Then you need to keep reading and look at some blogs from TFA teachers who left.
Are you saying then that it is okay for hospitals who are short on nurses to hire people without the proper credentials to step in and be a nurse to ease the shortage? Give Suziewho just graduated with a degree in sociology, a nursing job? Give her 6 weeks of classes and 15 hours of shadowing and she is good to go? Isn’t that what is frowned upon with pre-med students performing medical procedures in other countries when they don’t have the proper credentials to do such procedures?
If it’s not okay to do this with medicine it’s not okay to do this with kids who need actual teachers who have had the proper training and will be there for the long haul. When school districts hire cheap labor, they are less likely to worry about keeping teachers with MA degrees because they are too expensive. The schools don’t get continuity with the ever revolving door of TFA teachers leaving and new TFA teachers cycling in. You have schools with the blind leading the blind at the expense of the students. The good teachers go elsewhere because there are no incentives to work in struggling, difficult schools and the districts turn a blind eye because they can get untrained TFA “teachers” who will swoop in for 1 or 2 years and and struggle to teach at half of the cost to the district.
Ed Burns had a storied career with the Homicide and Narcotics division for Baltimore before he decided to retire and become a public school teacher. Do you know his first impression? He compared the experience psychologically to the Vietnam War. The glaring issue with teaching in the inner city is
not that the TFA teachers don't have masters or PhD's. It's that a lot of new teachers explanted to tough inner city schools haven't grown up in the inner city. Many of them aren't aware that most of their students are in school because their parents cannot afford to feed them and their biggest barrier to teaching them is providing them with food because their
only meal is going to be school lunch. They are not taught how to navigate between the b.s. NCLB curriculum/metrics and what the kids actually are able to learn. These school districts "grandfather" children into grade levels based on their age because they are worried statistically about attrition to the point where their spending is put into hiring attendance guards whose job it is to round up on these kids and see why they are skipping school.
If you think that the root of the problem is a
contractor like the TFA, then you need to evaluate the role of a
contracted company when it comes to providing a
service. These school systems need services like the TFA because they are just
that bad. Being able to teach students how to read and do basic algebra is light years ahead of their normal expectation. Having students attend class is beyond normal expectation. Students behaving in class and not starting a fight with another student or just going AWOL is beyond normal expectation. Dealing with curriculum standards that is clearly not designed to give these students a chance and balancing everything else is providing a service to both these school systems and these children. This is not about the "blind leading the blind," teaching in these school districts is about
survival for all parties involved.
Hospitals hire credentialed nurses, but nursing education is highly variable. Hospital acuity is highly variable. Nursing work is highly variable. Trained nurses are highly variable in terms of their specialty. Nurses within their specialty are highly variable. Any new nurse who starts on a unit that deals with high acuity patients is going to be inept, adapting to a new EMR program is going to lead a nurse being inept, and adjusting to the algorithms at a new hospital or entering into a new specialty is going to result in a new nurse being initially inept. That's okay, there is a reason why nursing is a collaborative effort and no one starts off being competent. Just like a TFA teacher being thrown into the jungles of a classroom, it's an important learning process where you need to learn, adapt, and survive. It's hard to explain to someone outside of healthcare what it's like to learn hospital protocol for blood administration when ED sends up a Jane Doe actively bleeding on the sheets (when you turn her) with absolute nada for Type & Screen or H&H. At that point it's not about whether you went to a community school nursing program, have a bachelor's in nursing, or went to a fancy program at MGH or Duke. Finding people who are willing to stick out hard situations and learn from them is far more important to surviving in hard environments than looking at stuff like whether they are a master of the arts.
