Teach for America – What a Stupid Idea! (Or is it?)
By: Steven Singer
Welcome to the Hall of Stupid Ideas!
I’ll be your guide through this section of the museum.
Moving past the hall of phrenology, past the flat earth wing and the newly renovated rotunda of climate change denial, we come to one of my favorite displays – Teach for America or TFA.
This really is a very dumb idea.
Imagine, if you will, a country besieged by an education crisis! In this case, a shortage of teachers.
To meet the needs of this deficiency, we hire a slew of poorly trained college grads to fill-in the gaps.
Sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Young go-getters ready to take a stand and help the country by devoting themselves to our little children.
Yet it’s just so much bullshit.
You see the problem is real. We DO need more teachers – especially at our poorest schools. However, the same people who are promoting TFA are the ones who caused this shortage in the first place.
As public school budgets are slashed at both the state and federal level, local districts are forced to furlough more-and-more educators. Students are stuffed into larger classes and forced to do without the arts, foreign languages, technology courses, anything that isn’t on our federally mandated standardized tests.
So there IS a real shortage of teachers in the classroom, but there is NO shortage of unemployed teachers.
More than 300,000 teachers are out of work. These are people with at least a bachelors degree in education – many of whom have even more experience in the classroom actually teaching kids.
You might think that we could just allocate funding and hire them! Right!?
Wouldn’t that be better?
We could fill our public schools with dedicated education professionals instead of lightly trained temps.
Because this is what Teach for America is providing. TFA recruits get 5 weeks training and only have to sign on for a two-year commitment.
So those advocating for TFA insist it’s somehow better to give a child an instructor who has a few weeks training versus someone with a 4-or-5-year degree and who has real life experience on the job!
It’s staggering isn’t it?
Now this would never fly in most neighborhoods. Imagine trying to convince the rich that their children would be best served by this kind of scheme. They’d riot!
But this scam is almost exclusively perpetrated in poor neighborhoods because that’s where our state and federal governments cut funding. In rich neighborhoods, they can just raise local property taxes to give their children all the best that money can buy. In poor neighborhoods, this isn’t an option. They rely on state and federal tax dollars to give their kids a fair start in life so they can equally compete in the job market.
Well, the joke’s on you, poor people!
Rich folks are selling you substandard teachers and pretending like it’s philanthropy!
You’d think this scheme would be laughed out of existence but many national news sources praise it to the sky! They even make excuses when research proves how ineffective the whole scheme is!
