Applicants to Teach for America hear about how the program looks for the best and brightest in student leaders. They hear about how leadership has been carefully studied and proven to produce effective teachers in underprivileged districts in the country.

What they hear less about is what happens when corps members actually enter the schools.

The past two years represent a peak in University applicants to TFA, with 461 students applying to the program in 2011 alone.

But complaints from former corps members have been aired in terms of training, a lack of support and a two-year teaching commitment that community leaders say doesn’t help schools in need.

How prepared are the corps members?

After a five-week intensive training period in one of Teach for America’s institutes across the country, corps members are sent to their placement schools to teach.

The corps members have had, on average, one hour of classroom experience every day during the five weeks, in addition to workshops and coaching from peers or TFA staff members.

For many corps members, this is their first training in formal education.

In 2011, only 4 percent of incoming corps members were education majors, while 34 percent majored in social sciences.

The inexperience that comes with the program is something that TFA founder and CEO Wendy Kopp called an “incredible advantage” for the program in a Jan. 19 speech she gave at the University.

“One of the reasons Teach for America works is because we do take people who ask crazy questions and do crazy things that anyone who knows what they’re doing would never do,” Kopp said.

But some feel that entering an inner city classroom after five weeks of training does a disservice to the students.

Keith Johnson, head of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, the union representing Detroit Public School teachers, said he feels TFA members entering into a classroom “marginalizes the profession” since other teachers have to go through formal training before they can teach.

“Why should we settle for someone that’s providing instruction simply because they were a math whiz or a science whiz or even a foreign language whiz?” Johnson asked.

Former corps members admitted to feeling unprepared for the initial transition into the classroom.

University alum Mike Dobbs, a 2007 Washington D.C. corps member, said he struggled to teach in classrooms where he had to purchase his own copy paper.

“A month is not enough to know how to set (a classroom) up, particularly in a place where resources are scarce,” Dobbs said.

University alum Rachel Rickard, a 2011 Baton Rouge corps member who left her assigned school after two months, said she faced unexpectedly large classroom sizes and was unprepared to manage 20 or 21-year-old high school students who were so close to her own age.

“The discipline was something that I struggled with,” Rickard said. “And when you have 40 kids in the classroom, everything that I struggled with was magnified.”

Rickard said she was under extenuating circumstances, however, because she was initially hired at a middle school but then got laid off before the school year began. Therefore, she had to quickly search for a new job at a high school.

But not all corps members felt unprepared.

University alum Joel Berger, a current 2010 Detroit corps member, said while he felt nervous about entering a new job, he could not imagine better preparation.

“I feel like I was as prepared as I could have been going into that first week,” Berger said.

During her talk at the University, Kopp further defended the criticism about corps members’ inexperience, lauding their leadership against the experience of traditional teachers.

“I really question the theory out there that the answer to this problem is to recruit veteran teachers in high income communities,” Kopp said. “I just think there are a lot of misconceptions out there.”

Entering the classrooms

Once in the schools, some corps members struggled under what they felt was a lack of support from Teach for America.

Dobbs said he felt he wasn’t getting support from TFA after his first year because his students weren’t meeting the standardized test results expected by the program.

“They focused on that test result and less on that teacher as a human being,” he said.

Dobbs said he also felt pressure under the program’s tenet of “pursue relentlessly,” one of the program’s six principles of leadership, to work around the clock for his classroom.

“I believe the word ‘Orwellian’ comes to mind,” Dobbs said. “I can’t help but think of reading '1984,' and all of the slogans and group speech.”

During her speech at the University, Kopp acknowledged that corps members sometimes get lost in the bureaucracy of TFA. It’s something she said she wished she had re-evaluated before the program expanded five years ago.