Taking Teacher Recruitment Seriously
An interview with TFA's Darin Lim Yankowitz
In a piece last month, I noted that states and districts can only boost the supply of new teachers by convincing people who are on the fence about teaching to decide to give it a try. While there might be other reasons to pursue policies that reward people who are already going into teaching, those won’t boost the supply numbers.
After I wrote my piece, Darin Lim Yankowitz reached out to me to share what Teach For America (TFA) has been doing on this front. TFA is likely the largest single provider of new teachers in the country. But unlike other teacher preparation programs, which tend to be more passive about who they enroll, TFA is active on the recruiting side and has to make a deliberate pitch to young people about why they should give teaching a try.
Darin leads TFA’s recruitment efforts for the regular TFA teaching corps and for Ignite, a tutoring program they launched in the heart of the pandemic. He devotes his time to thinking about how to convince Gen Z’ers who haven’t necessarily thought about teaching to start considering it. Keep reading for a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Chad Aldeman: Let’s start with a little bit of background. What do you do? Tell me what your daily work life looks like.
Darin Lim Yankowitz: Hi, I'm Darin. My title is senior vice president of recruitment for Teach For America. Our aim is to recruit some of the most promising leaders of the rising generation, current college seniors and early career professionals, and bring them into the field of education to teach full time for at least two years, and to take what they learn about educational inequity and how the education system works, and to have that inform how they pursue systems leadership over the course of the rest of their career.
Our thesis is that in order to reach a world where every kid growing up in America has an excellent education, we need massive change, both within the education system and in all the systems connected to it. We want our people to lead change in education. We also want our people to step outside of education and lead change in other fields.
It’s my job to lead a team of recruiters across the country who are trying to find these people, get into a relationship with them, and to convince them that the classroom is the right place to start their career, or the right place for them to move into if they're currently not in the field of education.
Chad: Let's start with what's evergreen about recruiting young people to teach. What are things that you would have said five years ago that are still true today about how to convince someone to consider teaching?
Darin: One, we specifically aim to work towards educational equity in low-income communities and in Title 1 schools. We want all students to have an excellent educational experience and all the life opportunities that come with that. A big part of our work, in the evergreen sense, is building people's understanding of what educational inequity is, the disparities that lie across race and class and educational outcomes in our country, and helping people to then see that they can and should play a role in changing that.
That requires getting into a relationship with folks. It requires understanding what motivates them, what concerns they might have, and then creating a sequence of experiences for them that hopefully lead them to the decision that moving into the classroom is a place where they can have a career of enormous impact. It's something that they'll find very personally fulfilling, and it's a place where they're going to learn a lot, and it's going to accelerate their career trajectory, whether the trajectory they want is to have the most impact possible within the education system, or the career trajectory they want is to lead systems change in another field.
Chad: What I'm hearing you say is that convincing people on the mission side is one of TFA’s entry points. Is that fair to say, that the mission focus and the devotion to kids is what is driving some of your pitches?
Darin: The way that I would break it down, with a little more depth or precision, is there are many factors that matter to a young person. They care about personal fulfillment. They care about the alignment between their talents and what they're doing every single day. They care about finances and earning enough money to live the sort of life they want outside of work. They care about being part of a community of other people who share their values, and having strong social relationships.
When you map those out, we have to absolutely win on some of those priorities. So mission alignment, that's a thing we are going to win on, relative to the comparison set of other opportunities that people are considering.
Being a part of a community is one that we are trying very hard to win on, especially for seniors who are leaving college. In some ways, you can think about the two years in the TFA corps as an extension of some of the best parts of college. You continue to be part of a group of people who you're very close to, going through a crucible experience together, supporting one another. These are hopefully going to be people that you are both lifelong friends with, and people who are going to support you in your career ever after.
And then there are things that we need to make sure we don't lose on. When I think about recruiting someone who's considering joining Teach For America relative to working in tech or going into consulting, I'm not going to win on salary. There's just no way. But I need to talk to them about salary and benefits. Both the ones that are provided by the district where you're hired or your charter school, as well as the benefits of joining Teach For America, being part of the AmeriCorps network, etc. Those have to be good enough that we don't lose you over that relative to say, consulting, where maybe it's not your lifelong dream to work until two in the morning every single night making PowerPoints, but you can't be so compelled by the lifestyle and the money that it caused you to go in that direction.
Chad: Let me repeat one thing back to you. I think maybe it's obvious to you and your day-to-day work, but for people who are reading this, maybe they hadn't thought about it this way, but TFA is not like a traditional teacher preparation program that's sort of taking candidates who already know they want to be teachers and just molding them into classroom-ready teachers. TFA is trying to convince people that are deciding between things like consulting and teaching. Is that right?
Darin: Absolutely. I would say there are two big things that are probably important to lift up.
One is exactly what you just said, our job is to find people, to seek them out, and to convince them, through conversations, through experiences that we help create for them, that they should bring their talents into the classroom, and that this is a really important thing for them to do with their lives. Part of my view on what it looks like to have a really strong talent pipeline into education is we actually have to take up the really hard work of making the case for people why they should do this and creating the conditions that make them want to do it, versus just crossing our fingers and hoping that the people we want to become educators become educators.
Number two steps away from the evergreen a little more into what we've learned over the last few years. A recruiter on my team can absolutely sit down with a college senior in the fall of their senior year who's planned on being a lawyer for their entire lives, and talk to them and potentially convince them that actually the thing that they should do is join Teach For America.
But it's also exceptionally hard to pull someone off of a career path that they've thought of for many, many years. And increasingly, what we've been doing is moving recruitment downstream to juniors, sophomores, freshmen.
That’s part of why we launched the Ignite program, which is a part-time virtual tutoring program. We also work collaboratively with other organizations that are trying to expand educational equity in low-income communities, such as Breakthrough Collaborative. And what we're hoping to do is introduce, say, a college sophomore to a lower-touch, lower hurdle way of working towards educational equity, to spend part of their time tutoring kids, to teach summer school. And through that, to help those candidates realize, “oh, this problem is tractable. I can do something about this. It is not destiny that kids in low-income communities will get a poor education.” The candidates also begin to develop some of the knowledge and skills to be really, really incredible educators.
You could imagine a sophomore in college tutoring through the Ignite program, then teaching summer school with Breakthrough Collaborative, then they do Ignite again as a junior. By the time they reach their senior year, they've had a series of experiences that make it natural for them to want to enter the classroom.
For us, this has been a way to influence who's interested in being part of the teacher supply earlier on, to be more effective at recruitment, and to do that, hopefully in a way that adds real value to the schools and students in the communities where we work.
Chad: That’s interesting. I'm glad you brought up Ignite and Breakthrough Collaborative as ways to give candidates an earlier experience to try out and see if they want to be teachers and to work with kids. It has a lot of similarities with the teacher residency movement and other attempts to shift clinical experiences earlier into the sequence.
Let’s talk about what’s changed changed over the last few years. Have candidates changed, or are there any values that are different than you used to see, or anything positively or negatively affecting teacher recruiting efforts that are worth pulling out for people to understand?
Darin: Our particular focus is recruiting college seniors and early career professionals (although some mid-career professionals try Teach For America as well).
What that means is we're really talking about recruiting Gen Z students. And what are people who are part of Gen Z interested in, and what will attract them?
A couple things that I would highlight. One the folks who we’re recruiting often have a very particular picture of the life that they want to lead, and they have a desire to have a lot of agency and choice over that.
I'll give an example of a change we've made in our own process. When I applied to Teach For America, I got in, and I was told, “You are admitted to Teach For America. You can rank the regions that you're interested in going to, and we will take that into consideration and do our best to honor your interests. But in the end we're going to send you to a region, and it might not be one of the ones that you preferred.” I think the ethos at the time was a little bit of like, “If you really care about the mission, you are still going to do this.”
With Gen Z, that doesn't fly as well. And so we moved to a system where people apply directly to regions, one or two or three of them. If you only apply to one region, you will only get an offer to be part of the TFA corps in that community. If you apply to two, you will get an offer from one of the two. We're trying to give candidates more agency over what their experience is going to look like. Autonomy and choice matter a lot.
Two, we see folks are really drawn towards making an impact in specific communities that they are already connected to, whether because they like live there right now, or they're from there, or they have another tie. I suspect COVID had a fair amount to do with this, where we were all in lockdown for prolonged periods of time, and everyone realized, “oh, something could happen that causes me to be in this place and I cannot go anywhere else. Is this a place I really want to be? And do I have the support network that I need here?”
For us, we pivoted from a more generalized national pitch when we're talking to people about the injustice of millions of kids growing up in poverty—which is true, it's an enormous injustice—to moving to a much more localized way of recruiting and talking to someone. When we talk to candidates, we’ll ask them where they want to live. We’ll talk about what educational inequity specifically looks like in that community. We’re also going to talk about why it can be different, and what we are specifically doing in that community right now, and why we need this candidate to be a part of it. We are trying to convince them to bring their talents and their energy to do something in this particular place.
We will also connect candidates to current corps members and alumni who have done the program and are leading change in the community. We introduce candidates to principals. One of the most powerful things for a principal to say to a candidate is, “I need you in my school, and here's why.”
Then the last thing that I would say is we really see people value social connection. They want to feel part of a movement, they want to feel part of a community that explicitly shares their values. This is challenging because, in many ways, it's at odds with how most teacher roles are constructed. My own experience as a teacher was that I got observed maybe once or twice a year, and otherwise I was generally alone in my classroom, and it was on me to figure things out. And even when I was observed, I did not always get the most helpful feedback.
So we do a lot to create environments where people are building relationships with one another, where they're learning alongside each other and they feel tied to one another. I think that plays a big role in our ability to capture talent.
Chad: A couple last questions. I want to turn to the policymaker side. What would you tell a policymaker that you would wish that they would understand about recruiting new teachers? If they're interested in boosting the supply of new teachers, what should they think about doing and how go about that?
Darin: One, I would encourage them to talk with people that we want to be part of the teacher supply who are not currently choosing the profession. All the changes that I outlined for you were changes that we arrived at by looking at what our prospects need. I would encourage policymakers to do qualitative interviews, one-on-one focus groups, and surveys, to try and really understand both the barriers that are leading people not to choose the profession, as well as what’s attracting people to it. What are the things that really matter to the people that you're trying to recruit?
And once you do that, it opens up the ability to say, “okay, what are the policy changes needed to change the conditions around teaching such that there are more of the attractors and fewer of the barriers?”
And as I said earlier, we're not going to win on everything that matters to people, but we've got to be really clear on what are the things where we absolutely need to win and where are the things where we need to be good enough not to lose. I would encourage policymakers to take that same approach.
And the last thing is that we actually need to recruit people. It’s not enough just to change the conditions, and then hope that the people come. At TFA, we go out, we find people, we build relationships with them. We are very intentional about creating events and experiences that help people understand the work, see themselves in the work, be drawn to the work. And I think that is actually necessary if we want to change the teacher supply.
Chad: Do you have any other last words, either something that we haven't talked about yet that you think is relevant, or a message for candidates?
Darin: For anyone who is reading this and working for an organization seeking to recruit talent for the field or leading policy, if there are things that I've said that resonate with you, I would love to connect. Nothing would make me happier than to be able to share more about what we do.
What I would say to a prospect, someone who's trying to decide what they might be interested in doing, teaching is an incredible job. I really deeply believe that it is one of the things that you could do where you have the most agency and control over your actions. It's an amazing thing to lead a classroom and have relationships with 60, 100, 150 students, and to have an opportunity to shape not just their content knowledge, but how they think about education, how they think about themselves, and who they are at a critical moment in time.
Teaching is one of the most impactful things you can do, and the things that you will learn as an educator will be an incredible asset to you over the course of your whole career, whether you want to stay in the classroom, whether you want to move into building leadership, or whether you want to move into another sector. Through teaching you will learn to become an excellent communicator and a coach and a mentor, and those things will serve you well in anything you could possibly do, in business, in law, in medicine, in education, which are all important paths that can impact the education system itself. I just think teaching is a phenomenal place to start your career and hopefully a place to spend a long time.