Are Teachers Dumb?
If you want to start a lively discussion, put "Teach for America" in the title of your blog. You're sure to get a little heat, if not outright hostility. That's OK--the purpose of blogging is hosting public dialogue. The best way to herd cats is to put out bowls of tasty food-- toss some debatable issues out there, then stand back.
So it was, a couple of blogs ago. A teacher who calls herself Julia629--saying she wasn't a Teach for America corps member but wishes she'd gone that route--showed up to defend the TFA program. Her arguments centered around Andy Rotherham's phoned-in piece in Time, in which he sets up five straw men (or, perhaps, straw corps members) then knocks them down.
Julia629 also asserted that teachers are--not to put too fine a point on it--intellectually feeble, what AEI researchers described as weak in the cognitive complexity department. With such inferior colleagues, she says,
