Josalyn Tresvant McGhee teaches fourth-graders in Memphis; her M.B.A. skills come in handy when she's managing the classroom
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And yet TNTP can provide something Memphis could not afford on its own: a tougher evaluation process for potential hires. Also, after TNTP fellows start teaching, they get constant, close evaluation. In August the Louisiana board of regents released a study showing that the teachers in its state who came through TNTP outperform graduates of state education schools in language arts and perform at least as well as ed-school grads in math, reading and science. A larger 2009 study by the New Jersey–based research firm Mathematica found similar results: teachers who have come through the alternative programs in weeks perform about the same as those who have taken years to earn education degrees.
Recently I met three TNTP teachers in Memphis. (They were all picked by the organization; I was not allowed to roam schools freely.) Two of the teachers were fantastic. One of them, Josalyn Tresvant McGhee, grew up in Memphis, earned an M.B.A. and worked as a banker for more than seven years. But she loved how she felt when she volunteered in schools, and she eventually left SunTrust bank for TNTP. On the day I saw her teach, McGhee, who is 31 and beguiling, had her fourth-graders rapt. She was supposedly assisting a more experienced teacher, but it was McGhee who got them enthusiastic — "We're rocking and rolling," she said at one point — without letting them get out of control.
Another TNTP teacher, Katherine Poandl, 25, ran her Hamilton High math class with the commanding mixture of patience and authority you would expect from someone who had spent many years in a classroom; it's Poandl's second. Hamilton is a tough place. On the day I visited, two police cruisers blocked one set of doors, and security guards escorted me everywhere. But Poandl was at ease. She used to be a social worker in Philadelphia, where, she says, she learned to deal with every type of social dysfunction. In her Memphis classroom, I saw her give orders to boys twice her size and not far from her age. "I should see your desk clear," she said, and the boys complied instantly.
McGhee and Poandl are the kind of teachers TNTP and the Memphis schools will rely on to change. But it was a different story with Deanna Acker, a 27-year-old Iraq-war vet and West Point grad who — despite having spent time looking for IEDs in Kirkuk — couldn't quite control her sixth-graders at Corry Middle School, a battered, ugly pile not far from the airport. Acker, who grew up in Joplin, Mo., and presents herself with ascetic plainness — simple glasses, unhidden fatigue (her first words to me were "I'm exhausted") — didn't quite have the presence to handle her class. She kept telling the kids to "slant," which turned out to be an acronym for a nongrammatical string of rules: "Sit up, Listen, Act interested, Note-taking, Track the speaker."
When I spoke with her after class, Acker was frank about her shortcomings. "People had warned us ahead of time like, 'You think you know, but you've forgotten. It's going to be crazy, and they don't act like adults.' Then you go there the first day, and you're just like, 'Whoa.' "
This is a big problem with programs like TNTP and TFA: they require a commitment of just one and two years, respectively, and like most traditionally trained teachers, participants often spend the entire first year learning their jobs. A vocal minority of TFA veterans have complained that the program does little good for the students who must endure their inexperience.
Many districts are trying to fine-tune their screening methods to help determine whether an enthusiastic potential teacher will actually be able to command and push a classroom. Since 2000, the Haberman Educational Foundation has worked with 130 school systems to train them to find nontraditional teachers to fill difficult positions. The foundation was started by Martin Haberman, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee, who helped persuade Congress to pass a 1963 law that provided funding for school districts to seek and certify teachers who had not attended ed schools.