TFA Trains Teachers At ‘Failing’ School Led By TFA Alum
‘Failing’ schools are the oxygen of the modern education reform movement. Up until about 10 years ago with the rise of Democratic education reformers like Arne Duncan, Joel Klein, and TFA alum Michelle Rhee, I hadn’t heard the term much. There were schools with low test scores, of course, but everyone understood that low test scores did not mean you had a school staffed by self-serving ‘adults’ who were the sole cause of these low test scores. Accountability became defined as identifying and punishing ‘failing’ schools and identifying and punishing ‘ineffective’ teachers.
This ‘failing schools / ineffective teacher’ narrative peaked, I think, around 2010 with Obama’s Race To The Top program which required states to invent metrics to better identify the ‘failing’ schools that need to be turned into ‘high performing’ charters and the ‘ineffective’ teachers that need to be fired. The movie ‘Waiting For Superman’ helped make this narrative ingrained in the public consciousness.
I’ve worked at four schools in my career and three of those schools would be deemed ‘failing’ by most education reformers. Yet I was impressed by the majority of the teachers at these so-called ‘failing’ schools so I know that most schools that states are labelling ‘failing’ are actually not to anyone who really gets to know the school.
Teach For America actually has many corps members and alumni working and even leading schools that have low state report card grades. They have also had many corps members and alumni in public and also charter schools that have been closed down TFA Trains Teachers At ‘Failing’ School Led By TFA Alum | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:
