商品簡介
The Teach for America program recruits high-performing recent college graduates as new teachers to “turn around” low-income, largely minority inner-city schools. It has been idolized and criticized. The author of this book holds a Master of Science in Education and is a former TFA instructor. She decided to look at TFA by measuring the success of its teachers. She surveyed her TFA cohort in the Greater Philadelphia region and used the results to develop this book. It documents a basic problem with the story of education TFA tells recruits: if impossible problems can be solved by inexperienced young people on their own if they simply work hard enough and have discipline, then when impossible problems prove impossible for one inexperienced young person to solve, they will believe the only real problem is them. This is a serious critique of the student experience of “bootstrap” education reform, but the author keeps her analysis to the teacher's role. Matsui documents the fatigue, shame, burnout, isolation, alcoholism, depression, and trauma of young teachers in her cohort, and records alternative stories in which no amount of teacher hard work and discipline makes children have similar grades as their counterparts in neighborhoods and schools that are wealthier, whiter, less crowded, safer, and better served. She concludes that TFA and similar education reform programs currently depend on widespread unrealistic superhero romances about what teaching is. Belief in these stories makes teachers personally responsible for problems they cannot solve, and isolates and deprofessionalizes teachers in America. More realistic stories about teaching, Matsui concludes, are more hopeful; they do more practical good for students, teachers, and society. Annotation c2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
作者簡介
Sarah Matsui holds a BA in urban studies and a MSEd In secondary math education from the University of Pennsylvania. She taught middle school math and is an alumna of the 2011 Teach for America Greater Philadelphia Cohort.
