A new Atlantic article is out about Teach for America. The question the article addresses is “what makes a good teacher?” Tough question. In one paragraph, the article points out that indicators like GPA don’t paint the whole picture of a “good” or “bad” teacher (not really a new, profound idea):

The most valuable educational credentials may be the ones that circle back to squishier traits like perseverance. Last summer, an internal Teach for America analysis found that an applicant’s college GPA alone is not as good a predictor as the GPA in the final two years of college. If an applicant starts out with mediocre grades and improves, in other words, that curve appears to be more revealing than getting straight A’s all along.

That’s good news: TFA looks not only at GPA, but also at individual semesters to see increases or decreases—a sign, the evaluators believe, of perseverance. But do they use any other indicator for perseverance, or just a close look at GPA?

Just as GPA cannot describe the whole picture of one’s college education, so too do peaks and valleys of GPAs not fully measure perseverance. It’s as if TFA wants us to believe that they use a mixed method approach—combining quantitative and qualitative data—but until we can see all “30 data points about a given candidate” we will be unsure if TFA is reifying qualities like perseverance and other “squishier traits” with one indicator like GPA.

I would be weary supporting this “proven model” like the Atlantic piece does until more research, preferably external research, is conducted. In other words, Teach for America is not the solution to public education. It may be a piece of the solution for particular classrooms—but it’s not the end-all solution as this article suggests.