt, Stanford University
We use survey data from all accepted applicants to Teach for America 1993-98 to assess the longer-term effect of youth service on participants’ current civic attitudes and behaviors. While TFA “graduates” score higher than the two comparison groups – “dropouts” and “non-matriculants” – on a broad range of attitudinal items measuring civic commitment, these differences appear to be less a byproduct of the TFA experience than a reflection of current involvement with the TFA organization. Moreover, the attitudinal differences are not reflected in actual civic behavior. Specifically, graduates lag behind non-matriculants in current service activity and generally trail both non-matriculants and drop-outs in self-reported participation in five other forms of civic/political activity measured in the study. Graduates also vote at lower rates than the other two groups. Finally, fewer graduates report employment in “pro-social” jobs than either non-matriculants or drop-outs. We close by speculating on what mechanisms may help explain variation in the long-term effects of youth service or activist experiences.