Trying to close education gap

JESSICA HUANG
news@columbiamissourian.com

When Brenda Smith headed off to college, she was warned that women — particularly black women — don’t do well in math. Now the MU grad is the head of the math department at Northwest Law Academy, a north St. Louis public high school, and pushes her students to love numbers the way she does.

When Kelly Schokmiller, another MU grad, first walked into her classroom in the south of St. Louis, she found her students had nothing to write with. In exchange for school supplies, Schokmiller volunteered once a month at a local nonprofit called KidSmart. Now her shelves are stocked, and her co-workers at Busch AAA can get supplies as well.

Both women are Teach For America corps members. And though neither has a teaching degree, both are running classrooms and trying to close the education gap in some of the poorest schools in St. Louis.

That’s TFA’s mission. It enlists college seniors and recent graduates from college campuses across the country, gives them five weeks of training, then throws them into some of the most troubled and under-funded classrooms in the nation, counting on the new teachers’ idealism to make a difference.

As an organization, TFA pushes to advance its students one to 1 1/2 grade levels each year. Meanwhile, public schools are under pressure from the federal No Child Left Behind Act to improve test scores dramatically. And right now, more than 6,200 corps members have joined the ranks of more traditionally educated teachers to try to meet both of these goals.

In many senses, TFA is succeeding but sometimes at the expense of the corps members that are recruited so fiercely.

Kim is also teaching in a St. Louis inner-city school through TFA. She had fallen in love with teaching when she worked in an inner-city school teaching sex education to urban youth. But when she finally got her own classroom, she faced crises during her first year that made her question TFA’s promise to support its teachers in the field.

Kim is now in her second year as a TFA member,and is happy in her school. Even so, she asked to be identified only by her first name — as an “at-will” employee, she is subject to termination at any time and doesn’t want to invite problems. She feels she was sent to the classroom unprepared and then abandoned by TFA when she needed help most.

As tough as her struggles were, they are not out of line with the TFA model: The corps members they recruit are picked not for their traditional teaching skills but for their grit.