Teach for America seeks Bruin applicants

Several UCLA graduates will join thousands of graduates across
the country who have decided to take the problem of educational
inequity into their own hands.

There are hopes that close to 200 Bruins will become educators
next fall by participating in Teach for America, a federal
educational program geared toward teaching low-income students.

The program takes top undergraduate students and places them in
low-income rural and urban public schools where they teach for two
years. For students wishing to begin teaching in the 2004 program,
the first part of their applications must be submitted online by
Feb. 15.

TFA was founded in 1989 and sent out 500 corps members to teach
in 1990. The program now has a total of over 10,000 alumni and
current corps members.

TFA recruits heavily from the nation’s top universities,
such as the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard
University. An equal amount of students come from both public and
private universities.

Though UCLA had an increase in its number of applicants last
year, it has not traditionally produced as many applicants as other
universities of the same quality and similar demographics. The
program aims to recruit 194 UCLA students this year, and so far
eight were accepted for the first deadline in October.

Elissa Clapp, vice president of recruitment and selection for
TFA, said UCLA should be a top-producing school and hopes more UCLA
students will apply.

“The quality of UCLA students is exactly what we’re
looking for,” Clapp said.

New graduates who join the program often make distinct lifestyle
changes working as teachers.

After graduating from UCLA in 2000, Melanie Searcy joined TFA
and moved to Atlanta to teach the fourth grade.

Though she said she enjoys her job, she said teaching is very
demanding and unsettling at times.

“To get through this job you have to find rewards every
day,” she said. “The little things make the
difference.”

For Searcy, some of the rewards include raising a student from
the 30th reading percentile to the 50th percentile and taking a
homeless student to Wal-Mart to buy socks.

Searcy originally planned to leave the program after fulfilling
the two-year commitment but is currently in her fourth year of
teaching and plans to stay a fifth. She has concurrently earned a
master’s degree in education and a teaching
certification.

Searcy is not unique in over-staying the original two-year
commitment; 60 percent of the program’s teachers stay for at
least three years, said Tommy Brewer II, UCLA recruiter for
TFA.

Over the past two years, 85 percent of TFA participants
completed their two-year commitment. Nationally, 82 percent of all
first-year teachers stay in their job for two years, Clapp
said.

Brewer, a former TFA first-grade teacher, agreed with Searcy
that the poverty of the students was unnerving at times.

“The experience really puts a face on statistics,”
he said. “I had heard the stories before, but now I know an
eight-year-old who parents his little siblings and another who is
homeless.”

“My ideas about poverty and its challenges became more
realistic; the insight is just phenomenal,” he said.

Also like Searcy, Brewer relied on the students themselves to
repay him for his time by changing their attitudes and improving
their academic skills.

“The most rewarding part of the experience is seeing how
the expectations of a community can change due to your
influence,” he said.

Brewer said when he originally began teaching, he would let the
students talk their way out of difficult assignments, but then he
realized that lowering his expectations would not help the students
learn to read. He became a tougher teacher and was pleased when the
students responded by improving their reading skills.

Upon applying to the program, students are asked to rank
teaching regions in order of preference. The program places
teachers in regions ranging from urban cities in New York to rural
areas in the Mississippi delta.

UCLA student Steven LaFemina will begin teaching high school
science in Phoenix next fall.

LaFemina, a fifth-year biochemistry and American literature
student, said he wants to teach to help mend educational
inequity.

Additionally, he said he looks to the program for an opportunity
to determine his future career. Upon entering college, he expected
to go directly from undergraduate studies into medical school, but
as his studies progressed he became more interested in education.
He is currently uncertain about his future education plan.

“Beginning college, I never thought I’d take two
years off to do what I want to do. It’ll be nice to take a
step back and reprioritize,” he said.

LaFemina applied to the first of the two deadlines and has
received word of his acceptance.

Other students who are currently applying must wait until April
to hear if they will be accepted.

“I’m so nervous; I know it’s very
competitive,” said Dolores Lopez, a fourth-year sociology
student. “It feels like I’m applying to college all
over again.”

In 2003, about 14 percent of the 16,000 applicants were admitted
into the program.

Lopez plans to teach regardless of whether she is accepted into
TFA but said she would prefer to be a part of the program because
she believes the organization offers its teachers a feeling of
community as well as a support network.

If Lopez is not accepted into TFA, she will likely have a longer
training period before entering the classroom as a teacher.

TFA’s five-week summer training session mandates that the
graduates teach summer school with supervision in the morning and
undergo training seminars in the afternoon.

In comparison, UCLA’s master’s and certification
programs require three quarters of training before students head a
classroom.