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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Agree completely with 10/11/2016 10:07.

I will also add: At one of the "FARMS schools" I worked at, I think the teaching was MUCH better than at the high-income school I worked at. We just had to do more and be better. The high-income parents would help or get tutors for their kids. It was completely acceptable to just give a lecture and assign some homework. You didn't even really have to grade much, because the parents were checking their kids' work all the time. At the "FARMS school", we tried much harder to give lots of feedback and create engaging lessons.

However, I also worked at a "FARMS" school which was a disaster zone full of TFA type teachers. The most experienced teachers had 5-7 years of teaching, most had under 3. It makes a huge difference in terms of classroom management and knowing how to create good lessons. The teaching and leadership at that place was pretty pathetic. It's not that they weren't trying. It was just a huge uphill struggle that no one had the skills to deal with. Insane expectations of teacher time and effort lead to incredible burn out rates- and it was like running in place.

The difference between a low-income school with great teaching and one with crappy teaching, in my mind, is good leadership, good mentoring, and reasonable expectations. That way, you'd get low teacher turnover and have some stellar experienced teachers. When I say reasonable expectations, I don't mean "low" expectations. I  mean reasonable expectations in terms of the amount of time, money, energy that I spend. I mean that if you give me a class of kids who are behind, I also get a smaller class size and teachers aide. That those kids who need help (food, clothing, counseling, etc) have access to it. That kids make progress, but not, "all students will be proficient or you will be in trouble". 
[/quote]

Thanks, PP here. Yup, I absolutely see my old school turning into a TFA factory. We had our principal retire after 20 years there and about 35 percent of the teachers took new positions in TransFair. No one with any sense would sign up to work under these conditions for the same pay when you can work elsewhere with much, much less difficulty. My school now has SOL pass rates in the 90's. We have some turnover, but it's people moving up in the system, going to central office, etc. I don't think anyone here would work at a Title I school. So, the kids are going to suffer. They are going to have untrained, green teachers who will also produce testing results that are not satisfactory. Those kids will quit after a few years, go to law school or whatever, and be replaced by another crop of kids who will also fail and the cycle will repeat until there is some sort of backlash that either leads to privatization and charters or eventually abandons the nonsense that growth doesn't matter and test scores are the sole determinant of teaching quality.

That's why there's a shortage. You're dealing with building a system with consistent turnover. [/quote]

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