Teach for America?

[UGAalum94]

I stand by my comment generally although it doesn't apply in your case. Someone with an undergraduate degree in history is likely to be well educated in my book, but someone with a degree in education may or may not be. I didn't mean you with my original post; what may be true when you look at trends, may not be true in an individual case.

Based on my own experience taking education classes, reading studies of education, paying attention to educational reform, my impression of education programs is pretty bad. They might or might not actually prepare you teach in a school where you are likely to get a job. Yes, you will have jumped through more hoops than a TFAer, but those hoops might or might not have anything to do with teaching.

At many colleges, the school of education will have the lowest admission standards and some of the weakest students, as determined by GPA and SAT scores.

TFA, on the other hand, pulls heavily from the Ivy league and other top tier schools. They seem to attract and select very bright candidates, and they seem to have a rigorous selection process. The five week training course might be pretty skimpy, but in many schools where they take TFA candidates, the administration will frequently hire people will no education training at all if they can qualify for a provisional certificate. The turnover of fully certified teachers at the schools is usually very high.

I think there are excellent teachers out there who went though traditional programs, but I wouldn't say on average that graduates of education programs are better educated than people with the same level degree in a non-education field. Think person with MA in History vs. person with MA in Social Studies Ed: who do you think is generally better educated? You'd hope the Social Studies education majors were better prepared to teach, but I'd bet the history majors know more history.

Depending on the program they went through, the education program graduates might or might not be more prepared to teach, which is sad because it was the focus of their education for four years rather than five weeks and they ought to be clearly better prepared to teach.

(Now, the TFA folks you know may be complete idiots, but that hasn't been my experience. I haven't taught with any, though: I just know some folks who after college did TFA.)

Sorry for the rant. I'm sure that you personally are a great teacher. This is just an issue that winds me up.