Congress Sticks Teach for America Exemption into Late-Night Deal | janresseger

Congress Sticks Teach for America Exemption into Late-Night Deal | janresseger:

Congress Sticks Teach for America Exemption into Late-Night Deal

Posted on October 17, 2013 by janresseger

Close to midnight last night Congress passed legislation to end the government shutdown, but as Valerie Strauss notes this morning in the Washington Post: “Unobtrusively slipped into the debt deal… is a provision about school reform that will make Teach for America very happy.  In language that does not give a hint about its real meaning, the deal extends by two years legislation that allows the phrase ‘highly qualified teachers’ to include students still in teacher training programs—and Teach for America’s recruits who get five weeks of summer training shortly after they have graduated from college, and are then placed in some of America’s neediest schools.”

Strauss continues: “It turns out that teachers still in training programs are disproportionately concentrated in schools serving low-income students and students of color, the very children who need the very best the teaching profession has to offer.  The inequitable distribution of these teachers also has a disproportionate impact on students with disabilities.”  According to Kenneth Zeicher,an education researcher cited by Strauss, “A 2012 study from Stanford University concludes that nationally students of color in low-income schools are 3 to 10 times more likely to have teachers who are uncertified, not fully prepared, or teaching outside their