<p>I want to echo carlmom’s report from the field, this time regarding my own ds. Like carlmom’s daughter’s friends, he graduated from an Ivy League school summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, thesis prize, and other top honors up the gazoo–and found TFA to be a nightmare. Briefly, TFA’s 5-week “boot camp” in no way prepares you for the rigors, or horrors, of the kinds of schools to which they send corpsmembers. If you are unfortunate enough to get a bipolar psycho for a principal, as my ds did, TFA will NOT go to bat for you. They value their relationship with the local schools far more than they value keeping a corpsmember happy, and will let you suffer, or quit, long before they will help you out. Ds endured a total lack of support when it came to disciplining completely out-of-control students (principal always blamed the teachers, no matter what–even when a student brought a gun to school). Fellow “experienced” teachers (not TFAers) taught him things like how to backdate false data to satisfy the endless requirements of a worthless bureaucracy. It was a disaster–and he, also, will not be going back for a second year.</p>
<p>Best resource you may find on the net to help you decide if TFA is for you is
[Thoughts</a> on Teach for America](<a href=“http://www.tfa-thoughts.blogspot.com/]Thoughts”>http://www.tfa-thoughts.blogspot.com/) --an excellent, highly perceptive analysis of the kind if people who will, or will not, thrive there.</p>