A tale of two teaching experiences: is Teach for America a brilliant way to bring Ivy League talent into some of the nation's neediest classrooms? Or is it just letting them pad their resumes at the expense of inner city students?

Diverse Issues in Higher Education, Nov 16, 2006 by Kerri Allen

In 1989, an ambitious Princeton University senior had an idea. Inspired to bridge the educational gap in the United States, Wendy Kopp formed a pilot program where enthusiastic grads like her would flood inner city schools and clean up the proverbial neighborhood. She even gave it an imperative and patriotic moniker: Teach for America.

Seventeen years later, the $40 million operation and its 17,000 alumni are stirring up a maelstrom in the teaching community. Some argue that the program is an invaluable resource, recruiting the best college graduates from top universities to America's neediest classrooms. Others contend that it's no more than a feel-good stopgap between Ivy League campuses and cushy boardrooms. Maybe it's both.

Applicants rate the 25 regions that TFA serves as "highly preferred" or "preferred." This year, TFA placed 95 percent of accepted applicants in one of their highly preferred sites. Once accepted, a TFA fellow is enrolled in a five-week summer training institute. He or she takes various courses and clinics on education and teaches in a district summer school program under the supervision of veteran educators from the hosting school district and TFA staff.

Joshua Kaplowitz mailed out an application to Teach for America not long before graduating from Yale University in May 2000. Accepted into the program and assigned to Emery Elementary School, just a mile away from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Kaplowitz has been very outspoken about his TFA experience.

"I wanted to do something service-oriented and give back a bit because of the privileged upbringing I had," he says. With a degree in political science, Kaplowitz was initially considering a career in government.

"I thought I would want to be in Washington, D.C., anyway," he says, "but I couldn't work in politics there without seeing how people lived outside of the political enclave."

Kaplowitz says he was excited to start work, but things quickly turned sour, as he documents in his article, "How I Joined Teach for America--and Got Sued for $20 Million," which has been published by several media outlets.

He says the children were violent and he received little support from the school's principal or the district's TFA staff. But the experience took a turn for the worse when one student's mother brought a $20 million criminal lawsuit for corporal punishment against Kaplowitz, the District of Columbia Public Schools and Emery's principal. He says he put his hand on the student's back to lead him out of the classroom when the student, who reportedly had been a discipline problem, asked to use the restroom. According to Kaplowitz, the student told his mother that Kaplowitz violently shoved him in the chest out the door of the classroom, injuring his head and back. After the parent sued, district police charged Kaplowitz with a misdemeanor count of simple assault. He was found not guilty after a six-day criminal trial. The school system settled the mother's tort claim in October 2002 for $75,000.

Now in his third year at the University of Virginia School of Law, Kaplowitz says his few weeks of TFA training were not enough to prepare him for such a violent setting, and that none of his colleagues received the expected support from Teach for America. "If you're having a bad experience with your principal, TFA is not equipped," he says. "I got, 'Everyone's in a bad school. Everyone's having problems.' When it was clear that I was in a dangerous situation, they really washed their hands of me."

But that's just one story. And if Kaplowitz experienced a true TFA horror story, Lizette Suxo is an example of what can happen when the program works like it's supposed to.

The New York City native taught kindergarten at Public School 156 in the South Bronx after finishing her degree at Bryn Mawr College. A high school graduate of the prestigious Dalton School in Manhattan, her educational experience was vastly different than that of the children a couple of train stops north. "I was slated to go straight to grad school to study history or sociology, but my undergraduate thesis advisor suggested I get some 'real world' experience first," Suxo says. As a first-generation Bolivian-American, she felt comfortable with the advice of the minority professors on her Pennsylvania campus.

Despite the challenges, Suxo says she enjoyed her time at RS. 156 so much that she decided to stay. "How could I leave? How could I be one less great teacher? I stayed two extra years, where I taught second grade," she says. With her college dreams of an international law degree behind her, Suxo went on to receive her master's in teaching in education leadership at Pace University. Today, she is a principal at the Achievement First Bushwick Charter Elementary School in Brooklyn.

"The Teach for America network is just wonderful. They continued to be my professional development network," she says. "Now, as an alumna, I am still getting up-to-date information that I need. They recognized that it was not just about getting great teachers, but about creating leaders in education."