Teach For America’s ‘dirty little secret’
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
