Teach For America Makes the Grade at Challenged Schools, Criticism Aside

TFA new york

As I hear it, the New York - Teach for America program is a mess this year. The recruiters misrepresented the program to top students recruits. Nobody has been informed of the personal expence they will encure. Their housing situation is deplorable, and they don't even know if they will be placed this year. The current administrative organizer is either incompetent or incapable of doing her Job. These are college graduates at the top of their classes from good colleges that were lead to beleive this is an organized program... The organizers will do well to pay attention to their recruits and fix it now. In this new push for service in this country they should be held to the standars they want from their recruits and for the praise they want to get.

TFA

From the perspective of a professor at a selective liberal arts college that had (in our department at least: political science) been suggesting TFA to some of our graduates. I have heard nothing from our best students (some who gave up slots at the best law schools and grad schools in the country to do TFA --under the false impression that it was something akin to the Peace Corp-- of what can only be called a lunatic asylum in Houston's five week "boot camp" their--TFA's-- terms to the students who are "trained" by a bunch of 25 year old graduates of TFA, to become teachers in the hardest possible environment. Given our feedback (all the students have been successful in TFA by the by: not one is teacher--6 students) I no longer suggest TFA as a move for our students in general.

It is true that TFA can place you in the private sector- -- and that is tempting given our current national economic status -- BUT for me, there is something fundamentally unethical (immoral perhaps is a better term) about taking very good students and letting them "practice" to teach on "at risk students and school systems." This is not a race issue per se (although some critics of TFA frame it this way, I would not), BUT IS DAMNED WELL A CLASS ISSUE!

TFA has it backwards (theoretically and organizationally), the best teachers even, dare I say it the best college professors [sabbaticals for example] with the *most experience,* should be used/recruited to teach at risk students. Alternatively, TFA should be a four year program: two years in the best schools where students learn to teach and not practice quantitative outcome assessment on the backs of the poor at the Houston "boot camp." After completion of this first two years, THEN AND ONLY THEN should TFA teachers be placed in at risk school districts to complete their four year commitment.

Finally, TFA actively tells students NOT to continue teaching but to move to administrative positions ---just what we need in education: NOT. Why do so many students leave teaching after TFA? One reason is the above mentioned private sector contacts TFA has and, two, the move to grad school is easier (perhaps justifiably)--- but mainly the tenure system in the public school which is at odds with the TFA program. For the most part public schools grant tenure in the fourth year: if two years are spent engaging in "on the job training" on human beings (kids!) that leaves only one more year before getting tenure. Most of the TFA graduates are not trained well enough to get tenure, they are out at year 3. Oh yea, the schools are getting subsidized to hire these TFA folks that also ends at year 3.

TFA is business with an agenda: the pushing of a corporate model as the best way to frame a national public school program. The debate on this open, but TFA is not a good example of this model--for it uses the poor as guinea pigs for well meaning (some of the best) young adults to practice on, as they try and learn how to teach.

ADG

Teach for America

Teach For America activists say poor schools and bad teachers cause the achievement gap not bad habits or inequality. Discounting the notion of individual responsibility, they want us to give TFA alumni top jobs in our urban schools, and to transfer kids from neighborhood schools to the charters they operate, so they can eliminate job security for teachers and eradicate any influence we have over school-district policies. The idea that teachers are opponents rather than advocates of education is a new one in our country. It derives from the time when Ms. Wendy Kopp first started TFA and decided, from her Princeton perch and without a day in the classroom, that inexperienced teachers were inherently better than experienced ones. Wendy's friends in Washington D.C., Houston, New York and elsewhere are launching an anti-American Ivy League class war on the very same teachers who serve our nation's toughest schools.