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Tag: TFA

  • A Closer Look at TFA’s Alumni Survey and Data Practices

    Teach For America (TFA) recently released a report describing some of the results from its alumni survey.  The report provides interesting information about many alums’ careers.  At the same time, however, TFA’s misleading presentation of the results and the organization’s unwillingness to share the underlying data are troubling. Consider the…

  • TFA, CTA, and What It Means to Be a Union

    A former instructional coach and one of only five people selected nationwide as a 2012 recipient of the Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence, Jen Thomas is now President of the San Jose Teachers Association (SJTA).  In this post, also destined for the next issue of the California Educator, Jen…

  • Approaching Education Data the Nate Silver Way

    My girlfriend’s very hospitable and generous family gave me some great gifts for the holidays when I stayed with them in upstate New York.  As I rocked my new Teach For America T-shirt in the Rochester airport on Christmas Eve, my cursory overview of Nate Silver’s new book, The Signal…

  • Working Together for Educational Equity: What’s Missing from the TFA Debate

    Teach For America (TFA) articles are all the rage right now.  Over the past month and a half, the four articles linked below have received particular attention: “I Quit Teach for[sic] America” by Olivia Blanchard (The Atlantic, September 23) “Remember the ‘I Quit Teach for[sic] America’ essay?  Here’s the counterpoint.…

  • TFA Effectiveness

    Several people have sent me articles discussing Mathematica’s recent research study that examined Teach For America (TFA) math teacher effectiveness.  This study is significant because, to my knowledge, it is the first large-scale study on TFA to randomly assign students to classrooms.  Its experimental design provides fairly convincing support for…

  • The Teach Like a Champion Paradigm

    At the middle school where I currently serve as Math Instructional Coach, part of our professional development consists of reading Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion.  This book provides a list of “49 techniques that [ostensibly] put students on the path to college” and is a Teach For America (TFA)…