I came across, recently, as I’ve been scanning in some of the ‘clutter’ I’ve had in boxes in storage, the the cover letter and the two essays I wrote for my TFA application. The deadline for applying to become a part of the second ever Teach For America cohort was in January of 1991. As…
read more »The past three months since I got my TFA acceptance have essentially been one long exercise in relinquishing control. It’s ironic, really, especially considering TFA takes such great pains to recruit and select applicants who have been so purposeful/intentional about their respective life paths. I will unabashedly admit I am awful at giving up control,…
read more »In my last post, I showed how in the final report from the Gates Foundation MET project they produced a very misleading graph. Though the implication of this graph — namely, that value-added measures are consistent from one year to the next — was not the only point of this study, I called it THE…
read more »Last year I spent a lot of time making scatter plots of the released New York City teacher data reports to demonstrate how unreliable value-added measurements are. Over a series of six posts which you can read here I showed that the same teacher can get completely different value-added rankings in two consecutive years, in…
read more »Teach For America recently launched a new initiative to recruit military veterans to become TFA teachers. With the catchy slogan “You Served For America Now Teach For America,” this campaign has gotten attention in various news sources like The Huffington Post. Just the way college students do TFA as a way to do something ‘good’…
read more »Poor guy. Maybe because he was feeling like an inadequate new teacher, maybe because he didn’t “get the memo,” maybe because there wasn’t an all-night confessional open. Whatever the reason, a KIPP teacher has snapped and ‘gone rogue’ publicly denouncing the ‘no excuses’ pillar of the reform movement. On a blog for Philadelphia teachers and…
read more »I grew up on TeachForUs. I remember spending entire nights reading through it back in 2008, when I was a junior in high school. The idea of applying to TFA flitted in and out of my life with the contours of my college trajectory. In a moment of fear, I told myself I would never…
read more »As a teacher, winter break has always served as a time of reflection for me. For people in general really, everyone is looking forward to the new year and reflecting on the year(s) past. I always see lots of Facebook and Twitter posts about New Year, New Me (which is actually quite annoying). This winter…
read more »Links to the rest of this series here My ‘open letter’ series culminates with this letter to the founder of Teach For America, Wendy Kopp. I suppose that I’ve ‘known’ Wendy for twenty-one years as I first spoke to her at my own institute back in 1991. I can’t say, though, that I know her…
read more »Of the nearly 6,000 new TFA corps members who have just completed half of their first year of teaching, very few have posted on teachforus about how their first years are going. I think I’ve seen about five or six midyear reflections so far. As they say in old western movies, “It’s quiet out there.” …
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