Learning to teach…
India goes to school to learn and to teach..
The Class of 2009
It’s a class unlike any other
The children won’t come in with handkerchiefs neatly pinned on uniform pockets. But in clothes that probably bear stains of soot or grease.
What you teach here isn’t something that’ll help a child get to the next class. But to a future free of poverty & deprivation.
Learning won’t happen from textbooks. But from pages borrowed from your life and often, from the lives of the students themselves.
U don’t get paid here. Yet u will return home each day with riches no remuneration can match.
Come to think of it, you’ve never seen a classroom this size. The walls after all, are the 4 corners of our country.
And when a child from this class passes, the nation will graduate. From being the world’s largest illiterate population to the world’s largest literate workforce.
So whoever u are, whatever u do, here’s calling out to the teacher in u.
Good Morning Teacher!
And welcome to the class of 2009.
I’ve seen the movie, it’s great and so meaningful… I hope for more post and wish you good luck Teachers of India !
I am a veteran teacher in Houston seeking a dialogue with Teach for America teachers nationally regarding policy positions taken by former Teach for American staffers who have become leaders in school district administrations and on school boards. I first became aware of a pattern when an ex-TFA staffer, now a school board member in Houston, suggested the way to improve student performance was to fire teachers whose students did poorly on standardized tests. Then the same board member led opposition to letting us vote on having a single union to represent teachers. A little research indicated this is a common agenda in several cities across the country.
The conservative-TFA nexus began when Union Carbide initially sponsored Wendy Kopp’s efforts to create Teach for America. A few years before, Union Carbide’s negligence had caused the worst industrial accident in history, in Bhopal, India. The number of casualties was as large as 100,000, and Union Carbide did everything possible to minimize its responsibility at the time it embraced Ms. Kopp. TFA recently started Teach for India. I wonder if its enrollees are aware of the TFA/Union Carbide connection.
Later, Ms. Kopp nearly went to work for the Edison Project, and was all but saved in financial hard times by their managerial assistance. The Edison Project, founded by a southern entrepreneur, sought to replace public schools governed by elected school boards with for-profit corporate schools funding by public resources. Ms. Kopp’s husband, Richard Barth, was an Edison executive before taking over as CEO of KIPP’s national foundation, where he has sought to decertify its New York City unions.
In 2000, two brilliant TFA alumni, the founders of KIPP Academy, joined the Bush’s at the Republican National Convention in 2000. This was pivotal cover for Bush, since as Governor he had no genuine educational achievements, and he needed the education issue to campaign as a moderate and reach out to the female vote. KIPP charter schools provide a quality education, but they start with families committed to education. They claim to be improving public schools by offering competition in the education market-place, but they take the best and leave the rest.
D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee’s recipe for improving schools has three ingredients: close schools rather than improve them; fire teachers rather than inspire them; and sprinkle on a lot of hype. She on the cover of Time, sternly holding a broom, which she presumably was using to sweep away the trash, which presumably represented my urban teacher colleagues.
TFA teachers, you do great work, but when TFA alumni or staff argue that schools, and not inequality, are the cause of the achievement gap, they are intellectually dishonest. Stable families are more likely to be ambitious for their children than insecure, overworked and struggling ones. Our society has failed schools by permitting the middle class to shrink. It’s not the other way around. Economic inequality and insecurity produces ineffective public schools. It’s not the other way around. Blaming teachers, public schools and our unions keeps the corporate money rolling TFA’s way, but this approach supplies big business more ammunition in its 28-year war against our government.
Ms. Kopp claims TFA carries the civil rights torch for today, but Martin Luther King was the voice of unions on strike, not the other way around. His last book, Where do we go from here?, argued for some measure of wealth distribution, because opportunity would never be enough in a survival of the fittest society to allow most of the under-privileged to enter the middle class.
Your hard work as a TFA teacher gives TFA executives credibility. It’s not the other way around. would like a dialogue about what I have written here with TFA teachers. My e-mail is JesseAlred@yahoo.com.