"Why Teach For America Is Not Welcome in My Classroom"

All I hear from this article is "WAAAHHHHHH". He would rather have the bottom third of Flalafel State College teaching in these schools then Yale graduates just because they chose to go a different route in life after a couple years in TFA. Oh yeah and because his students didnt make the cut he is now butt hurt over it.

^ basically

Based solely on this article alone, I would conclude that TFA favors the volunteers much more than the impoverished students themselves.

But tbh, TFA is a waste of time and resource imho.

Sounds pretty dead-on to me.

The absurdity of the program is that the TFA kids are paid as well as actual teachers and are less qualified academically and then get to quit after 2 years and never look back.

I think people should do good for the sake of doing good, not because they want an easier path to b school than the IBD/MC grind.

The whole point of TFA is to recreate the movie Stand and Deliver on a wider scale -- bringing in bright, unjaded kids that will push students from disadvantaged or at-risk backgrounds to pursue their education more seriously and be more competitive in the workplace. The problem is 1) most of these kids aren't qualified to do that and 2) it's a self-serving program that glorifies the teachers until they move on to totally unrelated careers right when they actually get the hang of teaching.

On an unrelated note, TFA is a non-profit -- there is nothing "socialist" about the program or criticisms of it.

Yale to Fordham: U jelly bro?

A good friend of mine did TFA with no intentions of staying in teaching long term. She has now been working as a teacher for underprivileged kids for about 7 years and plans to do so for the rest of her career. I'm not exactly sure how often this happens, but I know that without TFA she never would have become a teacher and her students likely wouldn't have ever had the opportunity to learn from someone as talented as she is.

TFA gives QUALIFIED graduates the opportunity to teach in an underprivileged classroom. These QUALIFIED graduates may decide to stay or may not. It opens up doors that were not there before, for both the students and the qualified grad. If only 5% of TFA candidates stay in education after the 2 years, that is still 5% more QUALIFIED graduates who are teaching the future of America, who may have gone a completely different route w/o TFA.

I do not see the problem?

There's a lot of truth in the article. I'm in the midst of my summer training for TFA now, and the vast majority of my co-workers don't REALLY care about these kids. It is a stepping stone, and a guaranteed job, by and large. I also have developed a tremendous amount of animosity towards the organization as a result of what I've seen in these past few weeks. This organization is NOT in it for the kids... it's in it for the "Corps Members" and their experiences.

They have us teaching summer school after only have ONE WEEK of formal training. These kids are getting REAL grades in subjects that many of the teachers have no prior knowledge of. I for one typically learn the subject I'm going to teach the night before the lesson plan is due. It's disgusting that these kids are used as our guinea pigs. Even the way their success is measured is a damn scam.

They are given the final exam on the first day and given 30 minutes to complete it. For the remainder of summer school, we are then forced to teach our objectives to this specific test, and it is given again on the last day of classes. They are given 2 hours at this point to complete it after having been taught essentially identical questions the entire summer. The questions we give on the final is the EXACT SAME as the ones given on that 1st day too. It's real easy to say that "little __________ made a 48 point gain in his subject" when you have those particular conditions. The shit is sickening.

I joined to try and do some genuine good, but this organization is no different than many of the private for-profit organizations. At least they're honest with their intentions. I would leave after seeing this, but there's too much of a social stigma attached for my professional ambitions to do it. smh.

We draw our teachers from the bottom third of college graduates.

The biggest joke credential behind a Series 7 is a Master's in Education.

Every teacher TFA brings in from the top pool of students is a boon to our schools.

Anyone else notice the writer of this article is a professor in African American Studies, but he's white . Reminded me of the scene in "How High"

For a good documentary on the education system watch :The Cartel" it is about the New Jersey public education system and how the administrations at these schools siphon money from the kids to their own pockets. Granted the solutions proposed are all conservative ideas (more charter schools, kill the unions, abolish tenure, ect) it is still a very solid look at the public education system.

I sent the article to my buddy who is doing TFA right now and this was his response:

Best Friend Currently in TFAEhh that person sounds like an idiot. (The one thing I do agree with is that it shouldn't be marketed as "The way to Stanford Business School." Whoever did that is a moron.) That said, I could probably disprove/respond to every single sentence he wrote in that article but I'll try and keep it brief:

1-Obviously TFA puts students into low-income communities to teach. It's main goal is to close the achievement gap by making corp members aware of inequity's existence. It makes strategic sense to prioritize those students who would never have seen it otherwise (as opposed to students who grew up in low income areas). Still, TFA still has a significant number of lower-income and black corps members-just because Fordham didn't have many doesn't mean anything.

2-TFA has only been around for 20 years. It must necessarily (by its nature) grow slowly. Just because the achievement gap hasn't shrunk in the last 15 doesn't mean much. On a smaller scale at the individual classroom level, there have been many success stories.

3-It's still doing something. Many regular teachers suck and don't try (think Fat Bitchy women from our high school). TFA teachers aren't great, but they're there with a positive attitude and a lot of energy. It can't hurt students when compared to those mentioned above.

That's my two cents

I love the writers absurdity in thinking that people who go to Fordham are poor. Poor in comparison to the average Yale kid but not ghetto kids poor.

Reading anything from a progressive was your first mistake.

is it possible to do tfa while doin a masters?