Teachers alone cannot be expected to fix America’s woes
Vikash Reddy
As a Teach For America (TFA) alumnus, I enjoyed George Will’s recent op-ed, “Teach for America: Letting the cream rise,” in The Washington Post. Will notes that TFA has become a force not just in education-reform circles but also among recent college graduates, with more than 15 percent of seniors at Harvard and Princeton competing for the chance to spend two years teaching students in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods.
I fear, however, that the lessons Mr. Will has learned from TFA’s story are incomplete. He writes, “Until recently—until, among other things, TFA—it seemed that we simply did not know how to teach children handicapped by poverty and its accompaniments—family disintegration and destructive community cultures. Now we know
Social media and a tale of two New Jersey principals
Middle-school principal Anthony Orsini of Ridgewood, N.J., made national headlines last year when he urged parents to keep their young adolescents off Facebook — at least until high school.
The slings and arrows of social-media stings by peers — also known as cyberbullying — were far more common than any from adult predators, Orsini said, calling threats from the latter “insignificant compared to the damage