Teach for America: Education reform in action
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Discussion Policy
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Not long ago, during an hour-and-a-half period, the Trinidad neighborhood of Northeast Washington hadfour shootings and a stabbing that together claimed eight victims. Among them was a 13-year-old boy killed by stray gunfire.
Trinidad's local elementary school reflected the chaos around it. "Students ran the school," says Scott Cartland, the principal of the Wheatley Education Campus. "The kids were running down the halls, roaming."
But on the morning I visited Wheatley last week, Cartland greeted each student at the front door by name, making sure no one lingered. Upstairs in Amber Smith's fifth-grade classroom, disruption is confronted immediately, with a note of the infraction put up on the white board. This morning the children sit on the carpet at the front of the room for a "read aloud" of "Bridge to Terabithia" -- a book teaching that even kingdoms of the imagination are not immune from tragedy.
Smith is a Teach for America corps member, meaning that fresh out of college, with five weeks of training, she was thrown into the deep end of the teaching profession in a low-income school. Smith is impossibly young and impossibly committed. She lives in the Trinidad neighborhood,
But on the morning I visited Wheatley last week, Cartland greeted each student at the front door by name, making sure no one lingered. Upstairs in Amber Smith's fifth-grade classroom, disruption is confronted immediately, with a note of the infraction put up on the white board. This morning the children sit on the carpet at the front of the room for a "read aloud" of "Bridge to Terabithia" -- a book teaching that even kingdoms of the imagination are not immune from tragedy.
Smith is a Teach for America corps member, meaning that fresh out of college, with five weeks of training, she was thrown into the deep end of the teaching profession in a low-income school. Smith is impossibly young and impossibly committed. She lives in the Trinidad neighborhood,