<p>Does anybody who has a kid involved with TFA know what percentage of total applicants get invited to a final interview? Or what percentage of those invited to a final interview are eventually admitted? I was invited directly to the final interview phase (didnt go thru the phone interview) and I’m just trying to get a sense of what my chances are of getting in at this point. Also, how do they choose who proceeds straight to the final interview and who has to go thru the phone interview first? Would the fact that I was invited directly to the final interview sort of indicate that I have a pretty good chance of getting in (of course, I understand that it heavily depends on how well i do during the interivew)?</p>
<p>My S has also advanced to the final round (had a phone interview) and has an upcoming interview day scheduled. From what we have read, the final day is very important and you are not competing with your fellow applicants. If they feel you will be effective in the position, you will be accepted. Good luck.</p>
<p>I have some vicarious experience with TFA from all directions: my daughter went through the process through the final interview round this fall, one relative was in its first or second class and worked for the organization for years (and still works in the field), another has had extensive dealings with them as a government education official. There are also a couple children of friends who are in the middle of their TFA programs now.</p>
<p>All the views that follow, however, are my own.</p>
<p>The most important thing to recognize about TFA, I think, is that it is NOT about getting smart, well-educated people to become public school teachers. Its rate of conversion of participants to teachers approaches 0%. The paradigmatic TFA success story would be someone who went through the program, then became a centimillionaire on Wall St., funded his own Senate campaign, and was sympathetic to public education (and, of course, TFA) as a member of the Senate Education Committee. In other words, TFA is all about the Establishment, and promoting TFA.</p>
<p>That has important implications for who it’s looking for. It wants sociable, ambitious leaders. Fraternity and sorority presidents are great. Jocks are great. People who want to save the world are great, too, as long as they don’t intend to do it one child at a time, and as long as they are attractive, charismatic, and not too out there. TFA is a service club and networking system for people on their way to bigger and better things.</p>
<p>I have not heard about skipping the phone interview step. At my daughter’s college in the fall, the final interview group was about 25 people, from several different area colleges. There had definitely been some significant cut-down from the applicant pool, although she didn’t know whether that was pre- or post-phone interview. There was no fixed number of slots available, but in the past they had generally taken 8-10 people per interview set. Some unknown number were “waitlisted”. The decision came in about a week. The final interview wasn’t a single interview; it included a number of group activities and a small-group interview, too.</p>
<p>A friend’s daughter (Harvard grad) is in TFA in New Orleans. She is exactly as JHS described. I’m just happy that as a future Secretary of Education/Senator/Business Tycoon/whatever, she will have had some actual experience, in the muck, with real life challenges before she returns to solve all the world’s problems. Actually, I love her and she is a wonderful person. But she would not be happy as a classroom teacher, for the long haul.</p>
<p>My daughter went through the application process this fall and will become a TFA corps member after graduation. It was first on her list for post-grad plans, so she applied in the first cycle, when I understand the odds of acceptance are somewhat higher. She, as well as several of her fellow applicants in that cycle at Vanderbilt, were skipped over the phone interview step - no idea why. She thought it might mean that her resume and essays fulfilled whatever standards the screeners were looking for (she has extensive experience in tutoring and volunteering in disadvantaged areas). Her final interview day included teaching a 15-minute lesson, group activities and meetings, and a half-hour personal interview.</p>
<p>Perhaps because TFA is what my d wanted to do so passionately, my opinion of the organization is rather higher than the one I’m gleaning from JHS in post #5. I personally would not describe it as a “service club” - it requires two years of exceptional commitment and hard work from college graduates who might reasonably be expected to have several attractive options to choose from, even in a suffering economy. </p>
<p>I don’t know about the Wall Street centimillionaire angle (I mean, how many more of them are there going to be? And has TFA produced that many?). My d plans to take advantage of the TFA benefit of obtaining a masters in education at greatly reduced cost - she wouldn’t do that if she didn’t plan to spend most of her career in education. Law school may be in her future as well; at the moment, she would like to specialize in education law. </p>
<p>I think TFA is upfront about its mission not being to direct outstanding students into the classroom permanently, but rather to invest such individuals in a commitment to bettering public education in the US. From the TFA website: “In the short run, our corps members work relentlessly to ensure that more students growing up today in our country’s lowest-income communities are given the educational opportunities they deserve. In the long run, our alumni are a powerful force of leaders working from inside education and from every other sector to effect the fundamental changes needed to ensure that all children have an equal chance in life.” Frankly, I don’t see anything wrong with that - if teachers working alone in their classrooms could create equal access to a good education, it would have happened already.</p>
<p>My own d is not using TFA as a networking system on her way to bigger and better things. She could make those things happen without serving at a low salary in a disadvantaged school district for two years, if she chose.</p>
<p>frazzled1, I didn’t mean to suggest it was a bad thing at all. (I thought about adding “There’s nothing wrong with that,” but thought it would be unnecessary.) It is what it is, and it is upfront about it. I’m pleased that your daughter’s program offers a master’s option; I’m not certain that all do. In my vicarious dealings with TFA from the standpoint of a regulator, TFA has strongly resisted making its participants go through the CPE-type training required of other young teachers in a particular field if they haven’t had that training in college. </p>
<p>And of course, yes, it’s a substantial commitment, and “service club” was a bit dismissive. I did not mean to suggest that people don’t work hard; they certainly do. But I do think that many view it as something of the EC component of their law school applications (much as the Peace Corps was for an earlier generation).</p>
<p>Your daughter appears set and happy, but others who are committed to education should know that there are several other programs (including The New Teacher Project, a spin-off from TFA about 10 years ago) that are built aroung alternate certification, so that at the end of the program the participants are fully certified to teach in whatever state they are in, and may have either an MEd or substantial credits toward one.</p>
<p>My daughter is an engineering major who is interested in TFA after graduation. I did tell her that teaching in any inner city is NOT a cakewalk. In fact…teaching anywhere these days is not a cakewalk. It is a huge commitment. She is going to think about this…Americorp and Peace Corps as options.</p>
<p>MIT Sloan
Stanford’s Graduate School of Business
Penn Wharton
Harvard Business School
Yale School of Management
UMich Ross
Harvard Graduate School of Education
Columbia Teachers College - Summer Principal Academy
Michigan State PhD program in Educational Policy
University of Chicago Law
Yale Law
Columbia Law
Duke Law
Harvard Law
WUSTL School of Medicine
Duke Medicine
… you get the idea.</p>
<p>While it is a teaching program and the students teach in under-served districts and do wonderful things for the kids there, I don’t think it’s unfair to consider it like Peace Corps was considered last generation.</p>
<p>I myself am doing the in person interview in two weeks. I got the impression – I may have read it on the TfA website itself – that about 50% of those who received a phone interview are invited to the final. I don’t know what percentage get a phone interview and then go onto the final, nor what percentage go straight to the final, nor a solid idea how many are accepted from the final.</p>
<p>I believe that last one – how many are accepted from the final interview – is as a previous poster said: there’s no set number of “slots” and you’re not competing against one another, it’s merely a place to showcase what it is that would make you a great teacher and future spokesperson/advocate and they tap those they believe best fit their criteria for those positions.</p>
<p>If you are interested in teaching and do not get offered a slot for TFA, there are lots of Alternative Certification programs out there. I’m delighted that TFA workers get to experience life in the trenches! We need more people setting education policy to understand what it is really like working with very needy populations; not glib speakers telling us that if we teachers just “set higher standards” and “raised self esteem” everything would be hunky-dory and the kids would miraculous be on a par academically with more affluent students. :eek:</p>
<p>My daughter was accepted for TFA. We believe that one of the important factors for being chosen is to be flexible in where you would be willing to go. She was accepted to teach in Baton Rouge, which is one of their high need areas. </p>
<p>My daughter’s logic was that if she truly wanted to make a difference, then she should not quibble about the location, and would go where she was needed the most.</p>
<p>Her friends that were rejected were all very specific about where they would be willing to go. For example, they chose St. Louis, Kansas City and Chicago, and nowhere else. </p>
<p>TFA is getting more applications than ever in this tough economy. All the kids who apply are very bright, and they accept less than 20% of their applicants. If you want to have the best chance, be willing to go anywhere.</p>
<p>“The most important thing to recognize about TFA, I think, is that it is NOT about getting smart, well-educated people to become public school teachers. Its rate of conversion of participants to teachers approaches 0%. The paradigmatic TFA success story would be someone who went through the program, then became a centimillionaire on Wall St., funded his own Senate campaign, and was sympathetic to public education (and, of course, TFA) as a member of the Senate Education Committee. In other words, TFA is all about the Establishment, and promoting TFA.”</p>
<p>This is not my perception at all. My daughter is a first year corps member. She is smart and well-educated as are many of her TFA friends. The kids who graduated from her Ivy League school and went on to TFA were very smart and academically impressive. So are the other corps members I’ve met who went to other schools. They were also leaders and possess the other qualities that TFA seeks – a sense of possibility, a shared vision, passion, etc. – and hard workers. It is not true that the ratio of participants to teachers approaches 0 percent. According to a recent article in Newsweek by the author of “Relentless Pursuit, A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America”, the most recent alum survey shows that one third of former corps members are still teaching. Keep in mind that up to half of the country’s teachers leave teaching within five years. In the L.A. corps, 88% stay for a third year (the commitment is only two years.) And of those who leave teaching, many still stay in education by going into education policy and reform – people like Michelle Rhee, chancellor of the DC school district, the founders of KIPP and others. My own kids wants to go into educational policy and reform. For the OP – last year TFA had 25,000 students competing for 3700 spots.</p>
<p>Oh, one more quality that TFA seeks is a strong sense of personal responsibility – i.e. the kind of person who believes that the buck stops with them and that the success of whatever they do rests on them. That is the mentality that they believe is needed in the kinds of classroooms they are sending corps members into because they want their teachers to believe that the students’ success rests on them.</p>
<p>At both my S and D’s campuses, it is considered quite difficult to be selectedf for TFA.</p>
<p>There are some very motivated kids who’d actually like to be teachers who may not come across as the high level leadership types with rah-rah personalities who don’t make the cut. Also, again at least where my two kids are/were in college, you’d better have a really high gpa to get intereviewed. Not saying this is a bad thing–just helps to know the odds before going through the application process. Based on all this, S decided not to apply.</p>
<p>What a rude awakening for a college graduate to show up in an inner city classroom and be among experienced teachers who are less than impressed with these recruits. Talk about a dose of reality. I cannot imagine going from Vanderbilt to a TFA position. I also cannot imagine it leading to much, resume-wise. It isn’t like people who teach in inner city schools network, really. They are busy with the students and meetings and preparing lessons. I would personally be skeptical of the program and would buy my kid a bulletproof vest if she or he insisted upon going to save the world.</p>
<p>Linda, you may want to re-think your post, as it seems to originate from a profound lack of information about this organization. TFA is a long-standing (19 years), well-respected program (though it obviously has its detractors. Whatcha gonna do - there are people who don’t like the Peace Corps or Americorps, either.) You may be skeptical of it - in 2007, “11 percent of the senior classes at Amherst and Spelman; 10 percent of those at University of Chicago and Duke; and more than eight percent of the graduating seniors at Notre Dame, Princeton and Wellesley” were not. They were among the TFA applicants that year; the numbers have increased since then.</p>
<p>Fortunately, you don’t have to imagine going from Vanderbilt to a TFA position. My d has, I assure you. She’s been tutoring inner-city kids for the past 4 years. She’s done volunteer work in very distressed areas. TFA provides its corps members with intensive training, and requires them to pass the qualifying exams in the districts where they are placed. Yes, some experienced teachers are not impressed with the program; some are. As a very intelligent and well-educated neophyte teacher, my d is expecting to work co-operatively with the other teachers on staff at her school. Believe me, this particular kid is not going to fail at establishing those relationships.</p>
<p>As post 10 above illustrates, TFA has numerous partnerships with top schools and employers to benefit its alumni (meaning those who have completed at least a 2-year term of service). Thank you for making my point that teachers are busy teaching, not networking. The TFA partnerships result from the recognition that accomplished young people who are able to make this kind of commitment, and succeed, are worthy of consideration for other elite programs. You may not think it “leads to much, resume-wise,” but the most selective graduate schools in this country do.<br>
This is really pretty disturbing. Fortunately, in every generation, there are young people who “insist upon going to save the world.” The world would be in even sorrier shape than it is now if they did not. Yup, safety is a concern of mine, and of TFA’s. Let’s remember, though, that there are millions of children in this country who must live and be educated in areas where you think a bulletproof vest is in order, and no one’s providing them with armor.</p>
<p>I know only two TFA grads–SIL’s nephew, and friend and fellow teacher’s daughter. Both went on afterward to continue in teaching. Just two data points, of course, but I can’t believe I happen to know the only two that did so.</p>
<p>My friend’s D was in New Orleans for Katrina. She lost her apartment and all her possessions. AFter returning from the evacuation, she slept in the school (as did other TFAs) until they could find new housing. She worked with her mom to organize a huge drive up here in NJ to get supplies for her students. </p>
<p>It certainly wasn’t all about resume polishing.</p>
<p>“Fortunately, in every generation, there are young people who “insist upon going to save the world.” The world would be in even sorrier shape than it is now if they did not. Yup, safety is a concern of mine, and of TFA’s.”</p>
<p>And mine as well. While I am thrilled that D is a committed and caring person, I do have safety concerns. The compromise that we struck is that while I understand the need for her to teach in a potentially dangerous location, I wanted her to live in a safe place. She will be living in a neighborhood that local college students favor and renting a house with 3 or 4 other recruits, so she will not be alone. </p>
<p>If I know that she is safe, and can sleep peacefully at night, then I can sleep peacefully at night. </p>
<p>Having said that, I feel vaguely ashamed that we have the means for her to live in a better neighborhood, and that "there are millions of children in this country who must live and be educated in areas where you think a bulletproof vest is in order, and no one’s providing them with armor. "</p>