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Study shows TFA alums vote, donate, volunteer less than program dropouts
Published: Friday, January 8th, 2010
Teach For America (TFA) alumni exhibit slightly lower levels of charitable giving, voting and civic engagement than those who dropped out of the program or declined offers of admission, according to a recent study by Stanford sociology professor Doug McAdam ...(back to the article)
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Holy misleading title, Batman!
tfa is a load of shite
I loved this story the first time when it was in the New York Times.
Seriously, though...this program gets highly motivated students into classrooms that would otherwise be stocked with (mostly) teachers with no better options. While I'm glad that the Prince has stopped giving full page glowing articles to the program, let's not let the pendulum swing the other way. Good program, good teachers, good kids, good outcomes.
By the way, I'm a public school teacher that didn't do TFA.
"Teach" you don't know what you are talking about. The program is a poorly thought out, self-serving scam which takes ladder-rung-climbing students, takes advantage of their desire for something "impressive" on their resume, and puts them in a position where they are statistically shown to not make a difference at all.
Not to mention the founder's (Princeton Alum) issues with using company money. The only students in Teach For America are well intentioned fools
'92, I recognize that this is anecdotal evidence, but please feel free to visit my classroom if you truly believe that TFA teachers are "well intentioned fools" who do not make a difference in their students' lives. I teach high school math on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico. Stop by when you are in the area.
Obviously Nate is going to think that what he is doing is important, otherwise he couldn't stand to do it everyday.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1d9/doing_your_good_dee...
Interesting new study out on moral behavior. The one sentence summary of the most interesting part is that people who did one good deed were less likely to do another good deed in the near future. They had, quite literally, done their good deed for the day. This suggests that people who have done one nice thing feel less of an obligation to do another.
This meshes nicely with a self-signalling conception of morality. If part of the point of behaving morally is to convince yourself that you're a good person, then once you're convinced, behaving morally loses a lot of its value.
The phrase "hoisted with their own petard" was used in this article. This automatically makes it worthwhile.
@ Senior: You wouldn't be a senior at Princeton if you hadn't had excellent teachers. What teachers do is important.
89% is not that far from 91% / 92% ... the title of this article could easily be "Study shows TFA alums vote at approximately the same frequency as program dropouts" ... especially when you consider that all 3 of these numbers are much higher than the percentage of american voters in general who vote