<p>My D is interested in the teach for america program preferably in New York City, but she would consider New Jersey. Does anyone have specific information/experience in either area?</p>
<p>She is completing her elementary education degree and wants to work in an urban setting.</p>
<p>Well, one thing to keep in mind is that Teach For America is not the only, nor is it in most cases the best program of its type. TFA’s benefit is that it’s nationwide, but many states have much better state or city-only programs that are like TFA (teach in underprivileged schools for x amount of time), but have much better benefits (sometimes loan aid, or they help with grad school, help with getting real certification, lots of other perks) and particularly if you want to make teaching your profession, I would look into one of the other programs. </p>
<p>NYC for example offers the highly respected New York Teaching Fellows Program. It’s very selective, but if you get in, the fellows program will subsidize your master’s degree. There may be other similar programs offered by the state of NY, she should look into it. </p>
<p>Even though NYC teaching fellows is very selective, keep in mind that NYC is probably one of the most competitve TFA areas anyway, so you should be a very qualified candidate if you expect to get placed there.</p>
<p>NYC is indeed one of the most competitive venue and the recent hiring freeze makes getting a teaching job virtually impossible. Friends whose daughters have been selected for TFA have not been assigned actual teaching posts b/c of the freeze.</p>
<p>As far as I know, all of the new NYC TFA kids got placed by mid-October, and most were placed shortly before or after the beginning of school. It wasn’t fun, since the program was constructed around an expectation that they would be placed long before school started, and would spend much of August preparing for specific classrooms, and this year because of the hiring freeze only about 25% of them were placed before mid-August. TFA had cut back the size of its NYC contingent from 500 to 350, too, and at one point offered kids places in Tulsa OK if they wanted to go there.</p>
<p>As I said in the other thread, there are a number of Teaching Fellows at my daughter’s school. The consensus seems to be that the Teaching Fellows are nicer, but that TFA’s intense training program is a little better. Also TFA did a better job of getting its corps absorbed this fall; lots of new Teaching Fellows WERE left without a position. (By the way, no one from TFA is “assigned” a teaching post. They interview with principals and hiring committees at various schools until someone offers them a job. There was a lot of pavement-pounding and self-marketing involved, and TFA-sponsored presentation coaching.)</p>
<p>If you’re not aware of it, the NYC public schools these days are a trip and a half. Most of the large schools have been blown up (metaphorically; the buildings remain) and replaced by a proliferation of micro-schools, each with its own theme, style, market, and leadership. My daughter teaches in a school that has about 400 students and 30 faculty, and it’s one of six completely separate schools that occupy portions of a hulking old building that once housed a singe high school. These aren’t charter schools; they’re what the regular public school system IS these days in NYC.</p>
<p>In NYC, TFA corpsmembers seem to be used mainly in the South Bronx, various neighborhoods in Brooklyn, and East Harlem. About 25% teach in charter schools, and the rest in DOE schools. I know TFA places teachers in a KIPP Academy in Newark, too; I don’t know how many other NJ places there are, although expansion is probably likely. I think some kids were getting placed in Yonkers and in Nassau County, too.</p>