Education 'Peace Corps' Expanding Area Presence

By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 23, 2007

Every school day morning, teacher Dawn Jacobs repeats a spirited chant with her young special education students at Langdon Elementary School in Northeast Washington: "We are moving and improving!"

Jacobs, 23, is a participant in Teach for America, a program that places recent college graduates in struggling low-income schools for two-year teaching commitments. Now the nonprofit organization is getting ready to put more teachers like Jacobs in D.C. classrooms, and, for the first time, in Prince George's County.

Teach for America, which has operated in the District since 1992, has 160 teachers working there this year. The number will grow to 250 in the fall, with 25 assigned to Prince George's schools. If the school systems agree, there could be 500 such teachers in the District and Prince George's by 2011, making Teach for America by far their largest supplier of new teachers. The expansion reflects what organization officials see as a new commitment to reform by the administration of D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) and Prince George's officials.

"Our mission is to close the achievement gap," said Amy Black, executive director of Teach for America-Metro D.C. "There is no reason an 8-year-old in D.C. should be two to three grade levels behind his counterpart in Fairfax County."

Black described the effort as "a domestic Peace Corps for education."

"The quality of education afforded to low-income kids is one of the biggest problems facing the country," she said. "It's our nation's greatest civil rights issue."

Teach for America was founded in 1990 by a Princeton University senior named Wendy Kopp, who posed the concept in her undergraduate thesis. Kopp raised $2.5 million in start-up funding, and in its first year, the organization sent 500 young teachers to low-income areas across the country. Since then, 12,000 people have participated. The District has 750 alumni of the program, including 18 local school principals, Black said.

The participants, who do not have to be education majors, are recruited from 500 college campuses. "We get the top talent," she said. "We look for leadership on campus, perseverance in the face of challenges." Last year, nearly 19,000 people applied for the program. The corps has about 4,400 teachers in 25 low-income communities.

The school systems that hire the teachers pay their salaries, but Teach for America provides extensive training and year-round support. Two-thirds of the participants end up in education as a career, Black said.

Dan Gohl, principal of McKinley Technology High School in Northeast Washington, has had six Teach for America teachers during the past three years. "What they've brought to the table is a commitment to learning, combined with recent content expertise," he said. "It has been an extremely positive experience."

School officials in Prince George's said they are excited about the organization's launch there. "These are people who come in on a mission, so to speak," said schools spokesman John White, "and we can certainly use their help in teacher recruitment, because we are looking for the best teachers to work in our schools of greatest need."

One Teach for America alumna, Aurora Lora, said the experience did as much for her as it did for the fourth-graders she taught for two years in Houston, from 2000 to 2002.

"Going in, I didn't really know if I wanted to stay in teaching for the long term," said Lora, now principal at a Portland, Ore., middle school. "But it was so incredibly moving. The kids will blow you away with what they are able to accomplish. After a couple of years of doing that in the inner city of Houston, I realized this was something I was cut out to do."

Dawn Jacobs, a University of Connecticut graduate, said she had been planning to attend graduate school for speech pathology when a professor suggested she join Teach for America. The thought of being a special education teacher struck a chord with Jacobs: She had been a special education student, growing up in Boston.

"I press on my students even more: 'You can achieve. You may have to do it in a different way, but you can achieve,' " she said. "I know what it's like to struggle academically."

Jacobs, as a child, had difficulties with reading, attention focus and organizational issues, she said. As a teacher, in her second year of the program, she finds herself "hyper-organized," she said, with her 11 Langdon students, who have a range of learning disabilities.

"It's really important to press on my kids, 'There's a box for your math stuff, a box for your reading stuff.' That's what I needed when I was growing up, so that's what I like to give them. I love it every time they say, 'Miss Jacobs, we're moving and improving.' "

Jacobs said the support from Teach for America has been invaluable. "I have a network of other special ed teachers going through it with me," she said. "We swap strategies, things we're doing. I can dial up my program director on her cellphone with any question. They have been there for me all along."

In Jacobs's first year at Langdon, behavior management was her biggest challenge, she said, and her mentors advised her on reward strategies and other approaches.

"One of the kindergartners came to my classroom, and he really was very busy. That was the nice way they put it," she said, referring to other teachers. Jacob helped the young boy harness his energy, giving him timed tasks and rewards -- work on reading for 15 minutes, get a sticker, work on math for 15 minutes, get a sticker -- and his behavior improved rapidly.

"It's wonderful to see him," she said. "You wonder: Is that the same child? He's getting his work done."

And Jacobs feels as if she is making a difference.

"There are so many positive, incredible things," she said, "in the trenches of the classroom."