It is all the rage. Obama loves it. Oprah thinks it is great. They made a movie. We are busy firing teachers left and right and replacing them with the best of the best from Teach For America. Supermen and women Ivy League whippersnappers who have decided to...what?... pad their law school resumes for a couple years?
That's right, this is how Teach For America, the current darling of Obama/Duncan's education policy markets itself on the Harvard campus. One might have thought from all the hype that Teach For America was some sort of selfless civic minded enterprise focused on transforming education from the bottom up. But no, it looks like this highly successful program that replaces veteran classroom teachers with completely inexperienced Ivy League fresh college grads with no background or training in teaching is focused on one thing above all else, inflating the resumes of their participants.
Here's the text of the email:
TEACH FOR becoming a transformational leader.
A panel of Harvard Law School students will discuss their experiences in the classroom and how it prepared them to be transformational leaders in law.
Tuesday, October 12th
6 PM to 7 PM
Emerson 108
FREE PIZZA
Panelists and a Teach For America representative will be available for questions prior to and following the event.
Sponsored by Teach For America, The Harvard Pre-Law Society , The Latino Pre-Law Association, and The Black Pre-Law Association.
And look how well it works. Michelle Rhee, the controversial DC schools commissioner, was a Teach For America veteran of two years before they put her in charge of firing hundreds and hundreds of DC teachers.
When you go to a Teach For America recruitment event they don't get all misty about the kids. It is all about you. You and your law school resume. You won't be teaching for very long and once you get over with it, you will be so much more of a "transformational leader" due to your experience.
What's the plan here? Use the sorry state of America's schools to teach these Teachers For America how to game the political system? Because it sure is working.
Teach For America, like so many other of these new fad government funded quasi privatization schemes sweeping the nation is not the panacea for all ills of the educational system that it presents itself as. It is just another way to use public resources to reward those who don't need any more rewards at the expense of those who really do.
Don't fall for the "Waiting For Superman" nonsense. It is not teachers that are the problem. It is a political system that scapegoats professional teachers while starving them for the resources they need to do the job. The answer is not to put young wiseacre amateurs who are just using the public schools as a self-promotional whistle stop before law school or Goldman Sachs in front our kids. The answer is not Charter Schools, another way of funneling public dollars to a selected few. The answer is to give public education the funding and prestige that it deserves in our society and hold on to professional experienced qualified real teachers, the real Supermen and Superwomen.