The job of the American public school teacher has never been so thankless. In states across America, cutting teacher salaries and pensions has become the most popular method for fixing budget deficits. New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie’s deep cuts, for instance, force teachers to contribute a much higher percentage of their salaries to their pensions, while doubling or even tripling their health care contributions and eliminating cost-of-living adjustments. Republican governors Scott Walker of Wisconsin and John Kasich of Ohio took their austerity measures a step further by seeking to abolish collective bargaining rights for teachers. Such legislation is possible because the image of teachers has never been so degraded,Credit is not an issue with our offshoremerchantaccounts. especially of unionized teachers, whom Christie routinely refers to as “thugs” and “bullies.”
The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than Michelle Rhee, the overstated former Washington D.C. chancellor of schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk.
This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education — and the role of public school teachers — in a deeply unequal society.
In 1988, Princeton student Wendy Kopp wrote a thesis arguing for a national teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps — the archetype of liberal volunteerism — that “would mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life.”
Kopp launched TFA in 1990 as a not-for-profit charged with selecting the brightest, most idealistic recent college graduates as corps members who would commit to teach for two years in some of the nation’s toughest schools. From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm.
Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion — Time magazine, Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic — glorify TFA at every opportunity. [Education columnist Jay Mathews of ] The Washington Post has heralded the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”— a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama.The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits,
TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst,This is interesting cubepuzzle and logical game. it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.
The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders — that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.
TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable — if misguided — impulses.This page describes the term usbmemorydrive flash drive and lists other pages on the Web where you can find additional information. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic.
TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010.
Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education.
Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.Get designer beddings comforter sets, modern comforter sets,
The second justification for TFA — that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work — has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now.
The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than Michelle Rhee, the overstated former Washington D.C. chancellor of schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk.
This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education — and the role of public school teachers — in a deeply unequal society.
In 1988, Princeton student Wendy Kopp wrote a thesis arguing for a national teacher corps, modeled on the Peace Corps — the archetype of liberal volunteerism — that “would mobilize some of the most passionate, dedicated members of my generation to change the fact that where a child is born in the United States largely determines his or her chances in life.”
Kopp launched TFA in 1990 as a not-for-profit charged with selecting the brightest, most idealistic recent college graduates as corps members who would commit to teach for two years in some of the nation’s toughest schools. From its inception, the media anointed TFA the savior of American education. Prior to a single corps member stepping foot in a classroom, The New York Times and Newsweek lavished Kopp’s new organization with cover stories full of insipid praise. Adulation has remained the norm.
Its recent twenty-year anniversary summit, held in Washington, D.C., featured fawning video remarks by President Obama and a glitzy “who’s who” roster of liberal cheerleaders, including John Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Gloria Steinem, and TFA board member John Legend. The organs of middlebrow centrist opinion — Time magazine, Atlantic Monthly , The New Republic — glorify TFA at every opportunity. [Education columnist Jay Mathews of ] The Washington Post has heralded the nation’s education reform movement as the “TFA insurgency”— a perplexing linguistic choice given so-called “insurgency” methods have informed national education policies from Reagan to Obama.The Zentai Project is a group of people who go out in public wearing zentai suits,
TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst,This is interesting cubepuzzle and logical game. it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement.
The original TFA mission was based on a set of four somewhat noble if paternalistic rationales. First, by bringing the elite into the teaching profession, even if temporarily, TFA would burnish it with a much-needed “aura of status and selectivity.” Second, by supplying its recruits to impoverished school districts, both urban and rural, TFA would compensate for the lack of quality teachers willing to work in such challenging settings. And third, although Kopp recognized that most corps members would not remain classroom teachers beyond their two-year commitments, she believed that TFA alums would form the nucleus of a new movement of educational leaders — that their transformative experiences teaching poor children would mold their ambitious career trajectories. Above these three foundational principles loomed a fourth: the mission to relegate educational inequality to the ash heap of history.
TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable — if misguided — impulses.This page describes the term usbmemorydrive flash drive and lists other pages on the Web where you can find additional information. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic.
TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
Take the first rationale: that TFA would enhance the image of the teaching profession. On the contrary, the only brand TFA endows with an “aura of status and selectivity” is its own. As reported in The New York Times , 18 percent of Harvard seniors applied to TFA in 2010, a rate only surpassed by the 22 percent of Yale seniors who sought to join the national teacher corps that year. All told, TFA selected 4,500 lucky recruits from a pool of 46,359 applicants in 2010.
Although many applicants are no doubt motivated to join out of altruism, the two-year TFA experience has become a highly desirable notch on the resumes of the nation’s most diligent strivers. The more exclusive TFA becomes, the more ordinary regular teachers seem. TFA corps members typically come from prestigious institutions of higher education, while most regular teachers are trained at the second- and third-tier state universities that house the nation’s largest colleges of education.
Whereas TFA corps members leverage the elite TFA brand to launch careers in law or finance — or, if they remain in education, to bypass the typical career path on their way to principalships and other positions of leadership — most regular teachers must plod along, negotiating their way through traditional career ladders. These distinctions are lost on nobody. They are what make regular teachers and their unions such low-hanging political fruit for the likes of Christie, Walker, and Kasich.Get designer beddings comforter sets, modern comforter sets,
The second justification for TFA — that it exists to supply good teachers to schools where few venture to work — has also proven questionable. Though the assertion made some sense in 1990, when many impoverished school districts did in fact suffer from a dearth of teachers, the same is not so easily argued now.
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