Photo courtesy of Teach For America

July 20, 2010 | Every would-be leader should probably envision herself, not as the captain of a smooth-sailing ship, but as a turnaround artist. A true leader will less likely be called to pilot a well-functioning juggernaut than to rescue a foundering institution.

And it’s hard to imagine a more foundering institution than American public schools. Or, rather, certain public schools: those under-resourced, mostly minority schools where students often start behind and have little opportunity to catch up. Steven Farr, Teach For America’s chief knowledge officer, reports in his new book, “Teaching As Leadership,” that fourth-graders in under-resourced schools are often two to three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities. Imagine being 9, and already three years behind.

Farr’s book is a distillation of Teach For America’s observations about what traits in teachers enable the greatest learning gains in students. The organization closely monitors its active corps of teachers -- currently, some 8,200 strong -- to determine whether their students are producing “significant gains” (which it defines as 1.5 or more years of academic progress in a year), “solid gains” (1.0 to 1.4 years of progress) or “limited gains” (less than 1 year). It complements these data with anecdotal analysis from teacher observations, reflection sessions, teacher surveys and interviews, and so on. Farr, as TFA’s “chief knowledge officer,” is in charge of training new teachers after culling the best wisdom from the findings above. “We define the effectiveness of corps members by the extent to which they increase students’ academic achievement,” he writes.

This book makes those findings available and applies them to leadership more broadly. As I read the book, I wondered not only what Christian institutional leaders might learn from these principles, but also how they can capture something of TFA’s magic. TFA stands as a challenge to the church. The organization wants to make the world better for millions, while the church that once raised its eyes so high now mostly tries to maintain its numbers.

At time when churches’ leaders are wringing their hands about their failure to attract young people, college graduates are willing to apply to a program that takes one in nine of them, pays them next to nothing, and sends them nowhere to do discouraging and exhausting work, all because poor kids need good teachers. The appeal is so much like the gospel that TFA now has significant partnerships with Christian groups like Young Life and Campus Crusade, and recruits heavily at Christian colleges.

Could it be that we are asking of our young people, not too much, but too little?

Teach For America has been one of the most innovative efforts to close the achievement gap between rich and poor schools. It has also been one of the most remarkable success stories in an age of mushrooming social entrepreneurship. Its teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps, recruits students from highly selective colleges to work for two years in some of America’s poorest districts. Teach For America harbors the further hope that their alumni will become lifelong advocates for justice in education. Farr’s book has hundreds of examples of highly successful teachers in difficult circumstances. The reader has to see only a fraction of these before she starts to agree with TFA’s promotional literature: we have the research-based means to close the education gap, much of it provided by 20,000 TFA alumni who’ve taught some 3 million children. This fits with recent scholarship detailed in Amanda Ripley’s article in The Atlantic that asks, “What Makes a Great Teacher?”: Despite all the political attention to grading schools in recent years, it’s the individual teacher that matters more.

As Christians, we can even offer a theology of TFA. It is propelled by an almost eschatological vision, summed up by Ellen Davis, a teacher from a reservation in Arizona. Farr describes her as one who “consciously stokes her outrage so as to maintain her focus and energy on the long road to academic achievement.” As in all good eschatology, the vision of the end and its misalignment with present reality inspires godly work. Andy Canales, a corps member in Miami, enthused to me this way: “I always feel like my work is like a mission! I wake up every morning knowing I am going to make a difference in someone’s life by inspiring them and preparing them emotionally and intellectually to succeed in the world. A new world is coming. TFA is aligning itself with the grain of the universe.”