One Day Teach For America Alumni Magazine

Inner Workings

Rallying the Troops

A closer look at Teach For America’s relentless recruitment team.

Rallying the Troops

For recruitment director Jack Carey, inspiring talented college seniors to join Teach For America is about more than just numbers—it means starting a revolution

By Calvin Hennick (N.Y.C. ’04)
Photographs by Jean-Christian Bourcart

Jack Carey (N.Y.C. ’04) neds his teacher voice today.

Seven hundred University of Illinois students in a nutrition class are slumped under their hoodies, lulled by their professor’s explanation of how their grades will be calculated this semester.

Now it’s Carey’s turn. He has 10 minutes. Dressed in a navy suit, the Teach For America recruitment director walks to the front of the lecture hall and begins speaking to the group without a microphone. He stands beside a glowing projector screen that reads: “One day you’ll look back on your life and wonder, ‘Did I make a difference?'”

The students begin to glance up from their doodles as Carey shares sobering statistics about the achievement gap. The stats come to life as Carey describes his own experience of teaching in New York City. His students entered the fifth grade reading at a third grade level on average, he says. By the end of sixth grade, most students were at grade level. One girl, he mentions, now attends a college preparatory academy.

“She’s got a 1-in-10 shot of ending up in seats like these. Not because of how smart she is, but because of where she was born,” Carey says. “She’ll beat those odds.”

When Carey collects the students’ sign-in sheets, he hopes they’ll include the names of a few strong prospects, whom he will then invite to one-on-one meetings. While large-scale presentations like these help to get the word out about Teach For America, they are just one way of identifying promising prospects on campus.

Most of Carey’s leads, in fact, come from a database of college students identified by Teach For America as high achievers based on GPA or campus leadership. At the beginning of the school year, recruitment directors sift through the records and assign each prospect a priority rating that they use to guide their outreach.

“It seems a bit weird at first,” Carey acknowledges. “You’re sort of categorizing people. But if the alternative is simply coming to campus and meeting with everybody and anybody, it seems there’s more risk there.”

“We need the top graduating college seniors to take this on, not just people who look at a poster and say, ‘I was born to do this,’ ” says Elissa Clapp (G.N.O. ’96), vice president of recruitment for Teach For America. “That means sitting down with them, telling them about the problem, and then convincing them that this is something they can do. You’ve got to find them; you’ve got to get in front of them; you’ve got to follow up with them.”

By January, Carey has conducted around 350 one-on-one conversations with students, mostly at a quiet table at Moonstruck Chocolate Café on campus. His days are packed with up to 15 meetings, to which he consistently brings the same high level of energy and conviction. Such one-on-ones are at the heart of Carey’s and every other recruitment director’s job. They are the reason he woke before 5 a.m. today to make the drive from his Chicago apartment, and the reason the Moonstruck staff keep a “reserved” table tent on hand for him.

The conversations give Carey an opportunity to address the apprehensions many seniors feel. “There are lots of barriers to applying that someone might be feeling,” Carey says. “ ‘Will my parents support this?’ or, ‘Is it smart to wait to go to law school?’ ”

He frequently taps Teach For America corps members and alumni to help, arranging for prospects to visit a corps member classroom or have a conversation with an alumnus who deferred medical school for the corps.

Yet the most effective strategy, Carey has found, is to get prospects fired up about closing the achievement gap. “They have to see that educational inequality is America’s greatest injustice—yet at the same time, this is a problem that is entirely solvable. At a minimum, when they leave a meeting with me, I want them to really be incensed by the inequalities that defined my students’ educational opportunities, regardless of whether they apply or not.”

Such personal attention to each recruit’s needs is central to the recruitment team’s success. Teach For America has seen a 36 percent increase in applications this year, with nearly 25,000 college seniors and recent graduates applying for the 2008 corps. In each of the past three years, applications have hovered between 17,000 and 19,000. Teach For America is on track to place approximately 3,800 new teachers this fall, well ahead of the organization’s expansion goal of 3,400. Last year’s entering corps numbered around 2,900.

Still, recruitment efforts aren’t just about racking up applicants, Clapp says. The team’s goals actually center on the number of people who end up joining Teach For America. “Some people think that we are fishing around randomly, that we’re not going after the right people,” she says. “Or the opposite—that we’re just going after a small band of people. It’s neither. You need the numbers, but you also need the right people in the classroom.”

“When we say that recruitment has improved over the years, it’s not just that they’ve gotten in front of more people, although they have,” says Monique Ayotte-Hoeltzel (Delta ’98), vice president of admissions. “It’s that they’ve gotten in front of more people who have more of the traits that we’ve seen drive effectiveness in the classroom.”

Application Numbers

Are Growth and Quality at Odds?
As applications have skyrocketed and Teach For America has forged high-profile partnerships with such companies as Google and Goldman Sachs (both of which offer two-year job deferrals to corps members), some are wondering if Teach For America’s aggressive recruiting efforts are yielding corps members who have the same long-term commitment to the mission of change.

Alumna Erica Morrison McBride (Houston ’02) agrees that the growth has been “tremendous” and is generally in favor of Teach For America’s expansion, but she worries that the pressure to boost numbers may compromise the quality of corps members and future alumni. “I just feel like, as an organization, we really need to pay closer attention to our roots and where we started as a movement—seeking people who first and foremost had a strong conviction and passion for the idea,” says McBride, a former Teach For America program director who is now teaching high school in Rochester, Minn. “It’s that core spirit that will keep TFA alive and growing, maybe not at as fast a rate, but at one that will produce more success in the long run.”

Yet Clapp says that while some students come to the process with a burning desire to effect long-term change, others develop a commitment to the mission as they go through the application process—a transformation that Teach For America believes is strengthened through the corps experience. “They’re learning so much about it,” Clapp says. “They just had no idea.” (Sixty-seven percent of alumni continue working in the field of education, a percentage that has remained roughly constant since Teach For America’s founding.)

“You can’t rule somebody out just because they may not have had exposure to the achievement gap,” says Carey, who notes that his own passion for the mission started during his application process as a senior.

Lynne Sebille-White is a senior assistant director in the career center at the University of Michigan, historically one of Teach For America’s largest feeder schools. She says she’s glad that recruitment directors contact a large swath of top students, because seniors who don’t buy into the organization’s mission won’t apply anyway.

While a high level of commitment to Teach For America’s mission isn’t essential in the early stages of recruitment, Clapp says, it becomes critical once the prospect applies. “By the time they get to the admissions stage, they clearly need to be able to demonstrate a knowledge of the problem, what we’re trying to do about it, and a belief that they can change it.” (Acceptance rates have decreased by about 10 percent since the mid-1990s, as the selection model has evolved to favor competencies and qualities that have proven to be predictors for increasing student achievement.)

Clapp says the recruitment team does its best to be transparent about the challenges of the corps experience, in some cases arranging for prospects to visit corps members’ classrooms, as Carey does. “Nobody wants to blindside anybody,” she says. “Not surprisingly, our most competitive candidates [become] even more inspired. If they walk out of that classroom saying ‘Whoa, whoa, that’s hard,’ and they don’t have a sense of agency about it, well, better that we know that now.”

Strength in Diversity
Broadening the pool of applicants and recruiting corps members of color and of varied socioeconomic backgrounds is a distinct priority given the high numbers of poor and minority students served in Teach For America placement regions.

“When I think about the impact that I had with my students, I deeply believe that we could have made more progress—and done it more quickly— if my students could see themselves in me more visibly,” Carey says. “We have a real responsibility to reflect the diversity of our students’ backgrounds in our corps members.”

To this end, the recruitment team has goals centered around both socioeconomic and racial diversity: They’re striving for a 2008 corps where 27 percent are Pell grantees and 31 percent are students of color, with African-American and Latino/ Hispanic thresholds of 10 percent and 7.5 percent, respectively.

Clapp says these goals reflect a desire to over-represent African Americans, Latino/Hispanics, and Pell grantees in the corps compared to the entire pool of college seniors, where each racial group stakes about a 5 percent share, and Pell grant recipients represent 17 percent. (The goal for African-American applicants is slightly higher than that for Latino/Hispanic applicants because Teach For America has, thus far, made more headway with this group.) “You can imagine that a lot of organizations and graduate schools are trying to increase their diversity as well, so we have serious, serious competition,” Clapp says.

Over the years, Teach For America has recruited heavily on campuses likely to yield the highest numbers of diverse candidates, and every recruitment director is held to ambitious diversity goals. In addition, says Clapp, several members of the national team are dedicated solely to this effort. One recruitment director works exclusively on a portfolio of historically black colleges and universities, while three staff members lead outreach to organizations whose members are predominantly people of color, such as Gates Millennium Scholars and Ron Brown Scholars. The team also focuses on developing partnerships with organizations such as the Posse Foundation, which serves students from predominantly underresourced backgrounds.

“Our recruitment directors spend significant amounts of their time sourcing and cultivating diverse candidates,” Clapp says. “It’s part of the DNA of our team.”

Later this evening, Carey will lead a strategy session with college students hired to support Teach For America’s campus outreach and then he’ll attend a dinner with accepted applicants. But for now, he’s back at the Moonstruck, bearing belated Christmas presents for the staff. He has a dozen one-on-one meetings scheduled. Even though he knows he’ll be up until 11 p.m. e-mailing prospects, he shows no signs of fading.

“It would be easy to look at this job as, you’re having the same conversation 15 times a day,” Carey says. “The challenge is, in those 15 meetings, you have to change a person’s perception of why the achievement gap exists.”

And for many, like Illinois senior James Paek, that brief coffee-shop encounter with Carey is the turning point in the decision to apply. “The first time I met with him, he was so passionate and so motivating,” says Paek, who will join the 2008 New York City corps. “It was invigorating.”