A Tale of Two Teaching Experiences
Is Teach for America a brilliant way to bring Ivy League talent into some of the nation’s neediest classrooms? Or is it just letting them pad their résumés at the expense of inner city students?
By Kerri Allen
In 1989, an ambitious Princeton University senior had an idea. Inspired to bridge the educational gap in the United States, Wendy Kopp formed a pilot program where enthusiastic grads like her would flood inner city schools and clean up the proverbial neighborhood. She even gave it an imperative and patriotic moniker: Teach for America.
Seventeen years later, the $40 million operation and its 17,000 alumni are stirring up a maelstrom in the teaching community. Some argue that the program is an invaluable resource, recruiting the best college graduates from top universities to America’s neediest classrooms. Others contend that it’s no more than a feel-good stopgap between Ivy League campuses and cushy boardrooms. Maybe it’s both.
Applicants rate the 25 regions that TFA serves as “highly preferred” or “preferred.” This year, TFA placed 95 percent of accepted applicants in one of their highly preferred sites. Once accepted, a TFA fellow is enrolled in a five-week summer training institute. He or she takes various courses and clinics on education and teaches in a district summer school program under the supervision of veteran educators from the hosting school district and TFA staff.
Joshua Kaplowitz mailed out an application to Teach for America not long before graduating from Yale University in May 2000. Accepted into the program and assigned to Emery Elementary School, just a mile away from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Kaplowitz has been very outspoken about his TFA experience.
“I wanted to do something service-oriented and give back a bit because of the privileged upbringing I had,” he says. With a degree in political science, Kaplowitz was initially considering a career in government.
