Word: tfa
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...midst of the 2000 Presidential campaign, George W. Bush had a private breakfast in Los Angeles with members of Teach for America (TFA), the exemplary national-service program that sends recent college graduates to teach for two years in the poorest urban and rural school districts. "Everyone came out of that room glowing," said Wendy Kopp, the founder of TFA. "He really understood education and cared about what we did. He sounds like us, one of our teachers told...
...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...
...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...
...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 ?litist; 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...