#gary rubenstein

Animal mismanagement/cruelty in this book as main character roughly removes hamster from cage by the neck and proceeds to juggle him then even drops him! Not a good book for kids who love animals or for parents who are trying to teach gentle hands. Also, odd things happen in the book to the main character that make it hard for young readers to relate, such as paparazzi following the child around each morning.

Biggest TFA Lie #2: The magical power of high expectations. If I were to summarize TFA’s philosophy to teacher training in a few words I’d say “Students always rise to meet the expectations of their teacher. A large part of the reason that poor kids don’t have the same academic achievement as wealthy kids is that the teachers of the poor kids have low expectations.” How great it would be if this were true. While I do believe that setting expectations extraordinarily low isn’t a good idea either, expectations that are too high are likely to backfire on the naive teacher. I haven’t figured out it TFA is purposely lying to new CMs about this or whether TFA, itself, actually believes this. The motivation behind lying would be, I suppose, that it would ‘trick’ new corps members into getting the confidence they need to take on this responsibility. Having high expectations, after all, is something that new teachers can choose to have, even if they don’t have the skills to get students to those expectations. The scary thing to me is that I’ve talked with different TFA staff members, and my sense is that this is not supposed to be a trick to psyche out the corps members. They seem to really believe that low expectations is a large culprit for the problems in American education. A good demonstration of how TFA leads new corps members to embrace ‘high expectations’ as the primary weapon for fighting educational inequity is in this corps member produced video last summer. Honestly, if I were to make my list of reasons why poor students struggle to ace standardized tests, low expectations from teachers would not crack my top 10. Yet, the first 35 pages of TFA’s guidebook ‘Teaching as Leadership” is all about the power of high expectations until they reluctantly admit in one sentence on page 36 (and then never again) “Yet setting a goal that is impossible for students to reach even with extraordinarily hard work might further undermine students’ shaky confidence, cementing their impression that effort does not lead to achievement and that they are ‘not smart’ enough to achieve in school.”