Blog 2 - Educational Inequity

Educational Inequity

During the video last week, many of us sat brokenhearted and wanting to fix the problem of educational inequity in American schools. I have found some educational reform programs or ideas that may address this specific need, but it seems that for every positive review, there is also a negative one. One of the first things to pop up when I googled “educational inequity” was Teach for America. Anecdotally, I have heard great things about Teach for America, so I wanted to do some more in-depth research to see if the organization is living up to its claims.

The Mission Statement of Teach for America sees poverty as a problem that can be solved by “growing the movement of leaders who work to ensure that kids growing up in poverty get an excellent education” (Our Mission, 2012, para. 1). In other words, a lack of qualified teachers in underprivileged areas is their largest focus, along with having alumni who will go into the business and government realm to continue working on educational inequity. Critics of Teach for America cite their focus on the long-term goal as a problem because recruitment is centered on furthering Teach for America politically, rather than truly qualified teachers. In “Why We Need to Learn More about Youth Civic Engagement,” Youniss confirms young adults who volunteer are exceedingly more likely to vote in presidential elections than their non-civic-minded counterparts, but those who do not begin or complete their two-year agreement with Teach for America (for whatever reason) are even more likely to participate in government than those who graduate from the program (2009). This leads to the conclusion that Teach for America teachers who successfully complete their two-year assignment are most likely to stay in education.

One may wonder what Teach for America is doing that makes it different from any other alternative certification program. Recently, St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Maryland, a “School of Distinction” by All Kinds of Minds, has partnered with Teach for America to further their brain-based learning approach. St. Andrew’s developed a workshop for Teach for America to educate teachers on the eight constructs of learning: “attention, temporal sequential ordering, spatial ordering, memory, language, neuromotor functions, social cognition, and high order cognition” (“Brain-Based partnership,” 2011, para. 6). In doing so, the school is working toward fulfilling its goal “to see every student benefit from what the school views as the transformative learning that comes from brain-based teaching” (“Brain-Based partnership,” 2011, para. 1). By “every student,” St. Andrew’s means every student in the nation. Teach for America is a good way to begin a nationwide initiative. Staying up on cutting-edge research and incorporating it effectively is just one way Teach for America differs from traditional alternative certification programs.

While there may be drawbacks to educational reform taking place through large corporation-sponsored programs like Teach for America, they have been effective in increasing student performance on standardized tests (Xu, Hanaway, & Taylor, 2011). Unless and until this dependence upon standardized testing as the be-all-end-all of education changes, we have to see Teach for America’s success as a positive effect on improving the gap in America’s educational inequity. Perhaps Teach for America can branch out by providing professional development for those of us who did not go through their program to become teachers.

References:

Brain-Based partnership for St. Andrew’s and Teach for America. (2011). Independent School, 70(3), p. 8.

Our Mission. (2012). Teach for America. Retrieved from http://www.teachforamerica.org/our-mission

Xu, Z., Hannaway, J., & Taylor, C. (2011). Making a difference? The effects of Teach for America in high school. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 30(3), p. 447-469.

Youniss, J. (2009). Why we need to learn more about youth civic engagement. Social Forces, 88(2), p. 971-975.