The recent growth of Teach For America (TFA) has enabled it to substantially expand the teacher labour supply in many rural Southern communities, one of its largest and fastest-growing partnership subsets. Though it is generally accepted that these areas face more severe teacher shortages than most other regions in the country, there is little research as to how these staffing challenges arise or how they might be resolved; TFA’s potential to grow the rural Southern teacher supply thus signals a promising opportunity in need of further research. This work offers a case study of teacher labour outcomes in the Mississippi-Arkansas Delta, TFA’s oldest and largest rural Southern partnership site. In this region, local schools have experienced a 600 per-cent increase in corps member presence since 2008; consequently, TFA provided anywhere from a quarter to a half of the area’s new teacher labour supply each year from 2008 to 2010. A mixed-methods analysis illuminates both the causes of Delta teacher shortages and TFA’s potential to address these vacancies. Within the Delta, local schools face chronic teacher shortages because the communities they serve are overwhelmingly poor, geographically isolated, and racially segregated. TFA appears to have targeted the Delta communities where teacher labour policies have systematically fallen short, as it partners with districts bearing the greatest share of the region’s aggregate teacher vacancies. Additional statistical testing reveals that amongst these hard-to-staff districts, TFA has further focussed its resources into the schools that serve more rural, less educated, and/or predominantly African American populations. In this way, TFA funnels its corps members into the very districts where state reform efforts have struggled most, thus serving as a powerful resource for realigning ‘sticky’ outcomes in the most hard-to-staff Delta school districts. These findings notwithstanding, closer examination reveals significant drawbacks and limitations to current TFA outcomes in the rural Southern Delta. TFA does not saturate hard-to-staff school districts enough to produce statistically significant changes in local teacher vacancy rates. Instead, the programme appears to have established an unofficial threshold for the number of teachers placed per district; once this ceiling has been reached, additional corps members are funnelled into a new area regardless of the original district’s remaining need. Additionally, there is no long-term ‘exit strategy’ to help Delta districts employing TFA corps members to eventually cultivate their own high-quality teacher labour supply, thus leaving them perpetually dependent on TFA to staff their classrooms. Preliminary evidence suggests that state governments could address these shortcomings through 1) increased financial support for TFA to fully saturate vacancies in current partnership districts, as well as 2) the simultaneous development of grow-your-own teacher certification programmes in rural Delta districts. The evidence suggests that these two strategies would improve TFA as a targeted teacher recruitment strategy for hard-to-staff communities both in the Delta and across the programme’s nine other rural Southern partnership sites.

Teacher recruitment and retention challenges facing urban school contexts provided the impetus for this study. High percentages of historically marginalized students, plagued by high poverty rates and low academic performance, as well as substandard facilities and inadequate material resources, serve as causative factors inhibiting recruitment and retention of credentialed teachers in urban schools (Education Commission of the States [ECS], 1999; Guarino et al., 2006; Horng, 2009; USDOE, 2003; 2004; Wirt et al, 2004). Schools and districts attempt to meet chronic teacher shortages in hard-to-staff urban schools by creating innovative teacher preparation schemes, such as the Urban Teaching Academy (UTA). This study focuses on teacher identity formation and prospective efficacy beliefs among a group of students enrolled in UTA. The research questions were examined using interpretive phenomenological inquiry (Smith, Flowers, & Larkin, 2009) through case study methodology (Yin, 2009). Findings show that the precollegiate student teachers in this study made meaning primarily from a student perspective, thus adhering to prototypical images of teaching characterized by identity markers. Salient components of definitions of teacher identity for precollegiate student teachers are Self and Care. Less relevant components for precollegiate student teachers were Emotion and Context. These components appear most influenced by the temporal distance between the precollegiate Urban Teaching Academy and actual teaching experiences during internship/practicum and subsequent teaching in a professional capacity, suggesting a need to determine whether it is possible for precollegiate student teachers to meet the emotional and contextual demands of teaching at such an early stage. Additionally, this study proposes to extend on the teacher efficacy construct by offering a model for prospective efficacy as it pertains to individuals in teacher preparation at the precollegiate and preservice levels. This model contends that beginning with the self as influenced by personal, social, cultural, historical and political knowledge sources, precollegiate student teachers begin to develop an epistemological stance towards teaching. Over time, precollegiate student teachers build identity capital grounded in the skills, knowledge and dispositions gained through access to varied knowledge sources, which develop as precollegiate student teachers learn theoretical principals of teaching, obtain and learn from performance information, and combine the theory and practice into an epistemological framework that provides impetus for ongoing synergy between theoretical and practical experiences. The broader the base of identity capital from which the precollegiate student teacher draws, the greater the likelihood that she will develop prospective efficacy, or the belief that she will be capable of fulfilling teaching roles and responsibilities in the future. This study informs the literature on precollegiate and preservice teacher identity and extends the literature on teacher efficacy.