Josh and I were among four TFA teachers who began at Emery in the fall of 2000. We faced enormous challenges that year—administrative turnover, lack of school discipline—and we all experienced them to some degree. But we responded in different ways. Some teachers channeled their anger to ensure that their students realized significant academic gains despite the chaotic conditions. Two TFA teachers that year were finalists for the Washington, D.C., First Year Teacher of the Year Award. The circumstances Josh describes only partially account for his failure as a teacher.

I won’t pretend to know what happened inside Josh’s classroom, but I did witness an event he leaves out of his article: Josh yelling in the face of a lone student in the hallway, his hands on the student’s shoulders, shoving him against the wall. If you believe Josh’s account that the allegations against him were total fabrications and that his physical contact was limited to breaking up fights, think again.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_letters.html

I'm calling this comment fishy.

Another thing - teachers with many many years experience struggle from year to year to "ensure that their students realized significant academic gains despite the chaotic conditions". Some years you get there, some years you don't. But first year teachers, especially TFAs with no experience, don't get there. Even Michelle Rhee admits she had no idea what she was doing when she started teaching. Since there is currently an investigation into questionable test scores in DC, I would be more likely to believe someone had a lucky pencil than to believe a first year teacher showed commendable academic gains.

I speak from experience. I've worked with TFA interns for 5 years now. This year I have 5 of them. I am mentoring them and am in each of their classrooms several hours every week. I meet with them before and after school once a week. I've seen them grow. 4 of the 5 are very good teachers. The other one is just taking more time to grow into the job. But award winning? No. Each of them will also admit any gains their students have made are due to the work of several teachers, support from the district, the students' parents and community volunteers who come in regularly to tutor. I consider that admission a great victory. TFA tells these kids they are the solution and all they have to do is walk into that classroom, work hard, and the kids will make great progress. The smart TFAs realize within a week that's bullshit. Children grow and learn because of the efforts of a team of people, beginning with their parents and involving several teachers at the school level. No one teacher works miracles. But TFA instills a lone wolf savior attitude into these kids that we have to work hard to correct.

So I am not surprised to see a TFA publicly criticize a peer as in this comment. It's a red flag to me.

a story on TFA's administrative problems and lack of transparency its first year of operation (1989-90, IIRC), so your comments on TFA sounded familiar based on my own experiences interviewing TFA's leadership.

I call the source story bullshit, because the author uses tired out old right-wing language and memes in several places. Because these are rw tropes, I highly suspect they do not originate from the writer's own experiences but that he is instead channeling the ideas and criticism of one of the rw educational foundations.

I believe every word of it. Besides, when it first came out (it's nearly 10 years old now) a teacher friend whose sister is an attorney found the lawsuit online. So yes I do believe it.

re-contextualizes his actions and makes the district's decision to settle the suit a little more problematic. IOW, the district may not have been settling simply to avoid litigation costs, they may have settled to avoid a potentially far higher judgment based on Kaplowitz' actions (if the comment in response is accurate).

They don't even wait for an investigation to be complete. They settle to shut up an angry parent.

But if that guy is representative of TFA teachers, the program should have been shut down.

Josh and I were among four TFA teachers who began at Emery in the fall of 2000. We faced enormous challenges that year—administrative turnover, lack of school discipline—and we all experienced them to some degree. But we responded in different ways. Some teachers channeled their anger to ensure that their students realized significant academic gains despite the chaotic conditions. Two TFA teachers that year were finalists for the Washington, D.C., First Year Teacher of the Year Award. The circumstances Josh describes only partially account for his failure as a teacher.

I won’t pretend to know what happened inside Josh’s classroom, but I did witness an event he leaves out of his article: Josh yelling in the face of a lone student in the hallway, his hands on the student’s shoulders, shoving him against the wall. If you believe Josh’s account that the allegations against him were total fabrications and that his physical contact was limited to breaking up fights, think again.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_letters.html

I seriously doubt he was really shoving him up against a wall. From what I read on both stories, if you're already in trouble, who is actually going to do something like that in the middle of the hallway. I don't buy it at all. Honestly, someone had it out for the guy and is helping the mother with her charges. Just because someone identifies himself as a fellow TFA teacher in a paper doesn't make it so. Your LTTE makes the whole thing that much fishier IMO.

who responded. Josh acknowledges both of them.

You're very quick to question the TFA-ers who rebut his essay, but less quick to question the essay placed in the media outlet of a right-wing think tank.

Not to mention some of the assertions in the story:

1. Josh had the good idea of sending his problem students to other teachers' classrooms for "time out" and this "solution" was shot down by the principal? How awful!

2. Josh replaced experienced teachers and found he couldn't control the kids as they were apparently able to (since he sent his problems to their classrooms), but it's all about the students' homelives and the school culture? Really?

3. The school paid off the parent who initiated the lawsuit just for the heck of it, though there was no real case or evidence? Sure, districts hand out money like that all the time.

lol.

& when he could no longer do that, by his own admission, his classes got out of control, tells me that either josh didn't have enough training to know how to control a class, or josh was not competent. Homelives are irrelevant to this basic fact. If you're going to blame kids' homelives for your class being out of control on a regular basis, you shouldn't be in the classroom, because there's nothing you can do about their homelives.

No, they don't do it all the time. You may find it hard to believe, but districts are short on money. They don't have tons of spare cash to hand out for fake lawsuits (thereby encouraging more fake lawsuits).

Josh's coworker says he saw josh holding a kid against the wall. josh acknowledged the guy was a coworker and didn't dispute the fact. ergo, it happened and josh is shading the truth in his story.

They believe each teacher should manage their own children. I don't agree (most of us understand working as a team is critical) but there are principals who don't like sending kids to other classrooms.

2. Home support is critical. Kids without it take advantage. For example, if they know there's no way to reach Mom by phone, they act out. I've had kids tell me this. I've seen changes in behavior the day after the phone at home was cut off. Experienced teachers know this trick and work around it. But even an experienced teacher will tell you the first thing they do when a child exhibits out of control behavior is contact the parent. So yes, home life is a key factor.

3. Yes, school districts pay off angry parents all the time. That's very common. Parents know it and that's one reason they threaten lawsuits so often.

Parents threaten to sue every day of the week. Even though today is Sunday, somewhere in this country at this very moment there is a parent threatening to sue a teacher.

Kids make crazy accusations every day as well. One of my friends, who happens to be a very good teacher, is suspended right now because she patted a student on the shoulder while he was working and he went home and claimed his teacher had pushed him out of his seat. I was talking to a kid once and he turned to walk away from me and accidentally bumped his head into a wall. He looked right at me and said "I'm going to tell my mom you pushed me" - and he did.

What a nightmare. These people are saints! At least they are if this is what they have to put up with.

and most of the actions are caused by circumstance outside of our classrooms

TFAs almost always struggle in that area.

because they don't have the background in child development and student teaching experience before they begin teaching.

I saw the shit they put up with every day even in a suburban district. There was no way I was ever going to go into education because of it, and why I get furious when people who've never set foot in a classroom put all the blame on teachers when parents and administrators share equally in responsibility, parents even more so. My stepdad dealt constantly with kids and parents who threatened to sue because they were deservedly given a bad grade, or kids who faked injuries then claimed my stepdad had hurt them, etc., etc. Somehow it was always the teacher's fault that little Johnny didn't show up for class or didn't do his homework at home. I guess my parents were supposed to follow the kids home every evening and make them do their homework and come to school well fed and cared for.

A very right-wing policy think-tank that advocates for--among other things--school vouchers.

Notice that this (old) post blames the schools, not the lack of training and follow-up on the part of TFA.

"They sure could use some voucher schools, right?"

Of course they wouldn't talk about alternative structures as the solution because they want to fix their own situation. But I think this article addresses the basic problem of lack of discipline in some of our kids and it's helpful to understand in order to be realistic about expectations and solutions.

Do you think our teachers are given the tools to use any training in a way that would fix discipline problems? Exactly how are they trained to do this anyway?

Teacher aides, the ability to send disruptive students "to the principal's office", mentoring and team teaching with more experienced teacher, and frequent classroom observation might be helpful. Personally, I think all new teachers should spend a year as an assistant to an experienced teacher before getting their own classroom.

TFA would be more effective if they provided stronger backup systems for their recruits. Mentors to call, objective observers to critique the new teachers, and resources to improve their teaching tactics and methods.

I taught first grade in a rural school district. The discipline problems may have been less intense there, but all teachers have to learn creative ways to deal with emotional, physical and mental challenges their students present. But it is also the responsibility of the school administration to work with the teachers and students to create a culture of respect and pride.

"Such poisonous bigotry directed at a black teacher at a mostly white school would of course have created a federal case."

It's the patronizing and condescending 'of course' combined with the muted current of white resentment that is a dead give away.

on a regular basis, he's saying his kids were racists.

josh is a tfa teacher who took an experienced teacher who *could* control the kids out of the classroom. by another tfa-ers own report, he put his hands on kids in instances other than the one at issue.

josh is a lying crybaby.

he passes along these tired old rw shibboleths like 'parental responsibility' being the key determinant in student success. He completely ignores poverty. I mean NOT ONE WORD! Absofuckinglutely incredible.

Most of his students earned 'straight 1s' (the lowest on a 4-point scale). Rather than ask himself whether his content or attitudes might be to blame, he lays it on the students and their parents. Simply despicable.

I thought briefly about lodging a complaint on the source site, but then thought 'what's the point?" DC schools are well rid of this bozo, though, that's for sure.

My first year teaching was in a 100% African American school. One parent told me repeatedly all year that I couldn't possibly meet his child's needs because I was white. Another told me she had requested a black teacher for her daughter and was upset when she was placed in my class because she knew white teachers hated black children.

And a very subjective part at best.

From a letter to the editor at City Journal:
"I won’t pretend to know what happened inside Josh’s classroom, but I did witness an event he leaves out of his article: Josh yelling in the face of a lone student in the hallway, his hands on the student’s shoulders, shoving him against the wall. If you believe Josh’s account that the allegations against him were total fabrications and that his physical contact was limited to breaking up fights, think again."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_letters.html

Furthermore, being a teacher, several parts of his story sound incredibly fishy. I'm not intimately familiar with D.C.'s policies and procedures, but most school rules are the same across the country, and many of the policies that he describes are not terribly believable.

But all of that aside, Kaplowitz's story does show one thing, that TFA "teachers" are simply unprepared and ill-equipped to step into a classroom. Five weeks of training, designed to cover the entire subject of how to teach? Hell, I had three times that amount in basic classroom management. I also had classes in Ed. Psych, Child Development, and others simply so I could understand what makes kids, in their varied and infinite forms, tick. It is this knowledge that is critical in establishing and maintaining a sane classroom where children can actually learn. Furthermore, I had hours of classroom observations, practicums, and let's not forget student teaching, so when I walked into my first classroom flying solo, I knew what to expect and what to do.

Frankly, this writer has an agenda, one that is at the same time self-serving and also tearing down public education. Sadly, this is simply another in a long line of attacks on public education.

The fact of the matter is that the TFA program is a disaster, one that shouldn't be inflicted on our students. I'm sorry, but a person with a political science degree, business degree, or any other degree besides one in education is unfit to teach. We wouldn't let a person with an Education degree take a five week training course and then walk into surgery, why are we allowing such inexperience and ineptness walk into our classrooms?

The fact remains that TFA "teachers" are unfit for the classroom, and their students are the ones who suffer for it.

Besides, given your statement, why should we believe Kaplowitz's story? Frankly it sounds very self serving, and in it he blames everybody else, not his own inexperience and ineptness.

Furthermore, his own inexperience and lack of knowledge in part opened him up to part of his problems. After all, if he had belonged to an organization like NEA, he could have purchased liability insurance, which comes with excellent legal help.

Like I said earlier, I don't think we're getting the whole story, but rather part of it filtered through Kaplowitz's own self serving lens.

and I've spent 3 decades + in urban education. Young white teachers struggle and are often threatened by parents. There is also little if any support from administration. The help they get is from the teacher across the hall who has her own class to manage.

So yes, I see no reason not to believe this account. I also know that TFA came down pretty hard on an intern who was sharing this story with fellow interns.

The clowns that push this "Teach for America" want these new teachers to fail and along with them the schools they infected.

I had an entire semester to student teach. Plus a degree in education. And I still struggled my first year. These TFA kids get 5 weeks practice before being placed in a classroom. That's insane.

It's fascinating to me how one of the most powerful narratives around teaching is "white teacher goes into minority school and inspires a love of learning."

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhiteMansBurden

It's a way to blame both teachers and students for lack of educational success.

between two fifth graders nearly twenty years ago. The parent of one of the children accused her of child abuse and she lived under a horrendous cloud for more than a year, in spite of the fact that dozens of students and teachers observed the incident. She retired last year, reluctantly, but still works a few days each month.

for an abuse investigation to start. Even an absolutely ridiculous accusation. And nearly every teacher goes through this at least once.

break this cycle of accusation\investigation\litigation\exoneration\sullied reputation?

I don't have the first clue what to do, other than radically restructuring society via a negative income tax so that wealth is distributed more equitably in our society, perhaps accompanied by tort reform. But that seems to me, even as I write it, doctrinaire and somewhat non-responsive to the problem.

We need to respect teachers. And recognize that kids make stuff up. They know their word is what drives the investigation.

Teachers are assumed guilty until proven innocent. That's unAmerican. And incredibly unjust. It needs to change.

School districts need to stop settling these lawsuits with parents before the investigation is complete. They do this to shut up the parent, who knows the media loves an angry parent story. District administrators also almost always give more credibility to the angry parent than to the accused teacher. Again, I believe it's because of the noise the parent makes. Squeaky wheel and all that.

I also think the police should be involved in all of these cases and they shouldn't be turned over to state child welfare officials. If the teacher is found guilty, then give this info to state officials. But until then, the accusation should be handled just like any other criminal investigation.

Much smaller classes (like 15 kids, tops) where the teacher can kick a disruptive student out at will and where there's a written contract between the teacher, the parent or guardian, and the student about academic and behavioral expectations would be a start.

I suspect that in a lot of these difficult classrooms, a small handful of disruptive students can create a hostile environment that spreads to the teacher, the administration, the other students, and the parents of the other students, and that getting rid of the bad apples would make the other parents happier about having their kids in the class.

Even if it means saying that 10% of the kids in these schools are never going to graduate and are going to be consigned to the ghetto, it's better than what's happening now where almost 100% of the kids are missing the opportunity for a decent education.

I've also wondered for a while why inner-city schools don't have cameras in the classroom. It's not a great solution, but if Timmy knows that he can't smack Johnny upside the head and get away with it, then it might cut down on a lot of nonsense.