Amidst seemingly international pressure to have Plans for After College, I am applying to Teach for America. “At the very least, it’s a paycheck and full hours,” one friend points out. I encounter two camps regarding TFA. The first are academic types that say “TFA is a great opportunity,” pointing to the acquired professional and graduate study qualifications the program allows, not to mention the “real world” experience. I counter that if I currently am not gaining real world experience, to please unplug the back of my neck from the motherboard and pull the hose out of my throat. The other camp comes more from my colleagues: “I heard TFA is really fucking hard. I knew someone whose friend dropped out.
Sitting in the office of a professor whose opinion I highly value, I popped the question: “So, what do you think of Teach for America?” “I love it,” he responded, referencing a former student of his who completed the program while gaining an expensive accreditation from a local university, made affordable by TFA. “It’s really fucking hard though,” he added. “No easy stuff.”
Upon closer examination, it is difficult to pinpoint what is “so fucking hard” about TFA, when, in fact, what you do is quite simple: you teach, and nobody who teaches does so because it is easy. As a four-year Woodward School for Technology and Research veteran, having co-run the program in 2007-2008, and currently involved in nuturing personal long-term relationships with specific students and their families, I can vouch that the rewards for such time-alotment are often retrospective, best reflected upon after a good meal and a nap. Hearsay, however, can be gold when it comes to “life transition programs” such as TFA, and one thing that I hear is that corps members quit, or become discouraged because they feel impotent to fight the greater forces at work in their respective classrooms.
The K student liaison to TFA came into my Shakespeare class Fall Quarter to plug the upcoming application deadline. She recounted a story of two public high schools in the same Chicago school district. One was well funded and in a wealthy area, and a majority of the students performed well on national tests, and the expected number went on to higher education. The other high school was more urban, poorly funded, and [I believe] serviced a predominantly ‘minority’ community. An astoundingly low percentage of the students there åperformed well on national tests, and very few went on to higher education, let alone graduated or passed an equivalency exam. And this was why we were supposed to join Teach for America. I sat in the back of the room and screamed “DOESN’T ANYBODY REALIZE THAT THERE ARE LARGER AND SYSTEMIC ISSUES AT PLAY HERE? THEY’RE IN THE SAME FUCKING SCHOOL DISTRICT. THERE SHOULDN’T BE A SINGLE FUCKING DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE TWO SCHOOLS AND THEIR STAFF!”
I brought up my “plugging the cracks in the dam” theory with my trusted professor. He nodded and said “Oh, yes. I see now. Yes.” and then he nodded again.
In May 2009, U.S. Secretary of Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Detroit “ground zero” for education, though he added that he felt “‘a sense of real hope … [that] people here understand’ the importance of education and the need for reform.” That following December, Detroit Public Schools learned that their students set the nation record for inferiority on the National Assessment for Educational Progress. 69% of the fourth graders and 77% of the eighth graders participating in the hour long exam scored “below basic” on math. The Freep mused,
“The results are perhaps the most damning indictment to date of a district already pummeled by reports of poor graduation rates, labor disputes, financial collapse, and even gunfire in the hallways.”
The buck stopped at the school district administration, and then Lansing-appointed “emergency financial manager” Robert Bibb took the Washington and deposited it into the district’s waning coffers. “Just one of three of DPS fourth-graders, the test suggests, can correctly subtract 75 from 301, given a choice of three answers,” the Freep observed.
In the print edition of the Free Press I picked up that evening, one column opined that this was the district’s fault, while one blamed the teachers. Another vaguely asserted a connection between parental involvement and educational success, and all parties agreed that this, above all else, was not the student’s fault. There was even a nice graphic to illustrate how two-thirds of Detroit’s publicly-educated fourth- and eighth-graders were stumped by 301-75 = ___. (My iPhone calculator says ’226′).
And I’m thinking: this isn’t one person’s fault. This isn’t just bureaucratic vacuousness, or teacher inanity or family fatuousness or a student’s lack of respect for him or herself: this is everyone’s fault. Every person who has ever meaningfully encountered these kids is to blame for this pathetic academic showing–including the students themselves (though we are all so much a product of our environments).
In an age where Washington plans to spend $663.7 billion on the DOD (not including $42.7 billion allotted to the Department of Homeland Security) compared to $46.7 billion on education–and $164 billion to cover the interest on our national debt–Teach for America employs around 7,300 college grads to help fill and ameliorate the nation’s classrooms, none of which are located at the academic “ground zero” of Detroit.
The final application deadline for 2010 is February 19.
Please tell the people who say “at least it’s a paycheck” and/or “it’s a great experience” that they need not apply. Only apply if you care about children and systemic change–and if you are prepared to let that motivate you to the hardest work you have ever done in your young life.
That is all.
TFA wants a program in Detroit but the unions are too strong to allow this.
You have some valid points, T, but at least these people are trying for change. You also leave out the skills, experience, and preference TFA corps members will gain once they are finished. The foundation seems to aim at producing (sorry if that word creeps you out) members of society who are aware of the achievement gap and the implications surrounding WHY this gap exists. If it takes these “future leaders” two years of teaching in terrible schools to fully understand the situation, well, at least they will when they’re finished, huh?
Your boisterous exclamation aligns with what TFA is trying to do. TFA, too, realizes that education isn’t the only answer to fixing the larger systemic problems. It seems that the organization realizes it will be key for making a change, or at least a giant step.
So, as you begrudgingly and skeptically apply for a spot that tens of thousands of people would like to have (and for which you are certainly qualified), maybe you can comfort yourself with that notion.