In our first installment of "Questions for Linda Darling-Hammond," we asked about a chapter she wrote in an anti-NCLB book. In the second installment we asked about key parts of her 1996 manifesto, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future. Today we're going to turn to a different medium: a webcast. In particular, LDH's October 21st??Education Week debate with Lisa Graham Keegan.
As Ed Week's Vaishali Honawar reported, the Teach For America program was a point of contention, with Keegan promoting it and Darling-Hammond attacking it.
Darling-Hammond raised concerns about the retention rates of TFA teachers and reeled off statistics citing that 49 percent of teachers who come in without training leave teaching within three years, while only 19 percent that come fully trained through teacher programs do so.
Darling-Hammond also said that TFA and its ilk were not the way to "build the profession." So let's get started.
1. Dr. Darling-Hammond: It's true that most (though certainly not all) TFA teachers leave the classroom after two or three years. Still, most TFA alumni??remain involved in education in some way. Many of the best charter schools in the country (themselves among the best urban schools in the country) were founded by former TFA-ers. Other alumni have landed in key roles at think tanks, foundations, on Capitol Hill, state capitals, etc. With that in mind, do you regret your all-out war against the program in the 1990s? Do you think the country's education system would be in a better situation had you succeeded in defunding and eliminating the program?
2. When you think about the teaching profession, do you picture 30-year careers for most teachers? If so, how do you square that with what we know about Generations X and Y and their penchant for taking up multiple careers over the course of their lifetimes? If a tenure of three years is too short for a teacher to make a difference, how long is long enough?
3. Speaking of numbers, it would be a whole lot easier to build a strong teaching corps if we didn't need so many teachers. Yet we've made a decision in this country to invest in lowering class size (choosing quantity over quality). You've been a close ally of the teachers unions, but are you willing to break with them and say that our education system would actually improve if we let class sizes rise?
We look forward to some answers!
