The long, uphill slog toward enlightenment
Tuesday, November 18, 2008Written by: Alan Gottlieb
One of the benfits of attending a conference is the interesting people you get to meet. At the Public Education Network gathering in San Francisco today, I was sitting at a table with a fellow named Garret Virchick, who is a member of the Boston Teachers Union and edits the union’s monthly newspaper, the cleverly named Boston Union Teacher.
During a briefing on federal education issues, a speaker said something complimentary about Teach for America. Garret turned to his table mates and said, his voice dripping contempt: “TFA has been a failure. They don’t keep people in teaching.” Another guy at the table nodded in agreement.
Wow. Cognitive dissonance. It was like suddenly finding myself at a meeting of the Sarah Palin fan club. Facts and research be damned. Garret might want to start his research by reading this. Calling TFA a failure is ludicrous, as most reasonable people would agree.
November 18th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Depends on the context for how you define success. For years, teaching was considered a guild apprenticeship, and anyone who left the profession in less than 30 years probably was considered a failure (a bit like the priesthood). If you look at teaching as providing lifetime employment, there is no doubt TFA is a disgrace. If you look at student learning, it’s probably one of the best things to happen to teaching in the past 15 years.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
I didn’t realize the contempt was dripping…did it fall into your dessert? I also didn’t realize an off the cuff comment would make it into some non-educator educator’s blog. But feel free to do some research yourself. Linda Darling-Hammond has called TFA a failure citing their poor teacher preparation and the lack of support they give teachers when they enter public education. She writes that they deprofessionalize teaching. Or…you can come around to a family dinner and hear my niece’s first hand critique of her experience in TFA in the New York Public Schools. I did click on your suggested reading…which just led me to another article YOU wrote. May I ask a question? Have you ever actually taught in a classroom? Or are you one of the legions of self-described education experts who feel they know something about education because they were actually in a classroom once?
December 4th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
The article I wrote cited a study of TFA conducted in North Carolina. The link is there if you care to read it. Like any organization, TFA has its pluses and minuses. It’s a shame you niece’s experience with TFA wasn’t a good one. That doesn’t invalidate the entire enterprise.
I respect and admire Linda Darling-Hammond, but she does tend to defend and indefensible status quo regarding teacher preparation. And one could argue that unions do more to “deprofessionalize” teaching than 100 Teach for Americas ever could.
I wasn’t sitting there in S.F. looking for things to put on my blog. But your remark was so divorced from reality that I couldn’t ignore it.
And no, I have never been a teacher. I respect and admire all of you who do that difficult work every day. But I think it’s a tired and empty argument to claim that only those who have taught have a legitimate point of view on all matters related to education. I realize that there are lifelong teachers who hold that opinion. I think it’s narrow-minded and misguided. But I don’t expect I’ll ever change your mind in that regard.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Garret, honestly, that’s a pretty lame criticism.
Do the teachers you know sit around when they are not actually teaching simply paralyzed and unable to form opinions or take any action on issues where they don’t have direct experience? Do they simply sit quietly on those issues that primarily impact those of a different gender or ethnic background? Does the Teachers Union with whom you are affiliated make donations to its chosen political parties and causes because you each have direct experience as politicians?
Consider a world where each person could only solipsistically opine on those things with which they had direct experience. I imagine that one of the first professions that would vanish would be, um, teaching — unless you magically happen to have done all that you teach…