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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Teach For America’s ‘dirty little secret’

Teach For America’s ‘dirty little secret’:

Teach For America’s ‘dirty little secret’

Teach for American founder Wendy Kopp (The Washington Post)
Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp (The Washington Post)
Teach For America is famous for many things these days, including its five-week summer training institute in which newly selected corps members are “prepared” to take over classrooms with high-needs students. Here is a perhaps surprising look at the five-week institute, how it has changed over the years and what that means to teacher training. It was written by Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian), an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., and the author of Excellence For All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools.  This essay is adapted from his article “Rhetoric and Practice in Pre-Service Teacher Education: The Case of Teach For America” in the Journal of Education Policy.
By Jack Schneider
Education reformers love Teach For America.  They love it for a number of a reasons, but perhaps chiefly because it seems to prove that traditional teacher training—frivolous and without content, in their eyes—is unnecessary.  Seeing the organization as a radical alternative to college- and university-based programs, reformers frequently point to TFA as proof-of-concept that conventional teacher education is totally superfluous.
But here’s the dirty little secret those reformers either don’t know or don’t want to