myths of nonprofit management and Teach For America

Grant and Crutchfield claim that "some of the organizations we studied are not exemplary models of generally accepted management principles." But they don't provide any evidence or cite which organizations are supposedly creating high impact with poor management. I would be curious to see what organizations are succeeding without strong management, or which generally management principles have been ignored.

My experience with Teach For America, one of their primary examples, suggests that TFA's success is highly dependent on strong management. I was a TFA Corps Member in1995 in the Mississippi Delta and worked as a Corps Member Advisor last summer training new teachers. The authors cite TFA's impressive growth, but even more impressive, in my estimation, is TFA's growth in internal capacity and external effectiveness.

Internally: When I was trained as a Corps Member, TFA ran one summer institute and the training was largely dependent on the knowledge of the teachers TFA hired to train us. TFA now runs trains its new recruits in six different locations simultaneously. To control and improve the quality of its training, it has developed an extensive curriculum. The focus of this curriculum is the "Teaching As Leadership" rubric - which provides a comprehensive way to assess teachers' performance and recommend next steps. TFA developed this rubric thorugh years of observations of highly effective teachers. The point - in 13 years, TFA has completely revamped its teacher training program, and this program is continually being adjusted based on data. As far as I know, no teacher education programs collect data on the effectiveness of the teachers they train and no common rubric exists for rating teachers' effectiveness or recommending ways to improve.

Externally: In the 1990s, critics of TFA began to amass evidence that emergency credentialed teachers (like TFA teachers) were less effective than credentialed teachers. However, several recent studies have shown that TFA teachers are more effective than other teachers in the same schools, even veteran teachers. On balance, the evidence now seems to point in TFA's favor. This is rather surprising given that teachers are least effectve in their first years and half of TFA teachers are in their first year. The increasing effectiveness of TFA teachers stems directly from the organization's attention to improving training and its similar efforts in improving recruitment and selection.