Students listen to a presentation by Kwame Griffith from Teach for America last Wednesday night.
In the spring of her senior year, Jessica Shyu was, like most college seniors, trying to decide her next move.
Shyu, a journalism and government and politics major who graduated last spring, had been offered a job with USA Today, the nation’s largest newspaper. She had also applied to Teach for America, a program that places recent college graduates of all majors in two-year positions at low-income urban and rural schools in an effort to close the educational gap in the United States.
“When I got the acceptance package [from TFA], I knew immediately I was going to take the job,” Shyu said. “Somehow I felt incomplete and unprepared for the real journalism world. I could churn out articles on deadline and gain praise from my editors, but something kept me from connecting fully with my interviewees, my readers and the subjects I wrote about.”
Shyu was not alone in her choice. Increasingly, soon-to-be college graduates are choosing to defer longer-term career goals and potentially higher incomes in favor of a commitment to service.
Teach for America, which was developed in 1989 by a Princeton graduate and offers students the same pay and benefits as other first-time teachers, began with 500 corps members. By 2000, the program had tripled its numbers, and today there are 3,500 corps members teaching in more than 1,000 schools nationwide.
In 2005, 12 percent of the senior class at Yale, 11 percent at Dartmouth and 8 percent of Princeton and Harvard applied to Teach for America, and the rising application numbers have been seen at Maryland, too.
Last year, 109 seniors applied, of which 24 were accepted and 17 decided to commit. Area Teach For America recruitment officers said they hope to accept at least 30 Maryland students this year.
TFA is similar to programs such as Peace Corps and Americorps. The Peace Corps sends college graduates to various locations around the world to help with everything from rebuilding governments to rebuilding homes, teaching HIV/AIDS awareness to teaching the ABCs.
Though TFA looks for highly qualified students to become teachers with the program, there is no limit to the number of students who will be accepted if qualified.
“TFA has taken a lot of time to research the characteristics that are predictive of success, but we do not have a set number of students that we can take from Maryland, so this is not a competitive program,” said Kwame Griffith, recruitment director for TFA at University of Maryland, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins.
Griffith said interest in TFA has been growing nationwide in what he calls “a generational call to action.”
“There is a massive injustice going on,” said Griffith, who taught fourth and fifth grade in Houston in 2002. “People want to have an immediate and direct impact.”
Vaughn Stewart, a senior English and anthropology major who is applying to the program this year, is looking for just that.
“Teach for America isn’t a lifetime commitment, but it’s long enough to make a noticeable change,” Stewart said. “As we graduate, we can take a desk job pushing papers, or one of the hardest careers and see everyday how our students learn even the most fundamental things they need to succeed. To me, that seems so much more real.”
Though TFA doesn’t require a lifetime commitment from its members, many TFA alumni continue teaching. In fact, of the 10,000 alumni of TFA, 63 percent are still working in education and all but 10 percent of those are still working in low income areas.
Shyu, who picked TFA over USA Today, now teaches special education on a Native American Indian reservation in Tohatchi, New Mexico. She said her experience has shown her the rewards of serving others outweigh the pay and perks she could have enjoyed at another job.
“No pay raise or award can compare to watching 12-year-old Julius read a book, Curious George, to me for the first time in his life,” she said.
Brian Katkin contributed to this story. Contact reporter Emily McAllen at newsdesk@dbk.umd.edu.
