...ain’t you TFA tho?
This convo we’re this am is abt the problematic positioning of education-as-silver-bullet, that sufficiently rigorous/no-excuses schools can offset systemic racism. The most vocal champions of that have been Teach For America and its alums, right? How does one square that circle?
There's a whole economy built around "whatever-it-takes" approaches to educating Black kids, and while the schools wildly differ in practice they often fall back on the same rhetoric and the same kind of too-credulous press to bat away real concerns abt how they treat students.
to underline a point from a diff thread: the coverage *this* school got — before this damning NYT investigation — is the same template we've seen regarding these miracle schools. A viral video of Black kids dancing, maybe, or opening acceptance letters to elite universities.
usually accompanied by flattering traditional media coverage: "This school is making a difference!"
In that Today clip on the Landry school, the hosts asked: "why are we not seeing more schools like this?" No one was asking if it was even real bc they so badly WANT it to be.
In that Today clip on the Landry school, the hosts asked: "why are we not seeing more schools like this?" No one was asking if it was even real bc they so badly WANT it to be.
It's so tempting to buy into these schools or some pedagogical models as The Thing that will fix these problems; an ed writer, whose name escapes me, wrote that our gauge of the soundness of edu ideas is often simply the "cardiac test" — as in, "this feels right in our hearts."
TFA ain't this school. Neither is KIPP or Success Academy or Urban Prep.
But they swim in these same waters of positive press, of "disrupting the edu status quo," and it might be helpful the next go-'round if we started with some healthy skepticism around what they're selling.
But they swim in these same waters of positive press, of "disrupting the edu status quo," and it might be helpful the next go-'round if we started with some healthy skepticism around what they're selling.
