It is no secret: Teach For America (TFA) and traditional colleges of education have had strained relations over the past 20 years, as their approaches to teacher preparation are starkly distinct. TFA, as its mission, recruits recent college graduates, provides a five-week summer training, and assigns primary teaching responsibilities in kindergarten through twelfth grade (K-12) classrooms for a two-year commitment, whereas traditional colleges of education aim to prepare lifelong teachers over the course of two-to-four-year teacher preparation programs. Since the beginning of TFA in 1989, academia has challenged the effectiveness of TFA teachers in the classroom and criticized the organization for the short-lived teacher preparation and limited time teachers are expected to stay in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, Chung, & Frelow, 2002; Darling-Hammond, Holtzman, Gatlin, & Veilig, 2005; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). Due to the inherent differences between the traditional path to teaching certification provided by colleges of education and the alternative path to teaching certification provided by TFA, many universities find their ideologies of teacher education too disparate to reconcile. No matter one's perspective on whether these teachers should be in the classroom, over 3,700 new teachers entered urban and rural classrooms via TFA in 2008 across America. In 2008, there were nearly 390 TFA teachers teaching in Phoenix-area schools alone. The College of Teacher Education and Leadership (CTEL) at Arizona State University (ASU) embraced the opportunity to partner with TFA to tailor existing teacher preparation programs to meet the unique needs of alternatively certified teachers in urban schools. Rather than harp on the distinctions between ideologies and approaches to teacher preparation, CTEL and TFA Phoenix found common ground with the shared mission to better support urban teachers in classrooms with thousands of Arizona children.
