Voucher Veneer: The Deeper Agenda to Privatize Public Education

The American Way writes the following about privatizing education:

The Heartland Institute’s Joseph Bast has urged others who share his group’s extreme agenda to be patient. “The complete privatization of schooling might be desirable, but this objective is politically impossible for the time being. Vouchers are a type of reform that is possible now, and would put us on the path to further privatization.”(emphasis added)

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Teach for America…Another, More Radical, Perspective!

Brown Policy Review writes:

First off, thanks again to everyone who helped out with/showed up at the Teach for America Controversy on Thursday. I think it’s really important to evaluate a program that attracts so much attention, particularly on college campuses.

At the discussion, panelist James Campbell from the Africana Studies Dept. read a few excerpts from Bil Johnson’s sharply critical opinion piece “Why I Don’t Like TFA.” Professor Johnson was a professor in the Education Department at Brown, and now he’s at Yale. We invited him to come down to see the panel, but he had to attend another conference that night (although he did say that he heard about how the discussion went, and was sorry to have missed it. But I digress). However, below I’ve pasted the entirety of “Why I Don’t Like Teach for America.” It’s funny, but it’s also very incisive. He raises some excellent points and asks very important questions.

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Do school houses rock with Elis at the helm?

MATTHEW SCHNEIER of The Yale Herald writes:

Teaching, in many students’ view, is what to do when there’s nothing else available.

This view can lead to a dangerous form of elitism. One cannot, says Pressman, just teach for lack of anything better to do; a love of children and a love of learning are absolute prerequisites. “You have to love kids,” she says. “You have to find it exciting and challenging to work with kids on the level that they’re at, whatever it is.”

Teaching is about the intense, personal relationship between the teacher and the student; “It can’t be about you,” Gillette says succinctly. Kaufmann agrees: As teachers must communicate far more to their students than just lesson plans, “if there’s a person who’s teaching just to fill time or have something on their resume, it can be detrimental to a child’s growth.”

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Student Engagement and the Use of Volunteer Teachers in Alternative Urban Middle Schools

L. Mickey Fenzel and Gerivonni M. Flippen
Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, April 8, 2006.
Abstract: The use of recent college graduates as volunteer teachers has increased in recent years with the growth of the Teach for America program and alternative middle schools for at-risk children from low income homes. Very few studies to date have investigated the effects of the use of such teachers on student learning and engagement in school. The present study examines the effectiveness of using volunteer teachers in 11 alternative urban middle schools that utilize the Nativity model. Results show that experienced teachers hold more positive perceptions of their teaching competence than do volunteers and their students rate the climate of their classrooms as more conducive to learning. Results also provide support for the value of using volunteer teachers, provided that they are well trained and supervised and that they are given more teaching responsibilities only as they become more competent in the classroom.
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SAMPLE QUESTIONS FROM THE REAL WORLD! Teach for America’s feel-good ideals lead us to ask some tough questions

The Daily Howler writes:

But then, low-income/minority kids have been treated this shabby way for decades. That high-minded statement from the TFA site is weirdly disconnected from real-world concerns. But so what? It makes the reader feel high-minded-and that’s why the Post decided to cite it. For decades, mainstream organs have treated low-income kids this way-as handy props for their own psychodramas. God spare our low-income kids the good intentions of recent Ivy League grads-and the sub-standard editorializing of those high-minded eds at the Post.

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On the Wal-Mart Money Trail

Liza Featherstone, reporter for The Nation writes

Among such projects, the Waltons tend to fund the most mind-numbing and cultish, giving in 2003 alone nearly $3 million to Knowledge Is Power (KIPP) schools and millions more to other schools using the KIPP curriculum, which emphasizes regimented recitation rather than critical or creative thinking. Particularly widespread in low-income neighborhoods, such schools seem bent on disciplining and exhorting the poor rather than developing human potential (much like Wal-Mart as a workplace, with its relentless company cheers and dead-end jobs).

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Research and Rhetoric on Teacher Certification:A Response to “Teacher Certification Reconsidered”

Linda Darling-Hammond writes:

Along with the report’s finding that, over a three year period, between 60% and 100% of TFA candidates had left after their second year of teaching, this finding raises additional questions about Teach for America’s contribution to the education of Houston students, since they do not stay long enough to gain the experience that could support student achievement. Earlier data from the Maryland Department of Education showed that TFA recruits in Baltimore had similar attrition rates, with 62 % gone by the third year of teaching

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Certified teachers get better results than untrained counterparts, new study finds

A News Release from Stanford University states:

A new six-year study by School of Education researchers shows that elementary students in Houston, Texas, consistently performed better when they were taught by certified teachers rather than by instructors lacking formal preparation.

Led by education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond, an advocate of teacher certification, the research specifically looked at the effectiveness of Teach for America (TFA), a program that sends graduates from the nation’s most prestigious colleges to work in disadvantaged school districts after only a few weeks of training.

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Debating ‘Teach for America’

Will Oremus of The Stanford Daily Writes

Yet critics, such as Stanford Education Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond, contend that the program hurts the very students and schools it purports to help. Darling-Hammond has two main objections.

First, recruits undergo only five weeks of training, as opposed to the year of postgraduate study required to obtain teaching certification in most states. Darling-Hammond said she believes that this leaves recruits woefully unprepared to face the complex issues that arise in classroom situations and runs counter to her goal of “professionalizing” teaching.

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Thoughts on Teach for America

Thoughts on Teach for America writes:

At the end of my senior year of college, I joined Teach for America and was assigned to teach in the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas. After several months as a sorely underprepared English teacher in a chaotic, wildly mismanaged high school, I experienced stress and exhaustion so profound that they exacerbated existing health problems. I left teaching and Teach for America at the end of the first semester of the school year and have not once regretted quitting.

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