TIME Magazine

Voices of the Volunteers

Posted Friday, Aug. 31, 2007

TEACH FOR AMERICA CORPS MEMBER, DANIEL BALKE

Daniel Balke, 22, is doing Teach for America (TFA) in Church Rock, New Mexico, teaching fourth and fifth grade at Church Rock Academy Elementary School, which is on a Navaho reservation outside of Gallup, New Mexico. Balke started his official teaching a few weeks ago at the beginning of the school year, after having attended TFA's training where he taught summer school to fourth and fifth graders. He graduated from George Washington University in May, played college tennis and he is now coaching the Gallup High School tennis team. Balke spent his childhood in New Mexico so he is excited to be back in his original home state. "It's good to finally get going. I love my kids and feel so invested already. Seeing the light bulbs go on is awesome."

Balke first heard about TFA through a classroom presentation in his sophomore year. He hadn't really thought about TFA before that. In October of his senior year, Balke decided to sign up. What changed his mind was the recruiter. "I always thought fixing the education system in the U.S. was key. And when [the TFA representative] told me their vision it resonated so much with my own vision. I found out they are operating in New Mexico and I wanted to come back to my home state." What sealed the deal for Daniel was that the organization has political goals for its members. "They want people to go on in policymaking endeavors. As someone who is interested in running for office someday, this seemed like something for me. I left our meeting on cloud nine and thought this is what I need to do." But, as he signed up, Balke was nervous. "The inequity is so huge, and this is a huge assignment, and who am I, this 22-year-old kid right out of college with seven weeks of intensive teacher training? I believe in it, but there are those thoughts of, Christ, what did I get myself into? But I know that I can do it and I'm in the right place."

Corps members go through a five-week training called Institute and Balke's was in Houston. A typical day: He awoke at 5 a.m., left for school at 6:30, spent half the day teaching summer school and the other part of the day attending a class taught by a curriculum specialist, learning to invest parents in a student's education. They did workshops on literacy and ways to teach kids to read. He spent from about 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. at school and then had evening meetings. At summer school all the corps members are divided into "corps members small groups" which consisted of 10 to 12 people plus an adviser. They would meet to come up with lesson plans. The Institute is physically taxing. "You are working 12 hours a day. Houston is hot and you have to do all these lesson plans, while somehow keeping your body going. It was the most physically taxing thing I've done." (This coming from a college tennis player!) "It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. Everyone you see is committed to this mission of educational equity. I still keep in touch with my small group. The environment is so challenging you have to lean on one another."

At Church Rock Academy Elementary School, Balke teaches fourth and fifth grade social studies and writing. Ninety nine percent of his kids are Navaho Indian. It's the poorest school in the Gallup-McKinley district, failing every year to meet the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standard for No Child Left Behind. "I'm a novice, but from my initial observation the class size needs to be smaller. Some kids are excelling and others I need to spend a long time repeating over and over before they can get simple concepts. Advanced kids are getting bored. We need smaller and more differentiated classrooms. There needs to be more after school and pre-K programs. It's empowering for kids to be good at something and that can come from after school programs. Then they have something to be excited about and that translates into better performance in the classroom. Most don't come from households where it's feasible to have the money to go to college. There was always going to be the money for me to go to college and if I worked hard it would work out. But that isn't always the case for my kids. So much of this is rooted in economics. Raising expectations is a huge thing. They need to see their hard work result in increased opportunities."

"Hopefully I'll do a lot for these kids, but I will probably take more from this experience than they will. I will take this with me for my life." Balke sees himself going back to grad school. He deferred from Georgetown's program in international relations for two years. "I'll go back to D.C. and work on the Hill like I was planning to do before. But things don't always go the way you think. I don't envision myself as an elementary school teacher in the future, but I would never rule anything out. I would like to use the experience in politics and in service. The most exciting thought is that TFA has political goals to have 100 members in the House with a TFA background. If a fourth of our lawmaking body had spent time in low-income schools, which would be huge in shifting our priorities and legislation. Being a part of this movement is incredible."

JESUIT VOLUNTEER CORPS MEMBER, BRIAN MCCABE

Brian McCabe, 23, is in his second year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC) in Philadelphia, Pa., after having been a Jesuit Volunteer (JV) in Juneau, Alaska last year. He graduated from Georgetown University in 2006.

The Jesuit Volunteer Corps is a nationwide service program (with a few international placements) where men and women spend one year living together and working with low-income communities — doing everything from counseling troubled teens to helping mentally ill patients to doing legal aid work. Since 1956, over 12,000 people have embarked on this one-year service program with about 300 JVs working in the U.S. and in six countries around the world each year. The cornerstone of a JV's year revolves around four goals: social justice, simple living, community and spirituality.

McCabe decided he wanted to sign up for the JVC after his sister did a JV year in Portland, Ore., in 2003-4. Last year in Juneau, McCabe worked for the Catholic Community Services, where he was employed by the Young Parent Center and taught at the schools. "I worked with youth, connecting them with housing services, food stamps, medical services. We provided a safe space for people to talk about things that were going on. I spent time teaching in the main high school and the alternative high school."

"Many of the youth who use the facilities had a lot of difficulties and we were trying to create a home away from home. We tried to build up some trust, hear their stories and develop relationships with them. One of our main goals was to provide them with options and give them solutions. We had a lot of young mothers and fathers and they had a ton of questions about relationships, working experiences, where to live. Sometimes it was just run of the mill things, other times it was more of a crisis. I would sit with them and help them with their decisions and work through the possibilities."

There was one woman McCabe worked with on and off throughout the year. His best memory was watching that woman "stuck in a destructive behavior pattern like drinking pull herself out and get a steady job and find a safe home. To see the effect she had on her family and the stability she brought to the people around her was amazing. I don't know that it was anything that I did, but to watch her make so many positive changes was great. She would check in and say hello and tell me the jobs she applied for. At the end she was living in a good place and holding down a steady job. That was nice to see. For me to be there for a year and for people to develop the trust to share the difficulties and the highlights — the big and the little — was really what made me want to go to work. I went in with the expectation that I would change people's lives, but I don't think that is what it's about. The thing I like about JVC is the ability to serve the people in the job and the people you're living with at the same time."

Now McCabe is starting his second year in Philadelphia, working at the Philadelphia Committee to End Homelessness. Ironically, McCabe is living across the street from his old high school. He is the Street Outreach Coordinator, which involves spending time in the day shelter and working with a student outreach program. "At first it seemed weird, to come back to Philadelphia where this journey started for me in the neighborhood I grew up in. I liked being in a new place I knew nothing about like Juneau, but this is a great opportunity to take the skills I gained and use them closer to home."

"My major was classical languages, but I don't think that is my future. Right now my heart would like to continue working in social services. But what's also important is the type of life I create, not just the career. I liked JVC because it is not just a 9-5 program. It is about the relationships in and out of work and how I choose to spend my time and money. I'll need to get a job after two years of volunteering. I think grad school is a possibility but a little ways down the road.The experience I had in my job and everything I learned from my housemates working in six different agencies will definitely affect the choices I make career-wise. Getting a personal look into these things is very powerful."

TEACH FOR AMERICA CORPS MEMBER, SHELLY JAIN

Shelly Jain, 22, from Houston, Texas, is in her first year of TFA, teaching sixth grade math at MS 45 in the Bronx, New York.

"TFA was not something I was going to do. I had been applying to jobs like lobbying firms and was going to take a year off before law school. My plan was 100% to go to law school. I already took the LSATs. I was looking at think tanks and the Republican National Committee as possible places to work for that year. There is a big joke around campus that if TFA is there to recruit no other nonprofit stands a chance. I can attest to that. They immediately get you very passionate about the cause, talking about solving educational inequalities. If you can solve educational inequalities in America you can solve every other social inequality. If you have people who are more educated you won't have to deal with as many other issues like teen pregnancy, violence, welfare. The other issues will be minimized."

"Compared to most jobs kids our age get right out of college, this one lets you immediately have a lot of impact. You don't have to build up to it. If I'm 22 at a lobbying firm or the Republican National Committee there is only so much responsibility they give you. This was some place I could truly make an impact. So that was huge for me."

Jain said she still might go to law school, but she isn't so sure anymore. "Teaching wasn't something I would have never considered doing, but I'm finding that it optimizes my abilities." She gave me an example of how she was teaching multiplication of fractions to her 6th grade summer school class and many of her students couldn't even do simple multiplication of 5 X 3. "I needed a way to still teach them how to multiply fractions and we didn't have time to relearn all the multiplication tables." Jain made sure the students had times tables in front of them so they could look at the tables. Then they were at least learning the skill of multiplying fractions and how to do that by looking at the tables. Students would come on Fridays and on the weekends or before school and she would give them extra help. "And we'd play a game where they would have to race me in the multiplication tables. If they won I had to buy them a slice of pizza. If you make it like a game they don't feel like they are so behind. Otherwise, if you get too far ahead of them, they shut down and don't pay attention. There was no point in frustrating the students. Multiplication is just a straight memorization skill and they were still excited that they could multiply fractions even though they didn't know the times table yet. By the end they could multiply mixed numbers and learned this multi-step process. And I did get two students pizza because they beat me!"

Jain spends a lot of time with creative lessons. When the kids were learning how to find the area of a rectangle, Jain brought in Hershey bars because there are cubes in the bar and kids can directly see the number of boxes within a specific figure. "It's not so bad then. They are getting to eat chocolate and give me the right answer!"

"A lot of things I'm used to didn't work with these kids because they didn't care about the consequences. There was a 16-year-old in her class who had failed a few grades. She was talking after class. And I asked her to please not talk while others were still taking the test. She kept doing it. I said, 'Next time you talk I'm going to not grade your test and you will get a zero.' Usually that would work for us because there are steep consequences. But she said, 'I don't care. I'm going to have to redo sixth grade anyways.' That's when I thought, Oh my god that's not a good way to deal with her! So I sat down with her and said, 'You know the material so well and that's why you finished so early so I want you to be able to help me teach the kids in the class.' She was totally accommodating the rest of the class."

"I became so attached to my kids. They e-mail me. They would call me. I gave them all my cellphone number. I would have lunch with them and got to know them on a personal level. I really do think I might go into teaching. Teachers can make a difference in the lives of kids because it is the one consistent thing in their lives everyday. This can be their way out. What's unique about TFA is you're getting the best students to put their other goals on hold for two years. We aren't doing this because we don't have other job options or we want this salary! If I don't continue being a teacher I think I want to stay in the realm of education now. I would like to create a project where I take four different schools in different cities and give teachers $100,000 in salary. I would recruit the best teachers with a college and teaching degree. Make it as competitive and prestigious as an investment-banking job. Right now it's not hard to become a teacher because there is a shortage. But if you can make it as competitive as getting into Harvard law school or a job offer from Goldman Sachs that would change people's minds."

AMERICORPS MEMBER, YVONNE PECHA

Yvonne Pecha, 60, is a volunteer coordinator for the Cowlitz AmeriCorps Network in Longview, Washington. This is Pecha's second year in the Cowlitz AmeriCorps program. She liked her first year so much she signed on for a second one. She works with all the volunteers at community service agencies throughout their county. These include volunteers in the social service agencies, mental health facilities, schools etc. In addition, she mentors in schools teaching a "Superheroes" program where she gets first and second graders interested in community service.

On her team of 30 that did the year together in the AmeriCorps program, about half was baby boomers. The other half WERE in their late teens or 20s. They all go to host sites or sponsoring organizations like Head Start, Habitat for Humanity, public schools and libraries, the Lower Columbia Mental Health Group and the Emergency Support Group (which provides support for domestic violence.)

Each AmeriCorps member receives a stipend or living allowance of $1,060 a month if you do the program full time and $560 a month if do it part time. It's an 11-month commitment, full time is 1700 hours and part-time is 900 hours. Fulfilling the service commitment means participants receive an education award of $4725 to go towards school. "That is really a good incentive even for a baby boomer. Once I get done [with this year] I'm going back to school. I'm interested in business but I'm going to take some classes in piano, nutrition, psychology and sociology."

The Superheroes Kids program: "One of my pet projects is working on getting children to volunteer in the community. I go around to the schools and talk to children about volunteering and get them engaged before they get into trouble. We have a list of 22 things they can do to volunteer." First and second graders participate in activities like forming a club that shows around new kids at school, helping out neighbors or volunteering at the Humane Society. "We try and focus on the little ones because if we can get them aware of the environment at such a young age once they get into the middle school they have less of a tendency to get involved in anti-social behavior. We try to promote caring about your environment and about other people. If they start out and feel good about it they will want to do it when they're older."

Pecha worked in market research for 20 years for Consumer Opinion Services. Her husband retired in 2004 and she decided to retire then too. After two years she was frustrated. "I didn't like it [retirement.] I found myself getting up, showering, putting on my makeup and then putting on my pajamas again. It felt empty. When you're used to working all your life it feels empty not to be around people. I wanted to be busy and give back to my community."

Pecha picked AmeriCorps because it was a structured program. "I got all these things started with Superheroes Kids and I wanted to do it another year to see it through. People my age can make a big difference in the community by sharing their skills and what they've learned in life. I will be a volunteer forever. I believe it is the fountain of youth. When you are helping others you don't focus on your aches and pains or problems. It gives you the opportunity to make the world better. Anything to make the world better for my 11 grandkids is great."

Pecha imagines after this year is up she will probably continue with the same agency through AmeriCorps, not for the stipend but on the side "for my own good feeling. I probably won't be doing 40 hours a week because I want to travel a little bit."

WENDY KOPP, FOUNDER OF TEACH FOR AMERICA

In the late '80s, as an undergraduate at Princeton in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Wendy Kopp wrote an ambitious senior thesis. Kopp envisioned enticing bright American graduates with a two-year service program to work in under-staffed, struggling public schools. This year's members came from a pool of more than 18,000 applicants, including more than 11% of the senior classes at Amherst and Spellman; 10% of those at the University of Chicago and Duke; and more than 8% of the graduating seniors at Notre Dame, Princeton and Wellesley. The year's corps size shows a 19.5% increase over the 2006 class. It's also the highest ever rate of matriculation of accepted applicants, with nearly 80% of those admitted joining the corps. TFA turned down over 80% of its applicants, making it harder to get into than the University of Pennsylvania. This year more than 5,000 teachers will lead classrooms in 26 urban and rural areas across the country.

What she's most proud of about TFA:

"We are out there recruiting our top recent college grads, the folks who are leaders on campuses, as aggressively if not more aggressively than corporations to get them to channel their energy in this direction. Between 5 and 10% of the college seniors at the 90 top colleges compete to teach in low-income communities through TFA every year. It's about the impact those folks have in the lives of kids growing up today in our country's most under-resourced communities. We know that that experience for the corps members is a really transformative one and one that changes their career paths, shapes their convictions and their level of commitment to addressing this problem throughout their careers.

What about the criticism that TFA teachers have a shorter training period than the average teacher and thus aren't sufficiently trained or qualified to teach?

"We probably need to do a better job of communicating the kind of training and professional development our corps members get. They come into an extremely intensive two-year professional development program. I would put it up against any training program in the country for sure. It's based on 17 years of learning around both what differentiates the most successful teachers in low-income communities and how you train and support new teachers. They go through a very intensive summer. They then have two years of support and professional development. We're training people differently, but if you look at our programs and the entire continuum of it, it's at least as extensive as the other programs out there, university based programs or whatever. Mathematica Policy Research did the study that...found that the corps members were moving their kids forward more than would typically be expected in both reading and math and significantly more in math than even the certified teachers and veteran teachers in their schools.

Why is TFA a transformative experience for the members?

"No matter what, this experience is transformative because you learn so much about why we have the problems we have and about, maybe more importantly, how to solve them. We are producing a force of people who deeply believe that we can solve these problems of educational inequity. Most people in America think this is an intractable problem...that we have it because of all the societal issues that stem from poverty. Yet our corps members come out of this believing, no, if we were making different choices as a society, we can solve these problems. The reason they know it is because they saw their kids make serious progress."

What are the challenges a national service program would face?

"It is very hard to do this well. We have gone through immense learning curves. Just to recruit and select people who are ready for this is difficult. Next year we will have 65 two-person recruitment teams. We have learned a lot and continue to learn still more around what are the personal characteristics that differentiate the people who are most successful as teachers. Past demonstrated achievement is still the biggest indicator of future success."

Why make TFA as selective as you do?

"There were many things we didn't know but we did know at the beginning that it would be very challenging to teach successfully and we knew we were looking for our future leaders. Our whole theory of change...is that there has to be an immediate significant impact in the lives of the kids we are reaching. But we are also influencing this generation of future leaders. That is extremely important if we are going to affect the fundamental changes necessary to actually solve this problem at the roots. We should be sending a message to our young people that you can pursue careers that make a social impact and a public impact."