Education drive in US schools

A teaching "crusade" in America's public schools

By Matthew Wells BBC correspondent, New York

Intermediate School 143 is in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan, way uptown on 182nd Street.

The streets around it are pleasant enough, but like many parts of the city, the leafy brownstones give way rapidly to tenement blocks which are home to New York's most vulnerable.

The school is big and overcrowded with 2,000 children, with nearly 1300 of them claiming free school meals. It is not an ethnically diverse place. Almost 97% are Latino - the vast majority Dominican.

It is to tough schools like this, that the young idealists from the "Teach For America" scheme come.

Teach for America aims at positive schooling

There are 150 staff here, of whom 17 belong to a national programme that began as one woman's dream in 1989.

Teach for America (TfA) recruits recent college graduates who commit to two years classroom teaching in low-income communities.

They are not obliged to go through the same training as their state-sponsored counterparts. Despite this 60% of the "corps members" stay in education.

TfA members have to compete for posts, and are paid the same as a junior teacher. The advantage they have over non-TfA teachers is a highly-evolved support network and a crusading sense of the impact they are having on classrooms.

My parents are both teachers. I never thought that I'd get into it, but now I've found this career I'm totally in love with it. Teach for America has helped me become a problem-solver both in the classroom and on a higher level

Erica Swenson

"I love my work. I made a special effort to let all of them know, that I wanted to learn from them", said 24-year-old social studies teacher Geoff Goldstein.

"If they know you're there to learn, you care about what they do, and care about the kids - well, I didn't find any tension."

Geoff has hungrily signed-up for another year beyond his two year commitment - but he's not sure beyond that.

Another TfA teacher, Erica Swenson, says she has found her vocation - despite dismissing a life in the classroom initially.

"My parents are both teachers. I never thought that I'd get into it, but now I've found this career I'm totally in love with it. Teach for America has helped me become a problem-solver both in the classroom and on a higher level."

Sitting at the back of Ms Swenson's medieval history lesson, you can see the amount of work and pre-planning that's gone into teaching her 6th graders about castles and serfs.

One of her 12-year-olds, Travis English, is full of appreciation for her energetic and youthful approach: "When she explains examples, she does it in a cool way. She'll say don't fight, and she makes us laugh. It helps us learn."

'Self-indulgent scheme'

There are 1700 TfA members in America's classrooms this year, and in three years' time founder Wendy Kopp wants to see that rise to 4,000.

Members are paid the same as junior teachers

The organisation says it is focused entirely on under-privileged children and trying to give them greater opportunity through education.

It has powerful friends. Among the Chief Executive Officers hosting last week's annual benefit were the heads of Sony America and AOL Time Warner.

But some in the teacher-training establishment attack TfA as being a patronising and self-indulgent scheme for graduates who don't really know what they want to do.

They argue that a brief two-year commitment is not long enough. That's not the perception at IS 143. Those siren voices have clearly never seen TfA in action.