Alexander Sidorkin is the Dean of the Feinstein School of Education and Human Development at Rhode Island College. He recently blogged about his experience attending one of TFA's summer institutes. We have reblogged his post in full with permission.
A couple of weeks ago, a colleague and I went to NYC to attend Teach for America’s summer institute. We are starting a collaborative program with them and this was an attempt to learn about the experiences the corps members have before they will come to our classes.
The relationship between TFA and the teacher education community is anything but easy. We sometimes end up on the opposite sides of educational debates. At the same time, in many states, colleges collaborate with TFA and help their members to obtain state certification.
TFA corps members attend a five-week summer training institute in one of nine locations around the country.
I’ve soaked in every sweat-filled, pride inducing moment of the Olympics. I’ve laughed at Samuel L. Jackson’s tweets, groaned at every sexist moment of coverage celebrating female athletes for their bodies versus their talent (THEY’RE AT THE FREAKIN OLYMPICS!), celebrated every underdog’s victory, pounded my fists at the smog of racism that permeates so much of the American coverage, and misted up each time an athlete hugs his or her parents.
And finally, in the rare chance to watch an actual live-telecast event here in the US, I closed out the Games with the gold medal men’s basketball game between the US and Spain. I write this deep in the 3rd quarter, where the US team is up by 3, and I can't tell you, at this moment, who is going to win the game.
The Olympic Rings on Tower Bridge in London. Photo by Gonzolito (via WikiCommons).
Here’s what drives me crazy with this men’s team—and where I see so many parallels to education in our country. They play in fits and starts. There are moments when they come together as a great team—but all too often the team misses an opportunity to go on a run. These are great individual performances. Durant, Bryant, James—they are playing great basketball—but they tend to do so in turns.
Over the last 25 years, we’re playing a similar fits and starts game in education.
Last week TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) released its new report, "The Irreplaceables," which examines the failure of our education system to retain teachers who have the greatest impact on raising student achievement. As the Huffington Post notes, the report is bound to make waves and drive policy initiatives over the coming year. It was publicized with a ringing endorsement by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and in many ways is a sequel to TNTP’s other seminal report, "The Widget Effect," which is credited with influencing the Department of Education’s Race to the Top competition.
"The Irreplaceables" is pragmatic in its analysis and presentation of solutions. In the four urban districts the researchers surveyed, they found that the 20% of teachers who are most successful in raising student achievement (dubbed the “irreplaceables”) are leaving the profession at almost identical levels to the lowest performing teachers. But TNTP also learned that three out of four of these top teachers would remain in their schools if their top concerns—ranging from school culture to public recognition—were addressed.
There’s already a great deal of discussion about the report’s policy implications: the same arguments that have been raised for and against teacher tenure, merit pay, and evaluation models will be debated again. But let’s go beyond pragmatism and talk blue sky. Something is rotten in our country’s perception of teachers, and it has to change before we'll see a true revolution in the results—both the quality of the overall teaching population and student outcomes.
OK, maybe I’m not glad I failed. These are more like three reasons I’m a better person for having failed calculus. When I shipped off to college, 18, full of promise and enthusiastic to cover everything in my dorm room with leopard-print fabric, I knew one thing emphatically: Having 8 a.m. Calc was not a good thing. My headline may have given it away—I failed that class. It’s the only class I’ve ever failed. But I’m a better person for having taken it, struggled with it, and failed it. When Andrew Hacker contended recently in the New York Times that algebra isn’t necessary, the memory of this class rang loudly in my ears.
Mr. Hacker’s op-ed is well worth the read—and if you fall into the majority of American adults for whom the subject of math “is more feared or revered than understood,” you may find his take extremely compelling. I had plenty of moments where I was nodding alongside him myself. In fact, I’d sign up on the U.S.S. NoMoreAlgebra tomorrow but for these three reasons:
Melissa Gregson is the managing director of Teach For America’s STEM Initiative.
This month I celebrated a personal milestone when STEMConnector’s 100 Women in STEM publication was released (STEM is an acronym for the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math). I had the honor of sharing the pages with a true pioneer: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. I’ve never questioned the existence of a publication celebrating female doctors, engineers, and mathematicians—it seems natural that so many phenomenal role models would be highlighted. But recently I’ve been reminded of our society’s unfortunate history of distorting positive images of women in STEM, and the barriers we still face.
In his recent article, "The Women Who Would Have Been Sally Ride," Alexis Madrigal reports that NASA was training female astronauts twenty years before Ride’s launch but never allowed them to fly, so strong was the culture of sexism in the field. At the same time Geraldyn Cobb was outlasting her male counterparts in the sensory deprivation tank, The Palm Beach Post was describing her as “a pretty 29-year-old miss who would probably take high heels along on her first space flight if given the chance.”
Heels made a resurgence in the European Union’s 2012 “Science: It’s a Girl Thing!” campaign, revealing the enduring nature of gender stereotypes in STEM.
If you’ve followed ed tech chatter these past few weeks, then you know that the buzz around Khan Academy, the popular online repository of educational videos voiced by the charismatic Sal Khan, has taken a rather negative tone ever since two teachers at Grand Valley State University created "Mystery Teacher Theater 2000”—in the style of Mystery Science Theater 3000—a scathing response to a Khan video lesson about negative numbers.
Salman Khan, speaking at TED 2011. Photo by Steve Jurvetson.
For those of you without the nearly 12 minutes to watch the MTT2K video, which has more than 32k views, I’ll summarize: it is short on actual humor and long on math inside jokes and nitpicks about Khan’s methodologies. In fact, I had to watch the video three times to understand the gripes. My main impression is that makers of the video are calling out Khan for a technical flaw or two, and their commentary is tinged with more than a dash of disdain.
While I believe that even the most ardent fans, be they of Teach For America or Khan Academy, must be critically engaged, asking tough questions, and examining fundamental assumptions, there is an important distinction between critical feedback and cynicism. Robert Talbert offers a measured and balanced view on what he loves and doesn’t about Khan Academy: “I believe online video is an idea whose time has really come in education. I’m not jealous of Khan Academy. But I’m not an uncritical fan, either, and we need to look at carefully at Khan Academy before we adopt it, whole-cloth, as the future of education.”
Shuhei Yamamoto joined Teach For America’s staff in 2007 and moved to Chicago, where he still resides.
In the wake of the Aurora shooting, our nation rightfully felt compelled to speak, sparking important dialogue surrounding violence, gun control, and mental health. It has become clear to the general public yet again—as it did after Virginia Tech and Columbine—that gun violence is a crisis in the United States. The Aurora tragedy is undoubtedly one of the most-talked-about American news stories of the year.
Between 8 p.m. July 20—the Friday of the Aurora shooting—and 9 a.m. July 23, 31 people were shot on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Three of them were killed. This news received little attention outside of local media outlets.
A memorial to the 406 homicide victims in Philadelphia over the course of one year (Courtesy of Tony Fischer Photography).
The next night, in the same neighborhoods, 13 people were shot. Six were shot within a span of 15 minutes, including one 17-year-old boy who died. He was reportedly hanging out with friends in the park.
This post is part of an ongoing series on Pass the Chalk called Point/Counterpoint, where two bloggers will argue opposite sides of a pressing issue in education. Yesterday, blogger Erin Teater argued for gender-segregated schools in "No Girls Allowed! The Case For Gender-Segregated Schools." Today, Marie Diamond rebuts.
While Erin can speak firsthand about the benefits of gender-segregated education at schools in low-income communities, I’m disturbed by the trend and its effects on students from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Does gender-segregated education really improve students’ learning, and in the long run, is it good for the welfare and social development of kids?
Boys and girls in the classroom together.
While the number of gender-segregated schools and classrooms remains small, they are growing fast. In 2002, only a dozen schools had single-sex classrooms, but today as many as 500 in 40 states do. Are these classrooms good for kids? The evidence suggests no. Last year Science magazine published a comprehensive review of existing research that concluded “there is no well-designed research showing that single-sex education improves students’ academic performance.” What’s more, separating boys and girls “reinforces stereotypes and sexism” because it “makes gender more salient.” Segregation, whether race-based or gender-based, “undermines rather than promotes equality,” the paper says. The New York Times, writing about the same study, points out that there’s even disagreement about the degree of success at Chicago’s Urban Prep, one of the schools that Erin mentions in her post.
Monday marked the all too soon end to a life I have admired for the entirety of mine. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, passed away after a long battle with cancer. Sally was my president, my rabbi, and the keeper of my dreams. Offering inspiration for a generation of girls, her accomplishments made the stars feel in reach for one young girl in a small, rural western Massachusetts town. A girl who sits here as a woman, now the same age as when Sally first went into space, deeply thankful for the inspiration that came from the worn pages of her copy of Ride's children's book, To Space & Back.
Sally Ride in space. Photo courtsey of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
When I was younger I pored over each page of that book. Every word was a passport to outer space. But what I loved most were the pictures. Each nook of the shuttle, every cranny in the gadgets—they filled my mind with possibilities. Seeing the crew together, all so smart, all in the same flight suit—it didn’t matter how much money you had. And growing up in a low income community, the image of achieving something so great and not having it matter what you were wearing was intoxicating.
There’s an ongoing discussion in the education community about what we can learn from the training of our armed forces to better prepare and develop our teachers. With just 13 weeks of intensive core training, the Marines manage to turn young men and women, most with no prior military experience, into a highly-skilled, effective fighting force.
Yet, as Andy Rotherham writes Time, “in American schools, we still haven’t figured out how to give our teaching force—whose members are college graduates, more than half of whom have advanced degrees—autonomy and accountability in a far less dynamic workplace.”
Teach For America corps members at summer institute.
Over the last 22 years, Teach For America has conducted its own intense introductory training for its corps members: summer institute, which consists of five action-packed weeks split between teaching and soaking up classes ranging from classroom management to lesson planning. The environment is nonstop, with the aim to start optimistic corps members—many with no prior teaching experience—on a lifelong journey of becoming effective educators. The hours are long, hard and, given the stakes, completely warranted.
Summer institute has been on my mind as I recently went through the latest “Pre-Institute Work” for 2012 corps members and found myself pleasantly surprised, but still wanting more. While Teach For America’s training and development of corps members is light years ahead of what I experienced when I was at Philadelphia institute many years ago, we have yet to fully embrace the use—and reap the benefits of—education technology (“ed tech”).
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