Study shows TFA alums vote, donate, volunteer less than program dropouts

The study, titled “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach For America,” was conducted at the request of TFA founder Wendy Kopp ’89 and is the first to examine what the program’s participants do after completing two-year teaching terms in low-income schools.

The program is a popular post-graduation option among Princeton students. Last fall, 173 members of the Class of 2009 applied to TFA, and 29 were accepted into the program. This year’s applicant pool is expected to be even larger.

McAdam identified three groups for the study: “graduates,” who completed two years of service with TFA; “dropouts,” who entered but left before two years and “nonmatriculants,” who did not accept the program’s offer. According to the study, 89 percent of graduates surveyed voted in the 2008 presidential election, slightly lower than the 91 percent and 92 percent figures, respectively, for those who dropped out or declined an offer to enter the program.

The study also found that TFA alumni had lower rates of charitable giving and volunteering than the control groups.

The disparity, McAdam notes, may be attributed to such factors as fatigue and burnout. Another possibility, he adds, is that TFA graduates undergo a “delay in the life cycle” during their two years spent with the organization, time that their peers spend getting a job or starting a family.

Professor James Youniss, a psychology professor at the Catholic University of America, wrote a commentary that will appear alongside the study in the journal Social Forces that interprets the data differently, however. He explained that the study’s results are hugely positive for all three groups when viewed relative to the age group’s general voting rate — 51.1 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds in the 2008 election, according to the United States Election Project at George Mason University.

“Teach For America seems to know how to recruit from the most likely people to be actively engaged in civic life,” Youniss said in an interview with the Daily Princetonian. “All three groups are way above any civic measures we have for this age level.”

Furthermore, TFA’s mission to “get to the day when all children have access to a quality education” is not directly linked to civic engagement, explained Heather Harding, TFA’s vice president of research. She also noted that those who graduated and continued to work in education may not report their activity the same way as those who dropped out to pursue other areas of employment, skewing the data.

“If you’re ... working in an education organization in a low-income area and you’re doing a lot of different things,” she explained, “you might not mark on the survey that you’re volunteering and things like that because you think that they’re just part of your job.”

Despite the embarrassment of being forced to disagree with a study it requested, TFA should not be too concerned with the results, Wilson School professor Stan Katz noted.

“There is some tension here because [TFA] markets [itself] very aggressively,” he said. “To some extent, they’ve been hoisted by their own petard,” he added, “but it would be correct to say that what Doug McAdam is trying to measure isn’t their primary objective in any case.”