The daily newspaper trumpeted the latest gift from the Walton Family Foundation — $50 million over three years  — to Teach for America, which sends young college graduates nto schools in needy areas after brief training programs. Burn ’em up and spit ’em up and replace them with more brainy, idealists from good colleges. This is considered better than people trained in teaching with years of experience.

The article didn’t include any reference to some of the criticism of the program, which enjoys immense good PR thanks to a very sophisticated press operation — helped by supporters such as the Walton billionaires and enablers in the press.

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Here’s one example of a contrary view recently from the Washington Post, an opinion piece from a Ph.D. candidate and former Teach for America participant who writes about the organization’s thin skin. What you won’t read in typical coverage of Walton promotion of Teach for America from T. Jameson Brewer:

I recently co-edited a book that features 20 essays by former Teach for America members. All offer critical perspectives, highlighting the organization’s major problems. Several writers, for example, took TFA to task for its five-week training program, which distills teaching to a very myopic and oversimplified recipe. As one former corps member wrote, “the five-week training program had not prepared me adequately.” Another critic, Gary Rubinstein, has said that the organization sets teachers up for failure: TFA teachers “don’t know how to deal with discipline problems, because they’ve never dealt with a class with more than 10 kids — there’s no way to deal with so many potential problems when they’ve never been practiced.”

TFA has also faced criticism for its shoddy teacher evaluation tools. Though the organization claims that the majority of its corps members raise the reading and math scores of its students by at least a year, the organization’s former research director, Heather Harding, disputed that finding. In a Reuters article, she acknowledged that many teachers provide performance statistics based on self-designed assessments. “I don’t think it stands up to external research scrutiny,” Harding said.

Additionally, TFA’s message of hyper-accountability ignores the broader problems in education today. Decades of educational research have confirmed that out-of-school factors like poverty explain two-thirds of the variance in student achievement. Despite this, TFA has continued to insist that good teachers are all schools need to close the achievement gap. This is little more than a “band-aid,” teaching scholars say. And that message also leads to high rates of teacher burn-out.

Jameson, like Baker Kurrus and like others, gets it. It is too easy to blame teachers for failures that began at home, long before school age.

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PS: Here’s another education blogger with contrary views on TFA, KIPP and others in the Walton pantheon.

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