I was impressed by this blog I happened to run across. I know the feeling. When I was still teaching I was not aware of Teach for America, the organization sending teachers with 5 weeks training to take the jobs of experienced teachers.
If I had been aware, I would have felt the same way.
The blog post:
I Teach For America TooI recently read an article about Teach for America, a program that recruits the best and brightest our nation has to offer from schools like Harvard, and put them in the most jacked up schools in our nation. Basically the article said this: After 2-3 years, almost half of these teachers had left the profession, and after 5-6 years, almost all of them were gone. With a track record like that, you have to wonder what the goal of Teach for America really is. I’m sure those stats don’t have their home office twirling their fingers and going “Whoopty-doo.”
The article basically highlighted the fact that Teach for America is harder to get into than Law School at Colombia, or Harvard, and that there were more applicants than ever this year because TFA offers a real paycheck, something harder and harder to come by straight out of college these days. But I read it in a little different light. The “best and the brightest” are using TFA as a resume builder, and laughingly, they’re doing it for the money! Isn’t that the ultimate recession irony? People are going into TEACHING for the money. Hilarious.
I remember the TFA students in my teaching credential program. They came to evening class all still wearing ties, took more notes than anyone else, and kind of put off the vibe that said, “I went to Harvard, we don’t need to associate, you’re a lifer.” Yes, a lifer as in, I’ll be teaching more than a couple years. I felt like the rest of us were freaks and perverts sitting in the back of the room while the Harvard alums were saving the children of Oakland for one year before going back to Ohio. In their defense, many of us were freaks and perverts. Getting into a teaching credential program without going through TFA isn’t what you’d call grueling. Our credential programs, like our hiring policies in public schools, basically consists of checking your wrist for a pulse followed by the question, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
It used to be hard to get certified in Florida, it took time, effort, and intelligence. I think the blogger may be right, though, in some respects. The last few years before I retired I refused to take interns. I had some of the best through the years, real quality. The last two I had I called the professor to come and see me. I said what is going on...these last two are not going to make it. Turns out both the district and the university were lowering the standards.
Now we are down to actually calling those with 5 weeks training the elite among teachers. That to me is puzzling. How did that happen. Well, silly question, I know how it happened. It was a corporate media power blitz with huge money behind it. Works every time. The blogger had a few more very pertinent things to say.
So essentially, what TFA is doing is helping these goal-oriented students earn a paycheck comparable to an entry level job in a “real” profession for 2 years, all the while boosting their resumes, because evidently TFA is harder to get into than most Law and Medical Schools. So like some political candidates these days, they can say, “I was a teacher once.”
Of course, the question left over is: “So where does that leave education?” Where education always is: Forgotten. These guys and gals go on to Law Schools and better paying jobs, buy bigger houses, and continually distance themselves from the poor kids they once tried to help for a couple years.
So once again the question. How did our country get to the point that they revere a group that charges school districts big money to hire teachers with 5 weeks training? How did we get to the place that these are the elite among education?
How did they manage to lower the standards required of educators and make it sound like a wonderfully great notion?
Money. Follow the moneyTorre Veltri is an assistant professor at Northern Arizona University. Last summer, her mother received a letter from Wachovia Securities/Wells Fargo Advisors, dated June 12, 2009, requesting input on a customer service questionnaire. In exchange for her time, the letter promised, “We will make a donation to your choice of one of the following charities: American Red Cross, Teach for America, or the National Council on Aging.”
Torre Veltri’s mother was puzzled. “Why would donations be solicited by (Wachovia Securities/)Wells Fargo for Teach for America?” she asked her daughter. “Since when is teaching some kind of charity?”(1)
Good questions without easy answers. Wachovia Securities/Wells Fargo was undoubtedly in need of an image makeover in early June. A few days before the letter to Torre Veltri’s mother, affidavits in a federal lawsuit recounted how Wells Fargo deliberately steered working-class African Americans into high-interest subprime mortgages, with the lending referred to as “ghetto loans.”
TFA’s 2008 annual report lists Wachovia as one of five corporations donating more than $1 million at the national level. The others are Goldman Sachs, Visa, the biotechnology firm Amgen, and the golfing tournament Quail Hollow Championship. The organization is, without a doubt, a fundraising mega-star. In one day in June 2008, for instance, TFA raised $5.5 million. The event, TFA’s annual dinner, “brought so many corporate executives to the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York that stretch limousines jammed Park Avenue for blocks,” the New York Times reported.
One more thing we know for sure. TFA got 50 million from Congress and recently got another 100 million from unknown groups. That federal money is in addition to money that was given to districts that converted their schools to charters and did away with the limits they had on charter schools.
TFA got another 100 million from varied foundations last week. Their donor list is staggering.Philanthropist Eli Broad and three other donors announced Thursday a $100-million endowment to make Teach for America a permanent teacher-training program. Broad's foundation pledged $25 million to the endowment, spurring three other matching donations from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Robertson Foundation and philanthropists Steve and Sue Mandel, officials said.
Education-reform efforts are a major thrust of the Southern California-based Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. Teach for America, which has a local regional office, currently has 270 teachers working in the Los Angeles area.
There was also legislation passed that allows TFA teachers with only 5 weeks to declare themselves as fully accredited. Some groups are trying to fight that designation.
The blogger is right, he teaches for America just as much those TFA trainees...and yes, they are trainees.
And they should not be able to be considered fully qualified. Parents need to know about this lack of certification.
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