Program Enrolls Teaching Recruits in Summer School

Take 510 recent graduates of the nation’s top colleges. Put them in intensive teacher training courses on the USC campus and in summer classrooms of year-round elementary and high schools of Los Angeles for eight weeks. Stir in large doses of idealism and enthusiasm. Then send them off to teach in inner cities and rural areas across the country with a lot of advice and encouragement along the way.

That’s the recipe for Teach For America, a new campaign aimed at easing the shortage of teachers and renewing respect for the profession. The program, which begins this weekend, is modeled partly on the Peace Corps and is the brainchild of a 1989 graduate of Princeton University.

“This is based on the theory that everyone here wants one thing, and that is to make an impact. There are just not a lot of other opportunities for people to live their idealism after graduation,” explained founder Wendy Kopp, 22, who has won national acclaim and more than $1 million in corporate and foundation backing for her idea.

Los Angeles was chosen as site for the premier summer because of the many year-round schools where prospective teachers can observe mentors and take fledgling steps in front of the chalkboard. About 225 of the Teach For America recruits plan to take teaching jobs in the fall in Los Angeles and nearby districts, while the rest go to New York, Louisiana, North Carolina and Georgia.

They are all committed to teach for at least two years, during which some can erase part of their federally backed college student loans. But even those who switch careers later “at least will have the experience to be really effective advocates for educational improvement,” Kopp said during an interview in a makeshift office at a USC dormitory.

In high spirits, the 510 new teachers arrived the past two days at USC, where Kopp’s group is renting dormitory and classroom space. Fifty education professors and veteran teachers from across the United States also are on campus to prepare the troops for the upcoming adventures in lesson plans, discipline and student motivation. The mood combines the friendliness of a summer camp with the fervor of a high-minded political campaign.

For example, Mike Loverude, 21, a Wisconsin native, graduated this month with a physics degree from Carleton College in Minnesota. He said he passed up a job offer from an electric power company and joined the teaching program out of a sense of social obligation. “I could be working in a nuclear power plant, but this is more rewarding,” he said. “If I can get through to some people and get someone to go to college, I’ll feel I did something.”

In September, Loverude will take a high school science post in New Orleans. He hopes he doesn’t experience resentment for being an inexperienced outsider. “We’re not coming down from on high to save the masses. We just want to do a good job,” he said.

James Dawson, 29, a graduate last year from Alabama State University, wants to be a math teacher in the New York area where he grew up. “This summer will let me know if I can handle it,” said Dawson. “I’ll find out if the kids think whether this guy really cares or he is foolish.” His role model, he said, is his high school math teacher who, Dawson recalled, “helped me to believe in me.”

Carmen Pacheco and Miguel Ceballos, a married couple, moved from Texas back to their native California for Teach For America. They said they were attracted by the program’s strong emphasis on multicultural learning.

A 1983 graduate of Mills College, Pacheco, 30, recently worked in Texas educating farm workers about the safe use of pesticides. She hopes to transfer those skills to a bilingual elementary school class in Los Angeles. Her husband attended Roosevelt High in Los Angeles, has a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley and a master’s in Latin American studies and economics from the University of Texas. Ceballos, 34, wants to teach math at Roosevelt because, he said, “I believe I have a responsibility to contribute something back to my community.”

All recruits receive room and board for the summer, while the neediest can get a $25 weekly stipend. Starting salaries in the fall range from $17,000 to $29,000 a year, depending on the school district.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is delighted to have all 510 as student teachers this summer and to keep about 100 as full-time instructors in the fall, according to Bob De Vries, director of university-college relations for the district. “This is a kind of recruiting for us and it at least gives these people an induction program for eight weeks, which is certainly better than coming off the street.”

De Vries said some participants may be naive about the realities of city schools. But he said their energy and idealism “is beautiful and I wouldn’t see any reason why they wouldn’t be very successful.”

There have been similar programs, notably the federal Teachers Corps, which was born during Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty and died during cutbacks in the Reagan Administration. Also, California and other states with teacher shortages allow college graduates without formal teacher training to work in the classroom on a provisional basis if they pass special tests and take courses for a credential.

Teach For America members will have to abide by those state rules and pass those tests. But Kopp stresses that her program is special because it is so selective and designed to create esprit de corps among energetic young people. After recruiting at 100 colleges, the organization chose 510 of 2,500 applicants. In the fall, it will have offices in six areas around the country where its full-time staff of 21 can offer workshops and support for new teachers.

Teachers hired without formal credentials often feel overwhelmed and isolated, said Carl Grant, who is dean of the program’s summer faculty at USC. A professor of education and Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Grant said the summer courses will stress collegiality and professionalism in teaching, down to details about proper dress.

Grant bristled at a suggestion that he is working on an experiment: “In an experiment, there is the possibility that something might not possibly work. This is going to work.” Yet he cautions against expecting any “60-day wonders” from the summer institute.

So far, Teach For America has overcome some big obstacles. The valedictorian at her Dallas high school, Kopp wrote her senior thesis in public affairs at Princeton about a new teacher corps--an idea sparked at an education conference in 1988. Then she began banging on the doors of corporate America, eventually garnering donations from Mobil, Xerox, Chrysler, Philip Morris and others. She now has to raise another $1.2 million to receive a $500,000 challenge grant from Texas businessman H. Ross Perot. Hollywood circles are sure to hear from her in the next few weeks.

Kopp wants Teach For America to have 1,000 recruits in next summer’s group and to attain the respected status of the Peace Corps. “We’re hoping it becomes an American institution,” she said.