Free Republic

It’s increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Teach for America — whose leaders are at the forefront of inflammatory anti-police protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and now McKinney, Texas — and left-wing activist groups such as Organizing for Action (President Obama’s partisan community organizing army). Guess what, taxpayers? You’re paying for it!

Dane Smith has been my worthy counterpart at Minnesota’s major progressive think tank, Growth & Justice, since he assumed the presidency there six years ago. Long before that, he was my colleague at the Pioneer Press in the 1980s. . . In the same way he generously has written approvingly about some things I’ve written in recent years, I’m pleased to write approvingly about a recent commentary of his in the Star Tribune on academic, employment, homeownership and other racially demarcated gaps in the Twin Cities (“The employment gap: The ‘why’ and ‘what to do,;” June 16). . . ....

Teach for America has been a breath of fresh air for public schools around the nation. The group recruits top college graduates to spend several years teaching is some of our nation’s worst schools. Most of these graduates did not plan to become professional educators, but they want to make a difference in troubled communities. They are focused on helping underprivileged children learn, and they have little interest in compensation issues or union political schemes. That, of course, does not sit well with teachers union officials. They think Teach for America instructors are invading their turf and taking job security...

TULSA, Okla. (AP) — Tulsa is the latest city to announce it will host a Teach For America teacher training institute in summer 2012. [snip] Officials say more than 3,000 students will be impacted by the 650 corps members coming to Tulsa for the training.

Teach for America, the creation of yesterday’s Left, is becoming the bete noire of today’s. When it was created, free marketers questioned the value of paying volunteers. Meanwhile, conservatives argued that yet another federal program would give the political Left one more redoubt than the many it already had. Audits of the program showed that their fears were not irrational. Nevertheless, a funny thing happened on the way to the millennium. Genuine reformers, such as Washington, D. C. chancellor Michelle Rhee emerged from the program. Moreover, a staple of the modern American political Left, teacher’s unions, began to view the...

Well-Schooled , Twenty years ago, when corporate America was knocking on the doors of Ivy League schools, 1989 Princeton graduate Wendy Kopp signed on with Morgan Stanley. But not for long. Teaching was her passion, not finance, but instead of getting the traditional education degree and certification, she decided to start her own organization. Today, Teach for America (TFA), originally the topic of Kopp’s senior thesis, has become a $180 million project that has already made positive strides to improve the quality of public education, according to the Wall Street Journal. Kopp says that TFA’s current 46,000 applicant pool “includes...

Anticipating significant budget cuts to New York City schools in the coming year, Chancellor Joel I. Klein ordered principals on Wednesday to stop hiring teachers from outside the system, a move that will force them to look internally at a pool that, according to an independent report, includes many subpar teachers. The Education Department suggested that principals could fill spots with teachers in the so-called absent teacher reserve pool, which includes educators whose jobs have been eliminated because of school closings or downsizing. Mr. Klein’s order marked a turnaround for the department, which had resisted efforts to find permanent teaching...

Hub teachers reject public service corps Possible layoffs cited By James Vaznis, Globe Staff  |  April 3, 2009They come from places like Harvard, Yale, and Brown, inspired to share their energy and knowledge with public school children. But the Boston Teachers Union has a message for those eager Teach for America recruits: Thanks, but no thanks.With the first batch of 20 corps members scheduled to arrive in the fall, just months after probable teacher layoffs, the union has sent a letter to the popular program objecting to its help. "We already have hundreds of good, 'surplus' teachers; we don't need...

Speaking of Change... by: Deborah Lambert, July 17, 2008 No doubt about it. Ivy League schools have issues. But when 11 percent of Yale’s senior class, 10 percent of Georgetown’s and 9 percent of Harvard’s head off to teach at some of America’s most impoverished inner city schools for the next couple of years, something’s going on. The Wall Street Journal reported that last month, 3,700 recent college graduates showed up at Teach for America’s five-week boot camp, the program that precedes their two-year teaching stints where salaries will average somewhere between $25,000 and $44,000, depending on location. Teach for...

<p>BATON ROUGE, La.(AP) -- Some students fidgeted, others stared into space, and some even paid attention as Bobby Jindal brought his high-intensity campaign for governor to a tough audience Tuesday: a high school biology class.</p> <p>Jindal's campaign billed the stop at McKinley High School here as a teaching session in "Teach for America Week," devoted to highlighting the national service program that brings top college graduates to teach in inner-city and rural schools.</p>