Homan ’04 returns to speak for America

Emma Epstein Assistant Life Editor

Teach for America: More students applying

As midterms approach, the Vassar student body spends hours perfecting a turn of phrase, reviewing that one essential formula, or memorizing lists of dates. Some, however, are investigating a unique way to turn the tables: becoming a teacher instead of a student to help disadvantaged children reach the point where they too can complain about sleepless nights spent at a collegiate library.

Jeff Homan ’04 visited Vassar on Oct. 4 and 5 to speak about his experiences as part of Teach for America, a non-profit organization that trains and places recent college graduates as teachers in at-risk urban and rural schools.

In his second year of teaching, Homan instructs a third grade class in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Government project housing surrounds the school and free lunch is offered universally. The demographics of the school break up into a student body that is roughly 60 percent African American and 40 percent Latino.

“The hardest part of teaching is the emotional part of going to school every day and seeing what your students struggle with, how much their outside life affects what goes on in school,” said Homan. “They feel like they’ve failed even before they walk in the door. As a teacher, I have to put that aside, hold the students up to every expectation regardless.”

Keeping up expectations has proved successful in Homan’s case. Last year, every single student in his fourth grade class passed on to the next grade level. About a third of his class had been held back a year before. “Seeing their face light up when they achieve something, like how they reacted when they moved up, there’s no greater feeling,” said Homan.

Homan is one of 3,500 recent college graduates in more than 1,000 schools nationwide that are attempting to make such a change in students lives through participation in the Teach For America corps. The program began as the senior thesis of then-Princeton student Wendy Kopp in 1989. Distraught over the educational disparity in the United States, she devised a way for motivated young adults to close that gap.

Kopp secured a grant from Mobil Corporation, and using mainly a grassroots campaign, recruited 2,500 men and women, from which the staff selected 500 corps members to begin teaching in six placement sites.

Recruitment remains a high priority of the Teach for America program. Almost a third of the program’s funding goes towards recruitment of future members. Vassar campaign managers Rebecca Worthington ’06 and Gen Lidoff ’06 are paid by the organization to facilitate visiting speakers, distribute information, and seek out applicants. “It’s still a relatively new program, and a lot of people have misconceptions about it,” said Worthington.

Lidoff and Worthington said that when searching for potential applicants, they look for students with leadership roles who are active in the campus community. Math and science majors are also encouraged to apply,
as student performance is most divergent in those academic areas. “We want to close the achievement gap, so we’re going to find the best at Vassar and other peer institutions,” said Worthington.

And the best of the best are applying. As the New York Times reported that this year, 12 percent of Yale’s graduates, 11 percent of Dartmouth’s and eight percent of Harvard’s and Princeton’s graduates applied to the program. The grueling application process selected only one third of Ivy League applicants and about one sixth of all applicants. Lidoff and Worthington said that last year a record number of Vassar students applied, but only three were accepted into the program.

Corps members agree to a two-year teaching commitment and receive salaries identical to other uncertified teachers. Corps members receive much support from Teach for America during those two years. Each member is assigned a Program Director, usually a former corps member, who observes him or her in the class at least three times a year and gives feedback. Corps members also participate in “learning teams” of fellow corps members teaching the same grade level in a city, where they brainstorm teaching strategies, support each other and attend workshops.

After finishing the program, Homan plans to go into school administration. “I don’t think you can make policy decisions without having been in the classroom,” he said. “Most people who make educational policy have never seen my kids, have never been in classrooms where policy fails.”

However, many Teach for America alumni choose not to go into teaching. Distinguished alumni include doctors, lawyers and politicians. For many, the two years are a way to take time off to figure out if they want to go on to graduate school. “I feel that I, along with most Vassar students, spent four years talking about social injustice, things that needed to change, but when it was time for people to make decisions about what they were going to do with their life a lot of people were making decisions that had nothing to do with that,” said Homan. “We can make a change on a day -by-day basis, a change for social justice. Yeah, it’s hard, but if you’re going to make that change, you have to be willing for it to be hard.”