Today the New York Times ran an admiring article about Teach for America.
I almost missed it because it was in the business section.
The young people interviewed intend to move on to six-figure jobs on Wall Street after they put in their two years in the classroom. Some say they are making quite a financial sacrifice by deferring their entry into their “real” career.
The comments are almost as interesting as the article.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If Yale Law School and McKinsey no longer guarantee the career paths due our Ivy grads, and if public education has become Rupert Murdoch’s lucrative $500 billion dollar sector desperately awaiting “reform,” it makes sense that these salary-frustrated youngsters would would pause breifly for classroom cred before claiming six figure management slots in the market’s next big bubblel. And given their familiarity with data, we can probably expect them to come up with an educational version of the Gaussian copula function, with similarly reliable results.
Oh wait, maybe the formula is already in use?
Notice that the NY State Reform Commission’s Education Action Plan is titled Putting Students First.
Click to access EducationReformCommissionReport.pdf
How creative! More “branding” thanks to TFA and Rhee.
One “teacher” said he considered TFA because he was desperate. Great…just what we need…desperate elites with no other option but to slum in a public school.
TWD: teach when desperate.
Or use it to pump up your resume.
btw, my comments garnered many recommendations and became part of “Readers’ Picks” because I, like many others, know the real agenda behind TFA. And I don’t buy into this fallacy that they are assigned to hard-to-staff schools, especially in NOLA where a majority of the teachers were not rehired. I don’t go by the name Schoolgal on the NYTimes site. But I was lucky enough to be among the first 10 people who responded.
Articles usually make it seem that Wendy is doing this out of the kindness of her heart. They never mention the “finders” fee that TFA charges and the grants that they receive. TFA is a multimillion dollar business built on the backs of these easily manipulated grads and their students. With more Charters it could easily become multibillion!
I know of cases where the TFA temp left within weeks. I wonder if they get the fee back?
Slum?
So that’s what you really think?
Racist reference
Shameful!
No that is not what I think. I teach in a public school. I am referring to the TFA temp having to give up their true dream and lower themselves for a few years hoping it will jazz up their résumé while making them look so altruistic. It had nothing to do with race…that was your assumption.
I don’t think Linda was implying anything racist. She was reflecting the attitudes of some who go into TFA, instead of committing to teaching as a career.
Yes, that it what I was trying to say.
I think the phrase “slumming it” refers to doing something beneath your (perceived ) station in life.
I got the impression that Linda was referring to the attitudes of the TFA types, not implying that public schools are slums.
I tend to wince whenever I hear TFA alums brag about the progress they made during their one year of “teaching.” I was there myself as a rookie, in that same mindset. I had thought when I began teaching that I had an edge over the other older teachers in my building. They were old and I was fresh. I was younger and could relate to the kids better. I had just come out of school and learned all the newest pedagogy while they had got the old school marm stuff. It just isn’t true. The first two years are really difficult for a beginning teacher. You don’t see how bad you were at it until your fourth or fifth year. Then you see how far you have come.
Teaching simply takes time. You have to make mistakes, reflect, grow, study, and watch and learn from the veterans you work with. The ones you orginally thought were bad turned out not to be, and vice versa. For all the bad publicity and misguided or evil-guided “reform” going on it still is a really great job, teaching in a public school. It takes a weird mix of talents (scholar, stand-up comic, government clerk, baby sitter, security guard, nurse, what else am I forgetting) to be good at it. You don’t quite get enough training, even with a full year of student teaching and two years of pedagogy before you start and so you learn on the job (I went the Master’s route). Considering TFA to be a teaching gig is crazy.
Jacques Barzun said something nice about teaching being an art (I’m paraphrasing): You wouldn’t want to bring back Hippocrates to perform surgery on you; you would prefer someone new and out of med school. But you would want to bring back Socrates to teach you over a teacher just out of ed-school. Reformers/Deformers just don’t see this. Or maybe they do, but they only think it applies to their own kids. They think kids in places like Chicago Public need surgeons. Their own kids get Socrates.
Attention defenders of the charter/privatizing movement: reality check. The above is a real teacher talking. I know—I worked with dozens.
Preparation that can be counted in weeks and a job stint of a year or two or three just to put an item on your resume does not a professional educator make. But my heartfelt plea to those who cannot even conceive of a “better education for all” is: please don’t let me stop you from hoisting yourself with [thank you Kevin Wilson for the help with prepositions!] your own rhetorical petards.
I think it would be useful to separate TFA issues from charter issues. They are certainlly not the same thing.
Every teacher, TFA or any other, is a beginning teacher at the beginning.
TE – yes, but there’s the matter of intent. Most teachers who go the traditional route are not planning to spend just two years in the classroom and then go on to six figure salaries in a different field. Many traditionally trained teachers do drop out after the first couple years, but that could hardly be intentional as they could hardly expect to use teaching as a stepping stone to big bucks. There’s a big difference between going into teaching with all the right intentions and simply discovering you’re not suited for it, vs. intentionally stepping on the backs of poor kids to get where you really want to be in life.
I do not know the intent of traditionally trained teachers or charter teachers.
Oh, come on, TE, yes you do. You can see it in their actions. No one spends four+ years pursuing a degree in education, plus student teaching, etc. with the upfront intention of leaving the field, especially since there would be no earthly reason for them to think that their brief teaching experience would lead to anything more lucrative. Clearly people who put in that kind of effort to get the degree really thought that education was what they wanted to do, even if it didn’t work out that way.
On the other hand, plenty of people would (and do) get into a five week training, two year commitment gig if they anticipated they could then go on to earn a six figure salary in pretty much any field they choose to branch into.
No, of course one can’t judge the intentions of all TFAers – I’m sure many of them do have altruistic motivations. But overall, the split between traditionally trained teachers and TFAers is clear.
You appear to have all kinds of book smarts, but you really don’t understand people.
I try to be careful not to make sweeping generalizations, so I can’t talk about what TFA teachers “do”. Some stay in teaching, some leave.
TE, no need to make sweeping generalizations. There is abundant research and evidence. TFA teachers agree to stay only two years. 85-90% are gone by the end of three years.
Agreed.
I have quite a few posts on TFA (dcgmentor.com) and have given talks about their hype at both the first SOS March and Conference in Aug 2011 and Occupy DOEDC last April.
The TImes, as most big media outlets, simply buys the hype and on occasion runs a “human interest” story about a “typical” TFA corps member and their plight.
They also tend to include TFA’s highly dubious #s about how many actually stay in teaching in PUBLIC school classrooms. Rarely if ever do they look behind the hype.
This article is just one of a series that aids TFA in its anti traditionally trained teacher crusade.
It doesn’t look like many of the TFA participates were faced with the “touch choice” referenced in Diane’s headline. According to the article, only 21 of the 5,800 participants were deferring a job offer from “a Wall Street bank, a management consulting firm or another corporate partner.” And there were 48,000 applicants for those 5,800 spots. A lot of the TFA’ers may view public school teaching as a temporary plan or even as “slumming,” but it doesn’t look like they’re doing it as part of their master plan to work at Goldman. It’s Plan B, and what’s driving application volume is a lack of opportunity elsewhere in the economy.
Also, I liked this: “At the end of day, he administers a five-question quiz to students to assess who understood the lesson. When class is over, he performs exhaustive data pulls in Excel, just as he did as a finance intern.”
Exhaustive data pulls = click “Pivot Table,” insert bar graph, return to surfing Internet.
“…but it doesn’t look like they’re doing it as part of their master plan to work at Goldman.”
Really? Looks exactly like that to me. As you yourself said, only 21 of these elite graduates had a job offer. But after just two years teaching other people’s children, suddenly job offers will fall from the sky. Sounds exactly like they are just doing it as part of their master plan to work at Goldman (or wherever else they’d like).
I guess that Steve Zimmer’s master plan did not work out well for him.
TE: What was “Steve Zimmer’s master plan,” as you put it? To ask questions? To seek answers about Board policy? Isn’t that his job as a member of the Board of Education?
Diane – TE is just being smug. He’s accusing us (me) of making sweeping generalizations about *every* TFA member, even though I’ve explicitly said of course not every TFA member can be judged the same way, just that the trend between TFA members and traditional teachers *in general* is obvious. From TE’s binary perspective, the presence of one exception to my “rule” (again, even though I explicitly said it’s not a rule) proves that I’m wrong. People like TE either don’t understand nuance or they deliberately obscure it to “prove” a point.
TE is here to keep everyone on his/her toes by constantly challenging whatever you say. I accept him as a member of our community, no matter how annoying he may be. I value free speech, so long as it is civil.
Dienne,
I apologize if I misunderstood you when you said “Sounds exactly like they are just doing it as part of their master plan to work at Goldman (or wherever else they’d like).” I thought the words “their” and “they” referred to all TFA graduates, not just some TFA graduates.
I often agree with posters on here. I had hoped, for example, that Darlene post about the impact of the common core requirements on her school might be picked out and featured on the blog. Her post is in this thread: https://dianeravitch.net/2012/12/30/common-core-nonsense/
“But after just two years teaching other people’s children, suddenly job offers will fall from the sky.”
They won’t, though. There’s another massive wave of Ivy graduates next year, and the year after that. Don’t believe the hype, even if some of these kids do.
My undergrad was as a Psychology Major in LAS and with honors. I decided to get a Masters in Education to teach E/BD Special Education students. In the 70’s the scope of humanistic education and the first law i.e. 94-142 demanding FAPE etc was exciting and so was being a committed young teacher.
When did teaching become a Harvard internship with as little as a two-year committment become equated with certified teachers period? They are not. And “teaching” as a last resort because Lehman cheats put themselves out of business and help cripple our nation is not what I want in the motivation for being a teacher. These are not teachers they are job junkies looking to jump at the first “real business” exit. Shame on TFA for doing this to children.
SAD situation. Yes, SHAME, SHAME on TFA.
Reblogged this on Dr Jamil Adimin and commented:
Sangat menarik untuk dikongsikan artikel tentang Teach for America (TFA) dalam New York Times yang diulas oleh ramai orang termasuk Diane Ravitch dalam blognya. Banyak yang kita boleh pelajari dan banding dengan Teach For Malaysia (TFM) yang sedang kita usahakan.
Wall street hiring weak…….professionals take their “high powered” skills to the classroom….Teach for America said its applicant pool had swelled during the recession and lackluster recovery. More than 48,000 applied for 5,800 spots
sounds more like “any port in a storm”
Teaching should encourage the best and the brightest to join its ranks. I recognize that many people have a problem with TFA, but the idea that we wouldn’t want the top graduates of the top schools to consider teaching is ludicrous.
Yes, they conisder it, but many do not consider it a career. They consider it as a way to buttress their resume..teach for a while, teach for a resume…then move on. And the best and brightest don’t always perform the best in all settings. That is an overused term and the original meaning was quite different.
No, no, no. The “best and brightest” are the ones who keep getting us into these messes in the first place – we certainly do not need more of them. Diane has posted numerous times on this.
Furthermore, there’s nothing about being a top graduate of an “elite” university that inherently makes one more qualified to be a teacher than someone who spent four+ years of their lives earning a degree in teaching. Teaching isn’t just about being smart (in fact, at times I think being “smart”, at least in certain ways, can be an impediment to teaching because “smart” people are often unable to understand how it is that someone doesn’t understand the material). Teaching is about caring deeply about other people learning and having at least a certain natural talent in reaching people to make that learning happen.
To add to this sentence: “Furthermore, there’s nothing about being a top graduate of an “elite” university that inherently makes one more qualified to be a teacher than someone who spent four+ years of their lives earning a degree in teaching”… even if that degree is from a “lesser” university or if such person didn’t graduate at the top of his/her class.
Yes, teaching is a human interaction based upon relationships and developing relationships. I suspect those who consider themselves the smartest and the best do not always value other points of view and do not have the patience to understand those who struggle. A little research on the true meaning of “best and brightest” may help Jay to understand.
The poverty-to-prison pipeline (at least for the Unworthy Poor who are excluded from the redemptive power of temp missionary miracle workers and charter schools) and the TFA-to-McKinsey/Goldman pipeline: two sides of the same devalued coin.