Suing to Shut Down TFA

A friend (shout out to Sam Thompson) sent me a link to this article the other day. It's very interesting. It discusses a current law suit in a California federal court against the Department of Education, claiming that No Child Left Behind allows beginning teachers (i.e. TFA corps members) to enter the classroom before they are legally considered "highly qualified," as they are mandated to be.

If the court rules that first-year teachers with no formal training who concurrently complete a teaching program during their first year are not "highly qualified," it could theoretically put an end to programs like TFA. An outcome like this is HIGHLY unlikely.

As the article points out, the CA coalition suing NCLB should really take up case with the standards for "highly qualified teachers." Having completed my Alternative Certification Program, I can tell you that I learned more from one summer with TFA than I did in a year of education classes taught by experienced teachers.

Education programs teach to the ideal and not the reality that is our public education system. Programs like TFA have found a way to cut to the core of what skills a teacher needs, works hard to instill these skills in their corps members, and then routinely checks their progress with lots of data.

I should also say a word about the source of this article. The American is a magazine from The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative mirror-image to the Brookings Institution. More than 20 former AEI employees have accepted positions in Bush's administration and AEI itself has often been cited as being a leading architect of Bush's second-term public policy.

Like I said; interesting.

The link to the story is below.

Suing to Shut Down ‘Teach For America’
By Frederick M. Hess
The American
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
When education schools act like a cartel, children are harmed.