Dive Brief:
- For the second year in a row, Teach For America, the controversial teaching corps that places college graduates in low-income schools, hired fewer teachers this year, with its current class down 1,200 year-over-year to around 4,100.
- The drop was the result of a concurrent drop in applications, as TFA maintains a 15% acceptance rate.
- The corps' all time application high came in 2013, when 57,226 college graduates applied to the program. This year, 44,181 applied.
Dive Insight:
Teach for America has drawn ire for providing just a few weeks of training and for undermining the hiring of more experienced teachers.
But some of the decline seems to be of TFA's own making. Although representatives attributed the decline at least in part to negative public perceptions, the corps also scaled back recruiting efforts after hundreds of qualified applicants ended up on waiting lists.
"It just felt irresponsible to continue so aggressively when we were getting enough applications," Elisa Villanueva Beard, one of the nonprofit's CEOs, told the Huffington Post.
TFA did focus on recruiting more minority candidates after it was criticized for placing a mainly white teaching force in schools attended largely by minority students. This year’s corps is the most diverse in the nonprofit’s 26-year history. A third were the first in their family to attend college, more than 40% were multiethnic, black, or Latino, and less than half are white. That's far closer to the demographics of the public school student body than the American teaching force at large.