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Stephanie Touch Dr. Alesha Gayle English 0701 03 Dec. 2013 Teach for America Is Not Doing Its Job Teach for America does not do what the organization is created to do. Teach for Americas goal is to give kids living in poverty receive a great education and filling teacher shortages. This is what they say their mission is but they are not giving the kids the education that they need. Teach for America is more focused on the recruits and their leadership. They do not focus on the most important part of their mission and that is the kids. To begin with, TFA puts inexperienced educators in a room full of children to teach. The teachers apply for TFA and once they are recruited, they begin the program with five week summer training. The five weeks of training gets them the job of teaching under a two year contract. It takes an education major at least four years to become a teacher so five weeks cannot possibly be enough time for them to learn what they need to teach a class. These inexperienced teachers are not ready to teach classes because they did not get the formal training they needed. Olivia Blanchard, who worked for Teach for America writes, Five weeks of training was not enough to prepare me for a room of 20 unruly elementary-schoolers (Blanchard). She said that the training was nothing like the real experience in the classroom and it was hard for her to deal with the bad behaved students. One of the corps members she spoke to was not sure of why she should come back for the second year, so she did not. She points out, Yes a commitment matters, but staying isnt necessarily helpful to your kids or anybody (Blanchard). She was right. The corps member were not ready for the job they were given. They cannot help the kids because

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they are learning while they are teaching. They are not prepared to handle the kids they have to work with and it is not good for the kids. These kids are in need of the best help that they can get to improve their scores. Giving them inexperienced and unprepared teachers will not do them well. They need the best teachers to give them the best education and Teach for America is getting in the way of that. Teach for America deprives students from the education they need by firing good teachers. The experienced and committed teachers that earned their jobs should be the ones teaching these disabled and minority kids. They will be able to make a difference because they want to be there and they are ready to make a difference. Katie Osgood from the article, Why My Students Do Not Need Teach for America, describes All phenomenal teachers who inspire kids and change lives, who fought for their students both inside and outside the classroom, all of whom lost their jobs due to layoffs or mass school closings here in Chicago this past year. The teachers Osgood was talking about are the teachers that should be educating the students. These are the teachers that are dedicated and want to see their students succeed. Taking away the devoted and long term teachers will not help the students succeed. Sandra Korn describes in her article, DONT TEACH FOR AMERICA: Education reform that helps only your resume, TFA is not only sending young, idealistic, and inexperienced college grads into schools in neighborhoods different from where theyre fromits also working to destroy the American public education system (Korn). These young college grads graduate with degrees other than teaching and are just using this opportunity to have something nice on their resumes. So, Teach for America is not fulfilling their mission of filling teacher shortages, they are firing great teachers and replacing them with unprepared college graduates.

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Teach for America was created to help the students. Many people assume that it helps kids with disabilities and minorities achieve better grades and test scores. TFA does not focus on the kids but more on recruiting teachers. According to Olivia Blanchard who worked for them. Katie Osgood comments, When an organization spends more on recruitment, PR, and lobbying than it does on training recruits, you know that the kids are not the focus (Blanchard). This is a very important part of why Teach for America is not focusing on the right things. They are more concerned about getting more recruits than spending more time and money on shaping people into good teachers to benefit the kids. If they spent the money on longer training time, the recruits would be more prepared for the teaching world because they would have the time to learn more things and become better experienced and ready. Therefore, TFA is not focused on their part on giving the students a good education. There are so many things that need to be worked on with Teach for America. Megan Hopkins, the author of Training the Next Teachers for America: A Proposal for Reconceptualizing Teach for America gives a few proposals. One of her proposals is to create professional development schools. Professional development schools are made to help the learning of new and experienced teachers and to restructure schools (Hopkins 893). They will work with university faculty members and get hands on training and give them a chance to become leaders. Hopkins points out Studies show that teachers trained in professional development schools feel better prepared, more often apply more theory to practice, are more confident and enthusiastic about teaching, and are more highly rated than teachers prepared in other ways (893). This is a wonderful idea because the teachers will be more experienced and will not struggle in the classroom while teaching. It will be great for the kids because they will get to work with teachers that are ready to teach and are skilled. Hopkins also suggested a new

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training model. One of the things she mentioned that should be fixed is that in the first year, the corps members will co-teach with a mentor teacher who is deemed highly effective at raising student achievement (894). By putting the corps members into classrooms with teachers, they will learn teaching and instructional strategies and it will help them comprehend the things they will teach. These proposals are excellent ways to create better teachers for the kids. It will be much more effective than the five week training which does not help the corps members. By making these changes, Teach for America will help the children and actually do what the organization was created to do. Teach for America fits into the school reform because the organization was created to give kids excellent education. The No Child Left Behind Act agrees that all children should have greatly qualified teachers and school districts are supposed to inform parents which teachers are not highly qualified. TFA is not sending out highly qualified teachers so it is going against the No Child Left Behind rule. In the article, The debt deals gift to Teach For America, the author writes Congress first approved legislation allowing student teachers and others with little training to be deemed highly qualified in late 2010, shortly after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the definition violated NCLB (Strauss). Strauss reports that education, parent, civil rights, disability, and student groups pleaded Obama not to keep the definition, but he kept it. The definition needs to be changed because it is unfair for the students to have unqualified teachers ruin their education. Therefore, TFA is not doing its job because it does not give students highly qualified teachers and excellent education. Ultimately, Teach for America is not doing what they promised to do. They are not giving disabled and minority students a good education and they are taking the spots of the good teachers instead of filling up the shortages. Also, TFA does not focus on the kids that they are

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supposed to be helping. What they need to do is give the students a better chance in education and stop the unfairness. Disabled, minority, and needy children should receive the most qualified teachers because they are the ones in need of help. Teach for America is keeping that from happening.

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Works Cited Blanchard, Olivia. I Quit Teach for America. The Atlantic. 23 Sept. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. Hopkins, Megan. 2009. Training the Next Teachers for America: A Proposal for Reconceptualizing Teach for America. The Norton Field Guide to Writing: Second Edition (890-901). W. W. Norton & Company; Second Edition with 2009 MLA Updates edition. Korn, Sandra. DONT TEACH FOR AMERICA: Education reform that helps only your resume. 4lakidsnews. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. Osgood, Katie. Why My Students Do Not Need Teach for America. Atthechalkface. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. Strauss, Valerie. The debt deals gift to Teach for America. Washington Post. 16 Oct. 2013. Web. 30 Oct. 2013.

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