The praise for Teach for America is undeserved and just plain wrong. The so-called reformers have used this super smart teacher argument as a distraction from their real goal of weakening and destroying ultimately American democratic public education. No other major country in the world believes or uses their argument. It is pathetically unfair to students to throw in a college graduate with a few weeks so called training and pretend that they are qualified to teach and that they are even needed. These Teach for America teachers just distract intentionally from the real issues in education. The real issues are that our school curriculums have been reduced to the main goal of teaching basic reading and math, teachers are handcuffed into prescriptive, lock-step lessons, and parent involvement in many places such as NYC has been outlawed from participating and providing input about the process of education for their children. Parents and the rest of us are propagandized that business model schools, if you can believe this, are the way to improve education. All the research and evidence in many, many test results prove that this is false. Charter schools for profit are just that and they are part of the attack our democratic public schools. Politically, it is also attack on teachers unions which protect teachers rights and fair treatment. The money for Teach for America should be used to help improve and support our real public school teachers. Teacher for America teachers take the reduction in student loans and are relieved to run to their ivy league corporate jobs 90% of the time after their 3 years are up. As should be expected, TFA teachers do not even last the 5 years that it usually takes to discourage and burn out over 50% of our regular teachers. Lastly, Joel Klein, one of greatest disasters in NYC education should not be cited as a source for your opinion.W.Rico

The TFA program is secretive. I have found it very difficult to get insider information on how they prepare teachers. The few hints suggests that they are trained to a coverage model and test prep, which would not make them good teachers, though their students might do well on meaningless tests. They apparently work very hard and long hours, but so do ordinary teachers. And they are notorious for dropping out at a very high rate after a couple of years. To get the job done, we need to field an army of competent teachers every year (not a small club of Master Teachers, whatever they are). And we need to free that army to teach within a good curriculum, undistorted by high stakes testing.

Teach for America does not produce great teachers. To say that it takes the top of some prestigous schools just means that the job market is slow. They know their subject but they are not necessarily skilled in passing that information on. Furthermore they will most likely not remain in the profession once the job market improves. If we were short of teachers, perhaps it could be justified but we are not short of teachers, there are myriads of qualified teachers attempting to live on substitute wages without insurance.

It is not a matter of money in the long run; it is a matter of responsible communities. The classroom and school must become the home for family and community building. I am in the midst of creating a space for the parents of young children to upgrade their education and help with parenting skills. Too many generations of teen parents have put our inner city schools in danger. The lack of opportunity has devalued education everywhere otherwise why would 18% of Harvard apply for this sort of temporary employment?

It is also a shameless attack on the Teachers Unions as are the so-called charter schools. They take the cream of the crop and leave the middle kids and the troubled ones behind. There is no teacher who can keep the chaos from taking over in that environment. Two troubled kids can destroy the classroom experence.What we need is more alternative schools for the troubled children who cause the chaos. This will leave the majority of the children in a peaceful learning environment thus giving them a fighting chance at success.

Wow, this thing sucks, totally erased my comment. Anyway, I agree, TFA is cruel to low-income areas. Our kids deserve good teachers as they are often neglected and we get TFA who, unfortunately, also think they are great.
All I had to say was that sending white teachers to underprivileged areas that grow up intimidated by whites is bad all around b/c I've seen principals lay out the red carpet for these teachers as a result of that intimidation and pretty much neglect the local teachers w/more experience.
It doesn't surprise me that TFA Teachers may appear to be "better teachers" than local teachers when they get more available supplies, etc. Principals like them b/c they're also trained not to "rock the boat."
I think fear and intimidation also stems from the fact that they are "united" & organized, albeit like a post-college fraternity/sorority, especially when local teachers are treated like criminals simply for joining and being active members of a "teachers' association." We get lots of TFA-ers in a right to work state like Texas, where teachers' association reps discourage us from even using the dirty word "union" to refer to our weak "association" and no wonder why administration fears unions, we see the TFA-ers stick together; unfortunately, they don't do it when it comes to the locals' rights.
And let me just add that it has been extremely difficult for me to garner any support for a pro-local teachers' group vs. shipping in TFA-ers; the only ones willing to support me are former TFA-ers who grew to loathe the organization and its founder Wendy Kopp!

Gosh Richard Cohen is confused. This sentence alone defies logic:
"But no one can deny the worth of such pro­grams as Teach for Amer­ica or the fact that, even in ed­u­ca­tion, you get what you pay for."
If we really wanted to "invest" in education, we would be so much better off spending more money on recruiting, training, supporting, and paying traditional classroom teachers rather than cranking out more TFA ("Teach for Awhile") "volunteers" -- the vast majority of whom are gone from the classroom after just three years.
And for Cohen to slander the nation's youth as "functionally illiterate" and smear public schools as "lousy" while trying to concoct an argument for spending more money on education is just plain moronic. If you want to justify spending more money on schools -- and you most definitely can -- don't repeat the same talking points of the people who are stripping bare America's education system. Make the case based on the evidence -- which there is an abundance of.

"The federal budget, now $3.8 trillion, will never be balanced by trimming this or that program. The formula is painful, but no mystery: Limit entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, etc.), severely cut the defense budget and raise taxes on the rich, the very rich and the stupendously rich."

Why do you buy into the "entitlement" verbiage? People worked and paid into Social Security. They pay into Medicare. There is a surplus in Social Security except for the massive borrowing from the trust fund. Cutting the safety net is as stupid as cutting teachers.

Why is it never mentioned in the budget context that we pay a lot of money to support the prison industrial complex to keep more non-violent offenders in prison than any other country, and a disproportionate number of them Minorities? We spend obscene amounts building new prisons to hold them when we could spend this money on teachers and better education to prevent crime. No, we continue the destruction of families across generations by long prison terms for parents. We would save so much money legalizing marijuana and taxing it, but this is never mentioned in the budget context because the profit centers around the prison industrial complex will not allow it.