'REVOLUTION' IN THE AIR

YOU SAY YOU WANT A R-R-REVOLUTION... Reading my campus email this evening. The list is topped off with this subject line: Revolutionary Case Takes The iPad To A Whole New Level. I feel certain that the masters of information-age metaphors who sent out this piece of "disruptive" drivel must have come out of the Kennedy School at Harvard.

And they say there's not jobs out there for these grads. Nonsense!

“Teacher turnover really destabilizes a learning environment,” said Hannah Nguyen, a University of Southern California junior who aspires to be a teacher but has helped organize protests against Teach for America. “So having a model that perpetuates that inequity in and of itself was also very confusing for me.”

But as ever, there's a real youth revolt brewing and it's impact is being felt right in the belly of the beast. Yesterday's NYT reports that lots of the best-and-brightest, who were flocking to TFA a decade ago, as our generation flocked to the Peace Corps or VISTA, are now opting out.

For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

My take on all this is that, given the ongoing exposés of TFA's horrific 5-week-wonder training regimen, its connection with privatization of public schools, the teacher attrition rates of its graduates, not to mention the organization's odious collection of reactionary, billionaire funders, it's become an embarrassment for many socially-conscious students to say they're joining TFA. 

According to the Times' Mokoto Rich, 

...as Teach for America grew, it became a magnet for criticism from teachers unions, education schools and some policy makers, who argued that sending enthusiastic but untested graduates to classrooms in some of the nation’s poorest communities with just five weeks of training would not produce great teachers. They also said the program’s two-year teaching stints brought instability.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Bob Marley. He would have turned 70 today.