CURMUDGUCATION: Teach for America: The Other Big Problem

CURMUDGUCATION: Teach for America: The Other Big Problem

Teach for America: The Other Big Problem

Teach for America's most famously flawed premise is well known-- five weeks of training makes you qualified to teach in a classroom. It's an absurd premise that has been criticized and lampooned widely. It is followed closely in infamy by the notion that two years in a classroom are about providing the TFAer with an "experience," or a resume-builder so they have a better shot at that law or MBA program they're applying to. That premise has also been widely criticized.

There's another TFA premise that is less remarked on but is perhaps, in the long run, far worse. From the TFA website:

To change our country’s education system, we need leaders challenging conventional wisdom and the status quo, working for the long term from both inside and outside the school system. Once you become an alum of TFA, you’ll bring an invaluable perspective to any career field in working to create opportunity for students and communities nationwide.

This is the other TFA premise-- that two years in a classroom makes you qualified to run a school, or a school district, or a state education department. Two years in a classroom makes you qualified to be an education policy leader.

This is nuts.

First of all, two years in a classroom is nothing. For most folks it takes five to seven years to really get on your feet as a classroom teacher, to really have a solid sense of what you're doing (and you will never, ever, reach a point at which you don't have much more to learn about the work). The beginning two years are a challenge for anyone, and in the case of TFA, we're talking about the first two years of a person who only prepped for the job for five weeks! So they are starting out behind the average traditional new teacher. And if they are teaching in, say, a charter where they are surrounded primarily by other newbies, or being coached and led by TFA staff who are alumni who only have CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Teach for America: The Other Big Problem