Harvard student: ‘Don’t Teach For America’
Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp (The Washington Post)
Year after year, Harvard University is one of the leading contributors of new graduates to the teacher corps of Teach For America. The latest statistics for the 2013 corps show Harvard and Vanderbilt University tying for No. 1 among medium-sized universities, with 45 each. (The University of Texas at Austin was the biggest contributor, with 73 graduates.) But not all Harvard students think highly of Teach For America. Here is a smart piece from the Harvard Crimson– which I am publishing with permission from the student newspape — written Sandra Y. L. Korn ’14. Korn is a Crimson editorial writer who is concentrating her studies on the history of science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality. You can follow her on Twitter @sandraylk.
By Sandra Y.L. Korn
Last month, I got an email from a recruiter. An associate of Teach For America, citing a minor leadership role in a student organization as evidence that I “have distinguished [myself] as a leader here on Harvard’s campus,” asked me to meet with Harvard’s TFA representative on campus. Dropping phrases like “race and class,” “equal opportunities,” and “educational injustice,” the recruiter promised that I could have a
A cautionary lesson in ‘raising the stakes’ for young students
Here’s a cautionary post about the unintended consequences of the high-stakes testing of very young children. Glory Tobiason, a former ESL teacher and current PhD student in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, writes about a new policy passed by the D.C. Public Charter School Board to give new standardized tests children […]
Five key features of effective schools
Yes, we do know the recipe for effective schools, as Greg Anrig explains in this post. He is vice president of policy and programs at The Century Foundation and author of Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools. By Greg Anrig Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, who runs the education policy shop at the […]