Monday, June 25, 2012

Is Teach For America Failing?

This from NPR:

As the school year winds down around the country, we decided to take a closer look at a widely touted success story in education that's getting new scrutiny. When then-Princeton University student Wendy Kopp created the idea for Teach for America as part of a student thesis, an adviser told her she was, quote, "quite evidently deranged," unquote.

But the idea of bringing outstanding college students from a variety of fields to teach at needy or underperforming schools caught on. Since 1990, Teach for America has trained over 20,000 would-be teachers. And it is still a powerful draw for many college graduates.

Teach for America, or TFA, reports that nearly 50,000 applications were received for just about 5,000 openings in the most recent program here. But now, some graduates of the TFA program are among those criticizing the group, and questioning whether it is really helping struggling students and schools. One of those is Gary Rubinstein. He is a math teacher at New York City's prestigious Stuyvesant High School. He's a two-time recipient of Math For America's Master Teacher Fellow. He's written books about teaching, and is a contributor to Teach for Us. That's an independent blog for Teach for America alums...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow go figure that sending unprepared young folks into the most challenging classroom environments might not result in effective education? Let's face it, there is no teacher shortage in this country, but instead we are creating conditions in which people simply decide leave out of frustration or elect to never enter the profession in the first place. Don't want anyone to cry me a river, but teachers have got to take control of their profession and collectively assert themselves or else we will continue to have concepts like this or computerized pre-packaged curriculm marketed in replacement of folks who actually want serve children in a skillful and meaningful fashion.