Teach For America (TFA) was founded to improve teacher quality in under-resourced schools, and recently expanded its goals from closing achievement gaps to altering students’ long-term educational trajectories (Farr, 2010). TFA’s model has been emulated by numerous US teaching fellows programs and has spawned partner programs in 32 other countries. While rigorous experimental and quasi-experimental evidence suggests that TFA teachers boost students’ short-term academic achievement in some subjects and grade levels, little is known about the relationship between having a TFA teacher and students’ longer-term outcomes (Clark et al. 2013; Glazerman, Mayer, & Decker, 2006; Xu, Hannaway, & Taylor, 2011). This paper examines the relationship between having a TFA teacher and longer-term student outcomes, including student test scores, high school graduation, high school class rank, and post-graduation expectations, examining whether this varies across grades and subjects.

I examine the relationship between TFA and long-term student attainment using administrative data from the state of North Carolina, working with TFA to identify the 1,502 TFA teachers assigned to North Carolina. I use matched records for all students in North Carolina in grades K-12 for twelve cohorts of students from 1999/2000 through 2010/2011. In a given school year, approximately 100,000 teachers educate roughly 1.4 million students in grades K-12.

I examine the relationship between having a TFA teacher and end-of-course and end of high school attainment primarily by comparing students who had TFA teachers to students who had the possibility of being in a TFA teacher’s classroom but were not by using school-grade-year fixed effects to compare students within schools, grades (or subjects), and years where TFA teachers are present. In secondary models examining short-term test score differences, I also use student fixed effects to compare students to themselves before and after having a TFA teacher, as well as across high school subjects within a given year.

Having a TFA teacher is associated with same-year test score increases in math in elementary and middle school, as well as language arts in middle school, and in most subjects in high school, with particularly large differences in high school math and science. Having a TFA teacher in high school is also associated with end-of-high school attainment and expectations, but not in consistent directions. While having a TFA teacher in high school is associated with a higher likelihood of completing high school, TFA teachers are negatively associated with end of high school GPA, class rank, and plans to attend higher education. Future analyses will examine whether these counterintuitive associations are a result of TFA teachers helping lower-skilled students complete high school, thus lowering the average levels of the other attainment outcomes among students of TFA teachers. This is the first paper to find evidence that TFA teachers can alter students’ academic trajectories, but not necessarily as predicted. These findings suggest TFA is making some progress towards improving both short- and long-term student outcomes, but additional improvements need to be made to achieve the goal of altered educational trajectories for all students.