Dear Danny

Dina Portnoy can easily rattle off her opinion about tension between Teach for America (TFA) and the traditional education establishment.

“The implicit tension is connected to the fact that TFA puts people in the classroom for two years. In schools of education, learning how to teach is a long term professional activity,” she says.

But Portnoy is in a unique position. Despite receiving formal teacher training at Penn and Temple, and spending 29 years as a teacher in Philadelphia, she now works as the director of Penn’s GSE/TFA Urban Teacher Masters’ and Certification Program.

When TFA began sending teachers to Philadelphia in 2003, it made a deal with Penn’s Graduate School of Education (GSE) to set up a two year teacher certification program designed specifically for TFA. Complicated? Yes. Controversial? Somewhat.

“There are other universities…who are also partnering with TFA, although what one might call the ‘top tier’ is not,” Portnoy explained. “The choice that GSE made was a difficult one.”

While TFA corps members receive limited training before heading into some of the country’s toughest classrooms, the support systems surrounding traditional teachers may not be there for them.

“The truth is that you [as a member of TFA] are not welcomed with open arms, not by kids or the school community,” Portnoy elaborated. “[The students] have been given up on over and over again. They’re not going welcome anybody until it’s been proven that these people are going to stick it out and work hard to teach them.”

The experiences of 2006 College Alum, Stefanie Williams, in her Miami classroom, once again vividly illustrate the point. “I invest a lot of time in my school’s community. It is a vital part of the experience,” she said in an e-mail interview. “If you go to the football games, or coach (I coach volleyball), your students really see that you are there for them, not the paycheck.”

While TFA may not be the pet child of the educational establishment, Penn’s choice to give support and training to TFA corps members is honorable. In a tough environment like the urban classroom, people promoting positive change need all the help they can get.

“[TFA] knows we don’t agree about everything,” Portnoy told me, “but there’s enough work to be done.”

Editor’s Note: This blog is party two in a series featuring Teach for America. Part one of the series can be found here.

Dear Danny appears every Monday and Wednesday.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 5:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.