‘City Journal’: Experiences at Teach for America

Joshua Kaplowitz joined Teach for America three years ago, and ended up getting sued for $20-million by a parent who accused him of physically harming her son. He provides a first-person account of his year teaching in a troubled District of Columbia school in City Journal (Winter).

Teach for America is a national charity that trains people who didn’t get education degrees to teach. Mr. Kaplowitz says during the training, the charity instilled its philosophy “that if you set a rigorous academic course, all students will rise to meet the challenge.” But, he says, “the training program skimped on actual teaching and classroom-management techniques, instead overwhelming us with sensitivity training.” He adds: “Nothing in the program simulated what I soon learned to be the life of a teacher.”

Mr. Kaplowitz details his major problems, which mostly stemmed from what he calls the school’s lax discipline. He says gangs of students roamed the halls at will, teachers screamed to get youngsters to behave, and he and four other teachers were investigated for what he says were “bogus corporal punishment charges.”

Despite the challenges, he says, he didn’t quit midyear, because of “Teach for America’s having instilled in each corps member the idea that you have made a commitment to the children and that you must stick with them at all costs. Because of this mentality, my TFA friends and I put up with nonsense from our schools and our students that few regular teachers would have tolerated.”

But in the end Mr. Kaplowitz was forced to leave before the school year ended after he was accused of violently shoving a student. Two months later, the youngster’s mother sued the school district, the principal, and Mr. Kaplowitz for $20-million. He was also charged by the District of Columbia with assault. He was found not guilty of the criminal charges, but ultimately, he had to pay the student’s mother $40,000 in a settlement, while the school district paid $75,000.

Though Mr. Kaplowitz gave up teaching, he says some of his friends left the public schools to teach at charter schools — which receive government funds but are operated privately — and have done well. He says the lesson he learned from the experience is that “inner-city schools don’t have to be hellholes, with their poor administration and lack of parental support, their misguided focus on children’s rights, their antiwhite racism, and their lawsuit-crazed culture.”

The article is available at http://www.city-journal.org.