Purchase
A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America
Knopf
April 2008
On Sale: April 21, 2008
352 pages
ISBN: 0307265714
EAN: 9780307265715
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction
A revealing look inside a national phenomenon, Teach For
America, which, since its founding in 1990, has pursued one
of the most daring—and controversial—strategies for closing
the educational achievement gap between the richest and
poorest students in the country. The story is set in South Los Angeles at Locke High School,
an institution founded in 1967 in the spirit of renewal
that followed the devastating Watts riots but that, four
decades on, has made frustratingly little progress in
lifting the fortunes of the area’s mostly black and Latino
children. Into this place, which resembles a prison as much
as a school, are dropped a group of “recruits” from Teach
For America, the fast-growing organization devoted to
undoing generations of disadvantage through a fiercely
regimented selection and deployment of America’s best and
brightest. Nearly twenty thousand top college graduates
apply for two thousand slots. Then, with only a summer of
training, the lucky ones are sent to face the most
desperate of classroom environments. Giving us a year in the life of Locke through the absorbing
experiences of four TFA corps members—Rachelle, Phillip,
Hrag, and Taylor—Donna Foote recounts the progress of their
idealistic but unorthodox mission and shares its results,
by turns exhausting, exhilarating, maddening, and
unforgettable. As the four struggle to negotiate the
expectations of their Locke colleagues (most conventionally
trained, many skeptical) and the relentlessly exacting
demands of the overseers at TFA headquarters (to say
nothing of the typical stresses of youth), we see these
young people assume a level of responsibility that might
crush a seasoned educator. Limited training must often be
supplemented with improvisation in a school where
Rachelle’s special ed biology students prove to need
remedial reading more urgently than lab work, while
Taylor’s ninth-grade English classes show themselves equal
to discussing Shakespeare. Through it all, these teachers
are sustained not only by the missionary fervor of their
cause but also by the intermittent evidence that they can
make a tangible difference. Without romanticizing the successes or minimizing the
failures, Relentless Pursuit relates, through the
experiences of these four new teachers, the strengths, the
foibles, and the peculiarities of an operation to
accomplish what no government program has yet managed — to
overcome one of the most basic and vexing of social
inequities, a problem we can no longer afford to ignore.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy