The Richard Barth – Wendy Kopp romance is well-known but one thing you saw at this weekend’s Teach For America summit is just how many TFA’ers met, married, and have started families via their experience with the organization. But, there are 20,000 of them and many are apparently still single.
As for the summit itself plenty of reactions out there but my big takeaway was that you have an army for school improvement here. There were several thousand more teachers at the summit than at the National Education Associations general assembly – and many more of them paid their own way to be there. They want better conditions and support for teachers, more money for schools, and a system that works much better than the one we generally have today because it operates with professional norms and meaningful accountability. As always plenty of room for legitimate disagreement about various strategies to improve schools but the people who are just attacking and demeaning Teach For America and its corps members have no idea what a shortsighted strategy that is – they are needlessly sowing dragon’s teeth.
Again, a spurious correlation. There were probably more people at the TFA summit than at NEA because the latter is a younger, more elite group that probably afford to attend at a higher rate…most of them do not work as teachers, so their salaries on average are probably higher.
Were you there, Aurora, or are you making spurious assumptions yourself? The vast majority of the crowd were current teachers–2008, 2009, and 2010 corps members were by far the most represented and in every room I was in the “raise your hand if you’re a current teacher” question resulted in well over half of the hands in the air.
Not an attack on you, just a truth.
Aurora, I think your comment is an assumption many TFA critics make; however, over 2/3 remain in education after their service in Teach for America. Thousands of teachers attended the event, and I’d dare say they were in the majority.