Pros

Great mission. Support a good cause.

Cons

It consumes your entire life and the staff is not as supportive as they suggest they will be.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more understanding of what the CM's are going through and strive to put them before your other duties.

Pros

Great sense of purpose, interesting work on one of our nation's hardest problems
Varied job responsibilities from recruiting to mentoring to other

Cons

Sometimes the culture can be a little too goal focused when it comes to performance reviews which sometimes leads to easy goals being set.

Advice to Senior Management

I've always admired the leadership, especially after reading Wendy Kopp's book and seeing the difficulties and improvements that have already been made.

Pros

They are doing good work and truly believe in what they are doing. Many of the employees feel they are doing something special.

Cons

There is incredibly high turnover. Average tenure of less then 1 year. There is no institutional memory. Those that do stay are from the education/non-profit side and have difficulties with the realities of the business world.

Advice to Senior Management

Make a decision, are you a warm, cuddly non-profit or a corporate entity. You can't be both. When you make a change, do it with a plan, don't grow to fast. Get away from your "results oriented" mind set, all that means is you want it yesterday, and you don't care if it's even possible.

Pros

Though the job may be difficult, the ability to work with like-minded individuals made pursing the mission feasible and relatively enjoyable. TFA was wonderful regarding the amount of support available for its corps members. Loved interacting with my PDs and always felt refreshed after a meeting.

Cons

Long hours, and seemingly lack of respect from parents and administration (unrelated to TFA, but still part of the job).

Advice to Senior Management

Though many CMs are recent grads, institute and orientation should be handled more professionally and less like college 2.0. This would make the sudden transition into the professional working world that much easier.

Pros

I truly believe in what TFA does, and know that with the right people we can eventually eliminate educational inequity. The students we work with are AMAZING, and our teachers are going to work tremendously hard to see that they get what they deserve.
We are constantly completing reviews and evaluations, and the organization goes to great lengths to understand the feedback they receive, and to continue to improve on an individual and on a group level.

Cons

TFA is trying to do something that has never been done, successfully, before. Therefore, there we are constantly changing and evolving. This is necessary, and it's great that the organization is constantly working to "get it right", but this is also exhausting.

Advice to Senior Management

Still love the idea of a 3 year option for CMs with additional benefits for CMs. Also, many Program Directors make less than some of the teachers they are managing (particularly those in charter schools and higher paying districts). Finally, there should be incentives to get PDs to stay for more than one year.

Pros

This is a non-profit that accomplishes wonderful things in the world of education. The end result of the incredible effort made by you and other lower-tier employees helps improve the lives of hundreds of thousands of children in the United States that most need it. At the same time you become a member of a rapidly growing network that are supposed to have in mind the lessons they have learned while either being a corps member or employee at Teach For America, and have the ability and knowledge to help in the fight to eliminate educational inequity in the future.

Cons

Elitist, abusive, incompetent and you are constantly overworked with no reward, with promises of a future made but always seeing unqualified outside candidates get positions you are qualified for. The Human Assets department believes that the best way to ensure a work-life balance and fair spread of workload amongst employees and management levels is by constantly revamping the "performance" review to take more time, while most at the managerial level appear to believe that the performance review is the one item on the table that lower-level employees don't have to worry about completing.

Everything else, including taking on responsibilities that should be at the management level, is thrown upon the shoulders of those that receive the least compensation, recognition, and worst treatment at the lowest tier. One example is that "Coordinators," one of the lowest level positions are "Budget Trackers" while the Senior Vice Presidents are "Budget Managers." In practice, budget trackers are told to "manage up" the budget. This means they track, build, enforce, and present the budget to the "Managers" who just rubber stamp it and do none of the work.

Be warned, Teach For America has Human Asset "Business Partners" who are assigned to several other teams. While they insist that if you have a problem with your role or your managers, you can speak to these Business Partners anonymously. This is NOT TRUE. They WILL report your conversations to your managers and every level above they find necessary. This was not only my experience but the experience of several other coworkers, a fact that has been confirmed to me by at least one Vice President and a Business Partner's assistant.

Finally, if you are being hired into Teach For America at the management level or above, welcome to the glory days of your resume building as a social servant. You can live remotely, with all travel trips paid, work at home, reap great benefits, send most of your workload cascading on the shoulders of lower level employees that, unlike you, probably are taking a huge pay cut and living beneath their means, because they actually believe in the cause. Congratulations, you're in the club of CEOs on a non-profit holiday.

For those recent college graduates and entry-level workforce employees who truly believe in making a personal sacrifice to work for a cause, welcome to the days of being underpaid, overworked, and stepped on. And when you finally decide to leave for a better place, I would recommend against still believing in those promises of great things in your future and good recommendations. I've seen more than a handful of people get burned by vindictive, two faced managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn how to promote from within and advance those who are able to manage the workload of 3 or 4 people instead of miring them in a thankless dungeon of paperwork with empty promises of a better future.

Pros

The people you work with - very hard working, dedicating, innovative folks. I am continually learning from my colleagues, many of whom have become very close friends. I feel extremely comfortable sharing my opinion and I know that I am heard. I feel valued. I have many opportunities for professional development and am often given praise and feedback to ensure that I am continually growing. I work with my manager to pick out several things that I want to professionally develop (she will agree that they are beneficial to me, my job, and the direction that I want to go in the future) and we work on those 2 or 3 things for 6 months. After that, we look at progress and establish a new professional development plan at that point. In my experience, there has been many opportunities for me to explore my interests across teams: I worked on the recruitment team for 2 years and then wanted a change of pace and now work on the teacher preparation team.

Cons

Sometimes Teach For America can be too focused on work and not enough on personal goals. We're working very hard to ensure personal and professional alignment, but I think it's the area where we lag the most. Often, deadlines and work loads are determined by the individual because if that individual spoke with his/her manager about being overwhelmed, his/her manager would help to prioritize the work load.

Advice to Senior Management

You do a phenomenal job making sure that we are focused on the right priorities. You help me to see a connection between my work, those priorities, and student achievement. In part because of your work, I do not feel isolated in my operations work - I very much feel that what I do contributes to our teams ultimate aims and the organization's mission. I appreciate that you share why big decisions have been made and give non-senior management folks the opportunity to voice their opinions, when appropriate.

Pros

You will be aiding to bridge the achievement gap in areas that need it the most! To be a teacher in the program is more than just writing a lesson plan and presenting it in front of the class. To be a TFA corp member is to be a mentor, friend, and teacher to some youth that may be on the borderline of dropping out. Within the first few months working under Teach for America, I feel I made a significant impact on my community.

Cons

Expect the unexpected. I could have never imagined some of the problems that our youth endure. This is the main thing that I feel that TFA did not put across thoroughly to me, but how could they?

Advice to Senior Management

The TFA management is doing a great job recruiting college graduates and giving adequate training over the summer to prepare them for their professions. The only thing I feel that TFA could have touched more on during institute is Classroom Management. Although each classroom is different, I feel that I was not as prepared as I should have been for the environment I was entering.

Pros

It was definitely a learning experience. I was able to change the lives of some awesome children. I now know what I want to do with my life.

Cons

While it's a noble organization, and I honestly believe they have good intentions and are trying to do a good job, I think they fail in most ways. It's painful for me to say this, but I learned the hard way. Being an outstanding student and a leader in college does not make you a competent teacher. TFA cannot create teachers in a month and a half. They try, and they'll tell you they do, but the reality is that most of these teachers are not equipped to adequately deal with the challenges of the most needy students.

I do respect them because, at least, they try. But the reality is that most of these teachers have no clue as to what they're getting into. They are enthusiastic and completely naive. Most of them do not have much exposure to poverty and do not come from diverse backgrounds. For many, their expereince with poverty begins and ends with trips to Guatemala or insert other country. Most do not continue to work as teachers for the long-term.

There is a fundamental belief within TFA that kids who live in poverty just need to work harder to get the same opportunities as rich, white kids. There is an almost willful disregard of the systematic devaluation of human beings. The problem isn't that these kids aren't working hard. The problem is that the system is utterly broken.

Advice to Senior Management

Please recruit people of color and people who know about poverty. Please provide more support and mentoring before flinging teachers into classrooms. Require longer commitments and don't accept individuals who are using this as a stepping stone for a life in management consulting.

Pros

This will be one of the toughest times of your life. People will think you are crazy for going into these schools and you have to be a little crazy to do this. If you are able to succeed in these situation the rewards are huge. To actually feel like you have had an impact on one child's life is an amazing thing. To help a student change life paths and to help them to understand how things work and empower them is amazing. You will come out of this program as a machine. You will improve on yourself as a person.

Cons

Insane amount of effort required. Teach for America treats your time like it is worthless. So many hoops to jump through and waste of time meetings and sessions.

You will be in schools where the school has no control of their students. Because of "student's rights" we cannot adequately punish students which ends up taking away their real "student right" of a quality education. The system is a broken system and you will be swimming upstream. It is frustrating to make half what the teacher down the hall makes when you bust your ass and they show movies everyday. The have been showing movies everyday for 20 years though so they make more money than a first year teacher. The unions are horrible, old, and out of date.

In TFA being white, straight, or male is treated like a disease.

Advice to Senior Management

Appreciate your corps members