Word: tfa
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...fall just outside the normal scope of governance. Service is more intense: it is a full-time commitment to do the most difficult public works--policing, teaching, social casework. The Police Corps, which exists outside AmeriCorps, and Teach for America are exemplars of the latter. They are unabashedly elitist; TFA accepts only 13% of all applicants. They involve rigorous training programs. And the goal is to leverage the altruism of the best and the brightest college students, putting them to work on the toughest jobs in the toughest neighborhoods--and, in the process, to help create a new generation...
Kopp was optimistic that TFA, one of the flagship AmeriCorps programs, would have a future in a Bush Administration. Indeed, Kopp was invited to sit in the First Lady's box at Bush's first budget message to Congress in February 2001. At the same time, Teach for America was designated as one of five education and literacy programs that would receive special attention and support from Laura Bush. In 2002, the President in his State of the Union address called for increased national service and then illustrated what he meant by visiting a Teach for America school in Atlanta...
...Atlanta, several Bush aides approached Kopp and encouraged her to quadruple the size of the Teach for America infantry, from 1,000 to 4,000 per year. (Each TFA teacher serves for two years and receives $4,725 per year in college scholarship money.) Last January Teach for America received a $2 million "challenge grant" to facilitate the expansion. But about that same time Kopp began to hear that AmeriCorps' priorities had changed. Programs that encouraged voluntarism would be favored over so-called professional corps like Teach for America. She says she was assured by John Bridgeland, the Bush voluntarism...
...week having Orwellian conversations with functionaries at the Freedom Corps and the Corporation for National and Community Service. "This shouldn't perceived as a lack of support for Teach for America," one told me. "There's a grant process, and they didn't succeed." But it does seem that TFA was axed because it doesn't encourage community volunteer work; its members merely teach school in poor neighborhoods...
Meanwhile, Wendy Kopp has 3,200 TFA members recruited so far who will not be receiving scholarship money this year. More broadly, AmeriCorps itself faces a reduction from approximately 55,000 to 35,000 members. Just before the summer recess, the Senate passed a $100 million appropriation to restore these cuts, but House majority leader Tom DeLay--who has made no secret of his desire to kill AmeriCorps--blocked the money. The President says he wants these funds restored, but he doesn't seem to have much control over the powerful DeLay. Even if Bush means what he says, Teach...