Our guest blog today is from Damon Bailey, Teach for America Alabama Executive Director. On March 11, TFA Alabama celebrated 10 years in Alabama. To meet key leaders and hear from students and corps members, visit: TFA Alabama Celebrates 10 Years
“Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest, ‘til your good is better and your better is best.”
In 2009, I accepted an offer to teach middle school science at Bunche Middle School in Southwest Atlanta. Formerly revered as a neighborhood that was home to a growing middle- and upper-middle-class African Americans, years of disinvestment shortly led to the Ben Hill community’s disrepair. Slowly this neighborhood became home to the all too familiar tale of two cities: an aging middle-class community living in largely single-family homes and a rapidly growing number of younger families mostly living at or below the poverty line living in either public housing or affordable multifamily units. The schools in the neighborhood followed a very similar trajectory. Awarded the National Blue Ribbon School distinction in the mid-1990s, Bunche Middle School was one of the premier Atlanta Public School middle schools. As families began to move out and real-estate developers (commercial and residential) and other businesses stopped investing in the neighborhood, the school slowly became characterized by struggling academic performance and concentrations of students living below the poverty line.
The same features exist in basically every urban neighborhood in America.
This is how social and racial inequity is arranged and exacerbated in our country: Communities with very limited economic flexibility living in intentionally under-resourced, underdeveloped, or disinvested neighborhoods with limited access to resources and supports. Usually, those same neighborhoods are home to some of the lowest-performing schools rendering it almost impossible for a child to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty and lead the life they’ve always imagined.
At Teach For America, we deeply believe that potential is generously distributed to every child across America regardless of skin color or socioeconomic status, but as you can see in Ben Hill — or Birmingham, or Hale County, or any other community where we’ve worked — opportunity is not. With this in mind, we seek to recruit leaders who will stop at nothing to ensure these gaps do not persist.
These leaders apply and go through an extensive selection process. Once admitted, these talented and passionate leaders make at least a two-year commitment in an underperforming classroom in a high-needs community in Alabama.
This past year, we placed 65 corps members in schools across Bessemer City, Birmingham City, Hale County, Jefferson County, Perry County, and Selma City School Districts. After two years, many of our teachers decide to remain in the classroom. Others, inspired by their students and families, go on to pursue pathways to school leadership, run for elected office, work on education and early learning policies, or start nonprofits. These members commit their lives to impact the conditions that shape education here in Alabama. Today, we have over 300 total members working inside and out of the classroom to help change education.
Teach for America Alabama Turns 10
As Teach For America Alabama turns ten, we are choosing to focus on the power of a decade. Alabama has seen positive movement these past ten years in the education realm as we have seen an increase in the number of students taking and passing AP exams, more kids graduating high school on time, and the rise and proliferation of one of the top-rated Pre-K programs in the country. As a Teach For America family, we’ve been able to bring in over 500 members to impact over 85,000 students in Alabama classrooms. Those members were collectively able to lead their students to an average of 2.4 points of growth per year on the ACT in our high school classrooms, support young learner’s to make over a year’s worth of growth in reading in our elementary classrooms, and across K-12 achieve an average of 73% mastery on grade-level content. In addition to teaching, our teachers were also starting new nonprofits focused on exposing students to college through summer programs like HASS, broadening their scholars’ world views through programs like Birmingham to Beijing, and working to increase our students’ post-secondary competitiveness by helping improve ACT scores through programs like The CAP AND GOWN Project.
The Next Decade
As we look to the next decade we are clear: By 2030, twice as many students will be achieving key educational milestones indicating that they are on a path to economic mobility and co-creating a future filled with possibility. Accomplishing this would have been challenging before the pandemic and undoubtedly will be our hardest task yet. Nonetheless, we believe it is imperative. The evidence shows just how deeply impacted marginalized and under-resourced communities are as a result of this pandemic.
But all is not lost. I am inspired by the network of our leaders who are committed to changing the odds for communities whether inside or outside of the classroom. Our member base is diverse, high-capacity, and deeply committed to creating a more equitable education system — a system where all children have access to an education that unleashes their full potential and supports their ability to create durable pathways to their dreams and aspirations.
So, as my students would boldly declare at the top of every lesson, I now say to you: Good, Better, Best. Never let it rest, ‘til your good is better and your better is best. Let’s choose to be the best – best at applying an equity-lens to every decision we make about our students and their futures, best at reimagining education and supporting leaders to take chances and do things differently, best at championing and advocating for policies and practices that are proven to support marginalized and low-income students and best at being unwavering in the face of challenge and never lowering our expectations. What we choose to do now will impact what our students can do later. When they ask in March of 2031 what we did during this moment, let us beam with pride and tell them we dug deep, worked arm-in-arm with others, and chose what was right over what was convenient. We will tell them we chose their future first, and we are better because of it.
I look forward to continuing to work in partnership with Christian and Small and any others who believe that educational inequity is solvable and are willing to do work worth doing! Cheers to the first decade of incredible work and impact!
Damon
About Christian & Small
Christian & Small LLP represents a diverse clientele throughout Alabama, the Southeast, and the nation with clients ranging from individuals and closely-held businesses to Fortune 500 corporations. By matching highly experienced lawyers with specific client needs, Christian & Small develops innovative, effective and efficient solutions for clients. With offices in Birmingham, metro-Jackson, Mississippi, and the Alabama Gulf Coast, Christian & Small focuses on the areas of litigation and business, is a member of the International Society of Primerus Law Firms, and is the only Alabama-based member firm in the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity. Our corporate social responsibility program is focused on education, and diversity is one of Christian & Small’s core values.
‘No representation is made that the quality of legal services to be performed is greater than the quality of legal services performed by other lawyers.