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Let's look at the piece.
First, it is a Time magazine piece, known for not only be a fairly conservative publication, but also a pretty factless one. Notice that most of it's stats and figures are either unsourced, or from TFA themselves. For instance, "Again and again, the most rigorous studies show that TFA's selection process and boot-camp training produce teachers who are as good, and sometimes better, than non-TFA teachers, including those who have been trained in traditional education schools and those who have been teaching for decades." What studies, why no link to these studies, show us these studies. And why the dismissive tone for those studies that don't show TFA in a glowing light?
Secondly, let's look at the "experts" it refers to. Dan Goldhaber is affiliated with the Urban institute, a conservative, though nominally Democratic think tank. Worse, the article refers to Michelle Rhee, whose personal crusade is to rip the heart out of public education, much like what she did in the DC district, where she was eventually forced out. The fallout from her tenure in DC is still being felt, and many of her claims of progress are being found to be either greatly exaggerated or altogether false. In fact to just get the job in DC she lied on her resume about her time as a TFA teacher, claiming that her students made great progress on tests and other measures of progress, a claim later proven false. Finally, let's look at the author himself, Andrew Rotherman. Not only does he write for Time, but he is Senior Fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, that DLC think tank dedicated, among other things, to the propagation of charter and private schools.
Finally, the very notion that five weeks of training prepares you for teaching is absolutely absurd. Despite the dismissive tone that TFA advocates use when talking about pedagogical theory, you absolutely need these theoretical underpinnings in order to understand what you're doing, why you're doing it, and how it can and does work. If you don't have these theoretical underpinnings, you're simply flaying around in your classes, unable to effectively teach because you simply don't know how to. Let me give you an example, Gardener's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. This basically states that people's learning is oriented on one or more ways of thought, such as verbal intelligence, visual/spatial, kinesthetic, etc. The point is to align your teaching towards those intelligences that your students excel at in order to more effectively reach and teach them. This works, there are decades of evidence backing this up. But since TFA doesn't teach these theoretical underpinnings, their graduates don't use this tool, thus, they are ineffective. Repeat this time after time, theory after theoretical background, and the result are TFA graduates who are approaching teaching without the necessary tools needed to effectively reach their students.
Furthermore, as any teacher will tell you, despite all your preparation, your practicums, your lessons on classroom management, nothing really prepares you for your first teaching experience. But, despite the feeling that you've been pushed into a deep lake without a life jacket, your education, your practicum experience, your theoretical background, all of this combines to buoy you back to the surface, enabling you to overcome being overwhelmed, and become an effective teacher. You start making connections between theory and practice, you realize that you have a pretty effective bag of tools for classroom management, you have a ream of lesson plans from your many, many hours of classes that you can now draw upon. These are all things that TFA graduates simply don't have. Thus, when they take that plunge into the classroom, they flail around like a drowning person who doesn't know how to swim, and only a lucky few are able to make it back to the surface.
This piece is simply another hit piece put out by corporate media, using corporate experts in order to enable the corporate takeover of our public school systems. This is another hit piece on teachers, teachers unions and the teaching profession. It is designed to try and force our education system into a corporate friendly mold, a mold that does and will do an extreme disservice to our children and children's children. To further the work and propaganda of corporate education is to deprive our children of their best possible chance for a good education. Are there problems in education that need to be addressed, certainly. But TFA is not the answer to those problem, it simply layers another set of problems on top of those that are already in the field.
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