Teach For America has announced that it is winding down a pilot program that gave some of its recruits a year of additional training.
The Education for Justice pilot focused heavily on social justice topics and how teachers can better engage with the diverse communities TFA places them in. The 2015-16 school year was the first full year of E4J, as it was known in shorthand, though some TFA recruits had gone through an earlier iteration the year before. In all, TFA says about 125 of its recruits participated in some form of E4J.
The pilot鈥檚 cancellation comes close on the heels of the announcement that TFA including shuttering a national diversity office鈥攁 move that brought some . Still, this is somewhat surprising news. After all, the pilot was one that TFA CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard because it was viewed as a proof point that the organization was willing to entertain at least some changes to its structure.
as part of a package of stories looking at the organization on its 25th anniversary. At the time, the organization said it was planning to study whether E4J led to improvements in how participants did later on the in classroom, compared to juniors who applied to the pilot but weren鈥檛 accepted.
The news of the cancellation has already brought some pushback from disappointed participants.
鈥淣ot only was Education 4 Justice teaching corps members amazing lessons with immeasurable value, it was the answer to a lot of the criticisms that TFA received,鈥� in an hosted on edweek.org. Cancelling the program, she said, 鈥渋s a disservice to the students who are going to have to attempt to learn from a corps member who can鈥檛 understand the community they have stepped into because TFA didn鈥檛 keep the programs to teach them how.鈥�
TFA officials say that鈥檚 not so, because it鈥檚 , and will incorporate some qualitative feedback from the pilot into those efforts.
鈥淭he E4J pilot allowed us to start answering critical design questions and test assumptions so we could be prepared to scale up effective development opportunities for more juniors going forward. We鈥檝e learned that there is power in virtual and in-person learning cohorts. Additionally, we learned that pre-corps development can increase corps member readiness to engage effectively with students and families, and that providing a deeper focus on issues of systemic injustice and inequity in education in the pre-corps years is meaningful,鈥� the organization said in a statement.
鈥淚n this next phase, our pre-corps development team is determining how to effectively transition from small-scale programming reaching around 1 percent of our corps to approaches that would reach 100 percent of our rapidly growing base of admitted underclassmen. They are engaging with teams across our organization鈥攊ncluding our regional teams, admissions and recruitment鈥攖o ensure we are providing larger-scale and differentiated options for juniors that take the best practices from E4J and other pre-corps pilots,鈥� it concluded.