Delaware Can Learn a lot from Teach For America
Teach For America (TFA) recently selected Delaware as an expansion site and has a 20-year history of recruiting outstanding individuals into teaching and effectively training them to raise the achievement of the most needy students in the nation. Just as the world’s best-performing school systems have learned, TFA knows that selectivity in teacher recruitment is critical. In Finland, for example, one out of 10 applications for teacher training is accepted. How selective are most teacher preparation programs in the United States? For the most part, they aren’t. While TFA isn’t a silver bullet that will reform our school system, we could learn a lot from their expertise in recruiting effective teachers. Our system of uneven teacher quality across high-need and more affluent public schools, is so 20th century! Read more at http://www.nsdc.org/news/policypoints/crow301.pdf.