Education in NOLA

We made different things today during camp! We had potato salad, hot dogs, and hamburgers. Potato salad is actually really easy to make considering we used potatoes, celery, green onion, mayo, and mustard. And some Tony's to add a little flavor.

Our programming for Tuesday night was at the TFA headquarters at the KB Building in Lee Circle. It was definitely a very interesting panel because I've started looking at the organization a little differently. I remember attending a recruitment event during the school year in the fall, and I always thought that TFA has a great goal. I think it's admirable that the organization wants to help struggling educational systems, but in New Orleans, in a post-Katrina time, I don't know that they have exactly. I'm not saying that they haven't provided teachers in a place that desperately needed revamping, but what about the 7,500 teachers who were fired? The panel said that teachers were given a chance to "re-apply" for their jobs after Katrina, but I wonder how big of an effort was made to insure that teachers who did deserve to stay did get to stay. And I wonder how well TFA people manage their first year of teaching when they're put in a classroom that is the furthest from anything they could have ever imagined. Take for example Schwartz, an alternative school. A teacher who had been teaching there for 15 years was recently fired, and he's being replaced by a TFA teacher. He was talking about how some of his students have seen their entire families killed. I don't know, but I'm just not sure how well an unexperienced TFA teacher would be able to handle this.

Overall I think it's a great organization that's dedicated to contributing to communities, and I hope they continue to help students, but I hope more people who are truly interested in education join the team. I know a lot of students do TFA to boost their resumes, so I hope for the sake of the students that the recruited TFA teachers are committed to educational welfare.