Is Teach For America Part of A Global Phenomenon?

Well, in the global age, isn’t everything?
Click here to read a post by Lois Weiner, educator, author, and researcher about Teach for America and the global trend that it represents for teachers, public schools, unions, and working people around the world.

American Politics Are Affecting Our Health

Let’s show this one to those who wish us to believe that the American Health Care System is so much better than in Europe and that by providing socialized care for all Americans, this superior health care will drop. 
According to Social Science Quarterly, Americans have stopped growing.  Apparently, Americans used to be the tallest in [...]

Somebody Wrote About Why They Hate Teach For America

And it wasn’t us this time.
Ed Notes has featured a post written by former NYCTF Feministe, entitled Why I Hate Teach for America.
Click here

What Wendy Kopp Could Have Learned From My Sicilian Grandfather

My grandfather grew up in the same town in Sicily as some seriously questionable characters.  We have lots of stories in my family of Grandpa’s dealings with certain individuals - he knew this one or that one- but they are mostly family-folk lore and the aggrandizement of a pretty gentle and honest man.
Still, he knew [...]

Questionable Associations

“Racism developed in Europe as part of a rational and scientific project to understand the world.”
Guiding Question:
What reason would “educational reformers” possibly have to be frequent guest speakers at an organization who publishes this?
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.18082,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Is Racism a Western Idea?
By Dinesh D’Souza
The contemporary mood of frustration and pessimism about racism springs from the conviction that American society may [...]

Teachable Moment

I really don’t have any intention of continuing the Teach for America debate, as it has been called. I, personally, am a bit tired of the back and forth and I’m sure that people are tired of hearing about it. Still, there are moments when something pops up that seems to be in [...]

Some TFA’s Do Get It

Given the commenting frenzy that has been occurring on this blog lately, and some of the oddly clueless comments which have resulted, people outside of the Teach for America Program may have been tempted to see all TFA teachers in a negative light.
Here’s one gem:
“Being a doctor or lawyer requires one to be very, very [...]

Is Teach For America A Cult?

You know, in retrospect, the way that TFA members feel the need to defend the TFA program has been striking me as really odd. In particular, I have been amazed at how some responders have reacted to the audit story. A simple posting about an audit of the program and - bang! [...]

Teach for America Members Respond

It looks like someone from TFA is not pleased with our criticisms of the program. They seem to have put us on some kind of a TFA listserv which has been circulating around. You can see the circulation on the Feedjit box below.
Some TFA members have been responding to criticisms on this [...]

Wendy Kopp Says No To Suggestions for Improving Teacher Quality

It’s a bit ironic that the founder of Teach for America, the organization who is portrayed as providing our neediest schools with “highly qualified” teachers, has said no to suggestions from Megan Hopkins at PHI DELTA KAPPAN on ways to improve teacher quality.
Alexander Russo reports that Hopkins presented some very concrete suggestions for improving the [...]