I'd be remiss in not pointing out the cover story in the New York Times on Teach for America from earlier this week. While plenty of people love the notion of sending out our "best and brightest" Ivy League grads to the inner city and needy rural areas to teach, the article does a decent job of balancing that with a few drawbacks: most notably, the new teachers get a five week crash course before they're in the classroom, and rarely do they stay for longer then their two year commitment. At a time when so much emphasis is on training and professional development, and when it's been widely acknowledged that the longer someone teaches, the better the teacher gets, both are troubling.
You can read a summary of the research on TFA here.
And there's some thought of TFA expanding in Massachusetts.
Thanks for sharing this Tracy. In addition to short tenure and short training periods, pumping the "best and brightest" from Ivy-league institutions into inner-city schools only increases the ethnic and racial disparities between the teaching force and the population served.
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