Comments on: Teach for America: Point/Counterpoint rebuttals

By: Al

Al — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:17:24 +0000

Per Ms. Gruber, we need to

1. Virginia faces a huge challenge to find and retain the best-qualified teachers

2. Shortcuts are not the solution for staffing our schools with the most highly qualified and dedicated teachers we can find.

In 2011-2012, according the the Virginia DOE web site, the Percentage of Core Academic Classes Taught by Teachers Not Meeting the Federal
Definition of Highly Qualified is 2%. Meaning 98% are taught by Highly Qualified teachers.

Looks like we are finding and retaining the best teachers.

By: Al

Al — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 01:36:16 +0000

Scott,

Seems like your author just has an ax to grind because students at Fordham did not get selected.

Plus, he expects….

1. TFA has done nothing to promote income redistribution, reduce the size of the prison population, encourage social investment in high-poverty neighborhoods,

2. …its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged in the rapidly expanding educational-industrial complex

He is simply another liberal seeking $$$ redistrubution

By: Scott M.

Scott M. — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:57:53 +0000

I don’t have anything worthy to add to this conversation because I haven’t followed the issue AT ALL!

But….this popped up on one of my news feeds and may be relevant.

http://www.laprogressive.com/teach-america/

…Until Teach for America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for America recruiter first approached me, I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in poor schools. I allowed TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, filled with urban studies and African American studies majors. Several of my best students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and most of whom came from the kind of high-poverty neighborhoods where TFA proposed to send its recruits.

Not one of them was accepted!

Enraged, I did a little research and found that Teach for America had accepted only four of the nearly one hundred Fordham students who applied. I become even angrier when I read in the New York Times that TFA had accepted forty-four of one hundred applicants from Yale that year. Something was really wrong if an organization which wanted to serve low-income communities rejected every applicant from Fordham, students who came from those very communities, and accepted half of the applicants from an Ivy League school where very few of the students, even students of color, come from working-class or poor families….