hacking education

I am a Teach for America corp member, 2009.  While I applaud the efforts of TFA, I don't personally believe that TFA is the solution to the educational inequity that is occuring in this country.  There are a lot of great things that Teach for America has going on for it, but it still seems to get a lot of flak.  And since I'm not totally enchanted with TFA, I can see both sides of the arguments.  Today I read this piece over on the Huffington Post, called Rebutting 7 Myths About Teach for America, which I really appreciated, especially this excerpt below.  It helps put the program in perspective.

In an ideal world, the teachers in this country would go through a rigorous development program, as doctors do, that would look something like this:

1. Ed schools would be highly competitive (the nations with the highest achieving students like Finland and Singapore only take teachers from the top 10 percent of college graduates);
2. Ed schools would be rigorous and provide students with real preparation;
3. Graduates would have to pass a tough exam demonstrating that they'd mastered the content;
4. New teachers would enter a carefully controlled and monitored environment, with seasoned mentors by their side to make sure they learned (and did no harm);
5. Effective teachers would be rewarded and given more responsibility; and
6. Ineffective ones would be given additional support and, if that didn't work, counseled out.

In our dysfunctional, Alice-in-Wonderland education world, not one of these six things happens with any regularity.

In my ideal world, there would still be room for TFA, but 80 percent or more of teachers would be seasoned veterans -- there's nothing incompatible both coexisting.

A better analogy for doctors would be the following: imagine that our least accomplished college grads went to medical schools, which were noncompetitive schools of quackery that taught students little. Upon graduating, new doctors had to pass nothing more than an eighth-grade level test (or none at all) and were immediately thrown into emergency rooms, treating the neediest patients. Not surprisingly, the mortality rates would be off the charts for these patients, almost all of whom are of course poor and minority.

(Incidentally, it's easy to imagine what defenders of this outrageous and immoral system would say: "It's not the doctors' fault. Look at how many of our patients are obese, have bad diets, drink and smoke too much, etc. What can we be expected to do when you ask us to treat such patients???" (This is, of course, exactly what the unions say.))

If this were the status quo in the medical profession, I would absolutely favor "Doctors for America" -- especially if the positive impact of the new doctors mirrored the positive impact of TFA corps members, for whom there's now overwhelming evidence that they are doing a good job - certainly far better than the teachers they're replacing (namely, the last teachers hired in every district).