Teach For Canada can only make things worse
Aboriginal-led educational partnerships such as Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey (MK) in Nova Scotia have had success in raising graduation rates. (photo: kinu.ca)
Have you heard of Teach For Canada? It’s a new project spearheaded by Nova ScotianKyle Hill, a Rhodes scholar and business consultant; and Vancouver-born Adam Goldenberg, former speechwriter for Michael Ignatieff and fellow at Yale law school.
Hill and Goldenberg want to address “educational inequality” in Canada, i.e. “[f]unding gaps, infrastructure deficiencies, and rapid teacher turnover” in rural and Aboriginal communities. Their solution? A program that would send university graduates (from any degree program) to work as schoolteachers for two years in these communities. Hill and Goldenberg hope to attract “some of Canada’s top graduates – our country’s future leaders” to their program, who would take their places in classrooms following a summer-long training period.
Teach for Canada takes its name from Teach for America (TFA), the U.S. program which for the past 23 years has sent bright-eyed young college grads into some of America’s toughest inner-city schools; schools where students tend to score lower than average on standardized tests and thus ostensibly need a dose of extra energy to succeed.TFA, though, has become a lightning rod for controversy in the climate of the “education reform” wars in the U.S. Just maybe, critics note, sending people with no experience in