posted August 20, 2003 03:16 PM              

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I recently read an article in Time magazine in which Teach for America (T.F.A) a national program, that was supposed to allow recent college graduates, to teach for two years in the poorest urban and rural school districts, was promised and then eliminated by the Bush administration.

It was sad becuase Bush was promising for two years, even supporting it in his speeches, and even visiting high schools. Before the founder was assured that her grant for 12.5 million in scholarship money and 1.5 million for operating expenses was safe. But in the end the program was being snubbed out. Other programs were being prefered for more volunteer work in the community and not the schools.

The point is this program was about teaching kids and helping them become leaders in forming a great generation. The senate even tried to restore some of the cuts by giving 100 million dollars back to Americorps, but the senate leader Tom Delay axed it once again. Even the President wanted it restored, but once again it went bye bye.

I guess there are the good guys and there are the bad guys. Are European schools any better?

-StarLover

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From: Madeira Beach, FL USA
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posted August 20, 2003 04:54 PM            

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Are you aware TFA teachers are not certified?

The Effectiveness of "Teach for America" and
Other Under-certified Teachers on Student Academic Achievement:
A Case of Harmful Public Policy1

Ildiko Laczko-Kerr
Arizona Department of Education

David C. Berliner
Arizona State University
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Teach for America

"The most familiar of the alternative certification programs is Teach for America (TFA). This ambitious program recruits graduates from top universities, provides them minimal training, and places them in public school classrooms across the nation to teach. The public schools, however, are all in either rural or poor urban districts (Darling-Hammond, 1994). Research conducted on TFA has been less than encouraging.

Four separate evaluations found that TFA's training program did not prepare candidates to succeed with students, despite the noticeable intelligence and enthusiasm of many of the recruits. Most criticism of a corps member's teaching behavior (classroom management was the greatest area of concern, followed by insufficient knowledge of the fundamentals of teaching and learning) was qualified by the cooperating teachers' perceptions of limitations of the program in providing the corps member with adequate practice or theory to be successful (Darling-Hammond, 1997a, p. 310).

From an interview study by Stevens and Dial (1993), TFA teachers apparently decide to teach because they like working with children; they didn't have other options; and they felt that TFA was their best alternative given their "circumstances and indecisiveness at the time" (p. 70).
Jonathan Schorr (1993), a former TFA teacher, describes the inadequate training and preparation that he and other TFA teachers received prior to being placed into schools. He notes, "just eight weeks of training ... is not enough for teachers" (p. 316). Schorr admits, "I was not a successful teacher, and the loss to the students was real and large" (p. 318). Schorr offers the first-hand experience that makes Darling-Hammond (1994; 1997a; 2001) quite critical of TFA, specifically due to the program's limited training of candidates, lack of evaluation, and the fact that such a program perpetuates the placement of poorly trained teachers with the most needy students in the nation.
Raymond, Fletcher, and Luque (2001) conducting research for the Center for Research in Education Outcomes (CREDO), released a report evaluating the Teach for American program in Texas. The report compares scores on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) of students taught by TFA teachers and non-TFA teachers, and lauded the performance of TFA teachers. However, the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future released a response outlining serious concerns with the research (see Darling-Hammond, 2001 and 2002). The most important of the criticisms is that the performance of the TFA teachers was never compared to the performance of regularly certified teachers. The comparison used to assess the TFA teachers was other uncertified teachers, some of whom didn't even have four-year college degrees.
It should also be noted that when we tried to access the data for this report, we were informed from both the primary researcher and the Texas school district responsible for the data that it was not available for independent review. We were told that the data was not the property of the researchers who reported the study, nor did it belong to the district, and that neither had a complete data set to provide for independent analysis. In our opinion, therefore, it is appropriate to regard this report as irrelevant, given that the comparison used to assess TFA teachers was faulty, the data are not available for verification or replication by other scientists, and the report has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal."

http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n37/

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posted August 20, 2003 05:22 PM              

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I guess it was a no win situation as always.

But still, you don't have to be certified to be a good teacher. The great ones always get lost that way. The article I read informed me that they were vigorously trained.

-StarLover

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From: Back in AZ with Bear the Leo
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posted August 21, 2003 06:28 PM            

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I would also look at archived Washington Post write up concerning two teachers who participated in the program out here in the DC ghetto. One was routinely threatened to be killed and both were hated by the black population as being outsiders.

The teachers at the urban schools hated the "rich" teachers and wouldn't help them under any circumstance. One of those teachers is battling a court case where several of the parents cried racism and are suing him for hate speech.

Sometimes these programs don't work. It's a sad thing, but there are those from both sides (poor and rich) that do not ever want to give these things a chance. The liability becomes an issue when these poor districts are being sued by parents for allowing a teacher to come in and "cause harm" to their children. Then the government has to step up and pay the tab and when that happens, we all pay since we are the ones footing the tax bills.

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