Teach for America corps at Riley

Even on a Friday afternoon, the three young people look eager, upbeat, and happy to be teachers.

Brittani Hernandez, Michael Knutson, and Tianna McCullough are all in their first year teaching at Riley Elementary School on Milwaukee’s south side. Their schedule is grueling. Not only are they teaching full-time, in that always-tough first year, but they are also taking six hours of classes a week and meeting often for help with designing lessons and assessments-all requirements of being in the Teach for America program.

Teach for America is a 20-year-old organization that places recent college graduates as teachers in hard-to-staff urban schools with the goal of expanding educational opportunity to traditionally disadvantaged populations.

“I was raised with the idea to give back to your community,” said McCullough, a Milwaukee native now teaching first- and fifth-grade special education at Riley. “And the greatest equalizer in the country is education.” The English and French major from Spelman College said Teach for America gave her an opportunity both to come back home and to be a part of that great equalizer.

Hernandez and Knutson, too, have similar stories about the origins of their own passion for teaching. They note that they had advantages and opportunities in their own schooling that they saw denied to their peers-Hernandez, for example, said she was the only Latina in her Advanced Placement classes in Wichita, Kan. “College was a steep learning curve,” she said. “Looking back, I thought I should have been challenged more.”

Knutson agreed. “I definitely saw a gap in my public education experience,” he said, describing his all-white International Baccalaureate classes in his majority-minority school. That led the St. Paul, Minn. native to want to work on closing the achievement gap after graduation from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he majored in history.

Across the country, 35,000 other college graduates came to a similar conclusion-2009 was a record year for applications to the Teach for America program. Only 15 percent of those applicants were accepted, and the program currently has 7,300 first- and second-year teachers in 35 communities nationwide.

Teach for America expanded to Milwaukee this year after getting strong support from the Milwaukee Public Schools Board of Directors, community leaders, and area teaching-preparation programs. Hernandez, Knutson, and McCullough are three of 38 Teach for America corps members in Milwaukee schools this year.

Garrett Brooks, the Milwaukee Teach for America regional director, said the program will stay in Milwaukee “long enough to make a long-term impact.” If the program’s stay in Milwaukee follows the national pattern, corps members and alumni “become a part of the community,” he said, “as teachers, principals, activists, and community leaders.”

Nationwide, nearly 450 corps alumni are now principals and leaders in many public school districts, according to the program’s promotional materials-including elected school board members and Michelle Rhee, the current chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools.

Not every Teach for America alumnus stays with education, but most do. According to Kerci Marcello Stroud, the program’s national communications director, 61 percent of Teach for America teachers go beyond their two-year contract for at least a third year of teaching, with two-thirds staying in education long-term. National studies indicate that in urban schools like those served by Teach for America, half of all young teachers leave the profession by their fifth year; some schools see five-year turnover as high as 80 percent.

This belies one of the most common criticisms of Teach for America, that elite graduates (11 percent of graduating seniors from Ivy League schools applied for the program in 2009) use the experience as a way to burnish their resumes.

Brittani Hernandez said such concern was misplaced-though it was one she initially shared. After working with juvenile offenders as part of her political science studies at the University of Michigan, she knew she wanted to work with children, but not as part of a program that did not share her commitment. “It took me months to get my application in,” she said, for that reason. “When Teach for America does its selection, it weeds out the resume-builders,” she ultimately learned.

The Milwaukee Public Schools selected the sites for placement of Teach for America corps members. The three at Riley could not be happier to be there.

Bilingual teacher Michael Knutson said, “There are dedicated teachers and administrators at our school. Seeing the veteran teachers still there at 5:30-they’re just as dedicated as they were at the beginning.”

McCullough agrees. “I walked in with the impression that we would be the only hardworking people there. But I take my hat off to the veterans. This district is working hard to get kids to where they need to be.”

Hernandez, who teaches second- and fourth-grade special education, added, “There are problems in every school, but at Riley, you don’t see people giving up.” When she goes to her colleagues for advice, she said, “the last thing they say is ‘never give up.’”