How I Joined Teach for America—and Got Sued for $20 Million

[MadHound]

9. Well, as I thought, this is only part of the story,

And a very subjective part at best.

From a letter to the editor at City Journal:
"I won’t pretend to know what happened inside Josh’s classroom, but I did witness an event he leaves out of his article: Josh yelling in the face of a lone student in the hallway, his hands on the student’s shoulders, shoving him against the wall. If you believe Josh’s account that the allegations against him were total fabrications and that his physical contact was limited to breaking up fights, think again."
http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_2_letters.html

Furthermore, being a teacher, several parts of his story sound incredibly fishy. I'm not intimately familiar with D.C.'s policies and procedures, but most school rules are the same across the country, and many of the policies that he describes are not terribly believable.

But all of that aside, Kaplowitz's story does show one thing, that TFA "teachers" are simply unprepared and ill-equipped to step into a classroom. Five weeks of training, designed to cover the entire subject of how to teach? Hell, I had three times that amount in basic classroom management. I also had classes in Ed. Psych, Child Development, and others simply so I could understand what makes kids, in their varied and infinite forms, tick. It is this knowledge that is critical in establishing and maintaining a sane classroom where children can actually learn. Furthermore, I had hours of classroom observations, practicums, and let's not forget student teaching, so when I walked into my first classroom flying solo, I knew what to expect and what to do.

Frankly, this writer has an agenda, one that is at the same time self-serving and also tearing down public education. Sadly, this is simply another in a long line of attacks on public education.

The fact of the matter is that the TFA program is a disaster, one that shouldn't be inflicted on our students. I'm sorry, but a person with a political science degree, business degree, or any other degree besides one in education is unfit to teach. We wouldn't let a person with an Education degree take a five week training course and then walk into surgery, why are we allowing such inexperience and ineptness walk into our classrooms?