Teacher at elite New York City high school has a serious beef with Teach for America — here's why
The celebration was billed as the biggest event in the history of TFA — which recruits high-achieving recent college graduates to teach in poor schools.
TFA members gathered to reflect on the organization's accomplishments and discuss the current state of education reform. It culminated with a performance by Janelle Monáe, a Grammy-nominated R&B singer.
But the anniversary wasn't entirely a celebration of TFA's successes.
At the event was also a smaller, if not at times equally vocal, subset of the TFA community, who set their sights on being a disruptive force at the event. About 100 of the so-called disrupters attended a meeting called "Critics not Haters" where they could discuss their issues with TFA, according toGary Rubinstein, a math teacher and former TFA member who attended the session. The group was not welcomed by everybody else in attendance.
"The people who criticize me, they were taunting me for the whole weekend," Rubinstein told Business Insider.
Rubinstein doesn't mince words when talking about TFA, placing much of the blame squarely on its shoulders for supposedly denigrating the state of education. He asserts that TFA and many of the organization's alumni have bolstered a harmful narrative about traditional public schools and have taken part in "teacher bashing."
"TFA has highlighted their few successes so much that many politicians actually believe that first year TFA teachers are effective," Rubinstein has written on his blog. "They believe that there are lazy veteran teachers who are not ‘accountable’ to their students and who are making a lot of money so we’re better off firing those older teachers and replacing them with these young go-getters."
TFA was founded in 1989 by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton graduate, who wrote her thesis on building such an organization. It places college graduates in public and charter K-12 schools with the promise they will serve two years in the program.
The organization has successfully introduced highly qualified new teachers into the profession, andstudies have shown the teachers in the program are effective educators. One of the most cited, a study out of Mathematica Policy Research, showed that TFA teachers were just as effective as their counterparts in other schools who had an average of 13.6 years experience teaching, versus TFA average of 1.5 years.Teacher at elite New York City high school has a serious beef with Teach for America — here's why - Yahoo Finance:
