Teach For America AmeriCorps Education Award

Prepared for Teach for America in 2019

APA was commissioned by Teach For America (TFA) to serve as an independent evaluator on TFA’s three year, 2016-2019 AmeriCorps national grant. The goal of the evaluation was to understand the near and longer-term impacts of the AmeriCorps Education Award with the intention of providing formative and if possible summative information to benefit both TFA and AmeriCorps. Issues that are important to TFA include the composition of the TFA corps, characteristics of people who join and persist within the TFA corps, their educational and career trajectory after completing their TFA service and the relation of these outcomes to the Education Award. The evaluation had two stages. The first stage was a feasibility study of available data to identify and design the best approach to meet the goals of the study. The second stage was to implement the study designed during the feasibility stage.