Gadfly readers know that teacher certification is no guarantee of teacher effectiveness. So our interest was piqued by a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that spotlights a summer school program run largely by students with no formal education training. The program, Summerbridge, aims to get poor, urban kids to stop wasting their summers, provides them with an academically rigorous curriculum, and seeks to get them on track toward college. It appears that the energetic and committed young men and women that work as Summerbridge teachers (most of them undergraduates, even high schoolers) are able keep students motivated to take challenging academic courses and inspired to want to succeed in school and beyond. No, it's not a formal evaluation, but a heartening tale nonetheless.
"Who needs certification?," by Brendan Miniter, Wall Street Journal, July 29, 2003
Breakthrough Collaborative, http://www.summerbridge.org/