Opportunities? for Aspiring Teachers

Hello faithful readers...it turns out during this week I've been a less than faithful leader. Swarthmore college turned up the heat on me with presentations on Fyodor Dostoevsky and Shakespearean plays. Wow, there is so much going on out there in education right now I don't even know where to start. But I think I'll begin with what is going on in my life, education wise. College students all across the country right now are trying to finalize their summer plans, and so am I. We education majors often look to organizations that could give us some hands on teaching experience before doing the real thing. Probably the one most well known summer teaching opportunity is

Breakthrough Collaborative: http://www.breakthroughcollaborative.org/

The students Breakthrough recruits are mostly students of color from low-income communities. The program uses a multi-year process and youth teachers to give these students guidance and instruction to keep them on track for college.

some other summer teaching programs that people do are CTY- Center for Talented Youth
http://cty.jhu.edu/

The catch? Well, you only get a 1000 dollar "living expenses" stipend for the 6 week program. I don't know about you, but for 1000 dollars don't go very far for rent, food, transportation, etc... The other thing is that it is only a 6-week program. So for folks looking to take care of a sizable chunk of their summer, this doesn't help either. The other downside is that the application is relatively involved and competitive. One has to write up lesson plans, activities, come up with three references, do several interviews. And who at top colleges has time to do all of that?

While we are on the topic of applications, there are a few other programs I would like to discuss with you all. Several college grads at my school decide last second that education might be a good career path to them. They haven't done any of the coursework to get a license to teach. Enter Teach for America and the various teachers' fellows programs. Teach for American offers basically a Peace Corps model teaching experience for graduating college students or adult career changers; you get a crash course (and I think its important to emphasize the abbreviated nature of this crash course) in education during the summer, some short student teaching experience, and then you are in the classroom to start teaching. The advantages are that you only have a 2-year commitment, you get your certification to teach and a Master's degree practically for free (big plus, for people like me it could cost anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 to get a master's), and a guaranteed salary. Programs like Philadelphia Teachers Fellows, Washington DC Teacher's fellows, and the biggest most sought after one: New York City Teacher's fellows, all have similar systems and perks.

Okay, sounds great right? Here are my problems with these programs.

1. They don't look for EDUCATION students! I know, it sounds crazy. But honestly, these programs will disqualify you if you've studied education too much. Because they want a blank slate, where they can pump you full of their philosophy and their style, and get you to teach according to their goals. Furthermore, and this does make some sense, they are looking to attract people who weren't going to go into education. The downside, is that it reserves the rewards away from the people who have always been committed to making a difference in education.

2. Very, very little training. Schools that TFA and teachers fellows put teachers in are the hardest, most difficult places to teach in. They are riddled with problems, don't have a high level of institutional support, and have great and deserving, but very tough kids. Sending idealistic college students, who (statistically) most likely came from a white, middle or upper middle class background, into these classrooms with little training or support doesn't seem to help anyone. Neither the teachers, nor the Students.

3. Doesn't encourage lifelong teachers. TFA's 2-year commitment seems to encourage people to do the program for 2 years, then go to med school, or whatever other prestigious career they had in mind. There isn't an emphasis on selecting, training, encouraging, and building a corps of dedicated teachers who want to stay in the system for life.

And of course, these programs do little to address the institutional and structural problems facing our nation's schools. After all, TFA's website boldly states that educational inequality is our nation's greatest injustice....so what is TFA doing about inequal funding policy?

Finally, and after this I will get off of my soapbox, these programs are fully complicit with the corporatist, standardized testing, frenzy that has been killing our schools since the 90s. Rather than working on alternative ways to assess student learning so that they can actually learn something rather than how to take a test, these programs pump more teachers into the field who's number 1 goal is a number on a test. We have to understand that this entire movement, while it may have SUPPORTERS from a diverse group people, the KEY INTERESTS in the movement are those businesses that stand to profit the most: the testing industry, and the privatized education industry.


So choose wisely fellow teachers and stay true to your critical principles!

Love and Solidarity,
Marc Engel