Warning: TFA hits campus tomorrow

I received the message below in my email yesterday. It seems the fox has been invited into the hen house.

The situation is tricky. Despite my professional disagreements with TFA as a solution to anything, other than resume building for future corporate types, a college campus is a place where conflicting ideas are presented all the time, and that's good. The crazy preacher who tells our kids they're all going to hell comes every spring. Surely we can accommodate TFA. But the College of Education ought not support their appearance any more than it does any other controversial organization that rejects everything we stand for.

Kentucky teachers need a professional preparation program. Our students need them to have it. Kentucky has established a strong set of detailed requirements governing what must happen before any teacher is placed before a group of Kentucky students. Academic credentials, background checks, tests, course work, portfolio products, two hundred hours of clinical training before student teaching - all are required, and all for good reason. The fact that TFA has specific legislation allowing it to ignore all other requirements is a political issue - but they do have that legislation.

Teach for America seems to be built on one slim idea: that the best teachers were the smartest students. There is some evidence to suggest that student achievement is greatest when the teachers' own test scores are high. This is particularly true if you happen to believe that test scores tell us everything we need to know about how well our schools are doing. So Teach for America looks for students with GPA's in excess of 3.5. Then they send their recruits to work with the most needy children after a training program that has been widely criticized for being way too short, is woefully insufficient, in support of a source of temporary teachers that is unsustainable by design. Most TFAers are gone in two years.

 Teach for America is recruiting on-campus
February 6^th at the Powell Student Center

ALL MAJORS MAY APPLY

Sign up here for one-on-one meetings:

https://www.timetrade.com/book/3PV11

For more information email: OJ Oleka

Learn more about Teach for America at www.teachforamerica.org

Salaries range from $30K to $51K

Alternatively, if you don't want to teach - don't teach.

If you don't really plan on making teaching your career, but rather, see the classroom as a mission field for a couple of years before you go into banking, then please do our kids a favor, and don't teach. Appalachia hardly needs another program that views eastern Kentucky as a collection of third world imbeciles in need of a "saviors" or where the elite come in, spout off, and soon leave to go do what they really want to be doing.