"no worse, and maybe a little better"

I'm not at all sure that this Washington Post article about TFA is flattering.

But then, it's not all about me.

and there's this:

"But it is hard to make [significant gains] happen for many schools because it takes more money to train and pay their new teachers and more resolve to shake up the education schools, where professors with tenure teach classes that don't prepare students well for inner-city and rural schools.

And it also requires a change in the way the schools attended by low-income students are led and organized. Here the growth of Teach For America has had an unanticipated but wonderfully beneficial effect.

There are scores of small schools throughout the country -- my favorites being the 31 KIPP charter and contract public middle schools -- that have been created by TFA teachers who saw how little they were doing for their students and decided to change that. They established small schools that hired TFA teachers who had gone beyond the first year and figured out how to raise achievement more than three percentile points. They focused on student behavior in ways most low-income schools never do. They spent much time convincing parents of the need to make sure homework was done each night. And their results, year by year, make the little improvements recorded by the Mathematica study look pathetic" -Jay Mathews, "A Very Sad Success Story," Washington Post.

Next year at Kipp, baby. Next year at Yes!