just to get out of his classroom. Teach for America sent in a few of its team members to help him out, but it didn’t help. “They would come and be shocked with the disruption in the classrooms and then give me a few pointers, and ‘peace out’,” Williamson says. He was fired by November. But TFA quickly sent him back into the field, this time to a public middle-school classroom that had already churned through three other teachers. It was just as bad there. He now runs a blog critical of the program, called “Recovering from Teach for America.” Kristina Lusk can empathize with the challenges her Teach for America co-workers have faced. “It’s a very unique way of training teachers,” Lusk says. “It doesn’t always work.” A 2011 graduate of Gonzaga, one of the country’s top schools for TFA recruitment, she was placed at a school in Charlotte, Send comments to N.C. editor@inlander.com. “My first year was not picturesque,” Lusk says. “My first quarter was a mess.” But when she asked for help, both from TFA and her fellow teachers, she got it in droves. Teach for America even went as far as hooking her up with an earpiece — like a secret agent — and someone to whisper instructions from the back of the classroom. “She could identify explicitly where I was [lacking] in my classroom management piece,” Lusk says. “We were able to turn around my classroom quickly.” At least one study, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education, has showed that Teach for America teachers actually do better at teaching middle and high school math than more experienced conventional teachers. In part, credit TFA’s selective hiring process: It recruits a crowd of top college students, then hires only a fraction of those applicants. “You get hardworking people who are used to success and want to be successful for whatever they do,” Lusk says. “For the most part, that works.”
LETTERS
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FEBRUARY 13, 2014 INLANDER 19