Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America (Vintage) |  | Author: Donna Foote
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.72
as of 9/9/2010 12:13 CDT details
You Save: $6.23 (42%)
New (21) Used (18) from $4.50
Seller: allnewbooks
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 131,028
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0307278239
Dewey Decimal Number: 371.100979494
EAN: 9780307278234
ASIN: 0307278239
Publication Date: March 10, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
| |
| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9780307278234 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
|
| Also Available In:
|
| Similar Items:
| |
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
When Locke High School opened its doors in 1967, the residents of Watts celebrated it as a sign of the changes promised by Los Angeles. But four decades later, first-year Teach for America recruits Rachelle, Phillip, Hrag, and Taylor are greeted by a school that looks more like a prison, with bars, padlocks, and chains all over.
With little training and experience, these four will be asked to produce academic gains in students who are among the most disadvantaged in the country. Relentless Pursuit lays bare the experiences of these four teachers to evaluate the strengths and peculiarities of Teach for America and a social reality that has become inescapable.
|
| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
 The Myth of the Hero Teacher April 29, 2008
Lars Poulsen (Santa Barbara, California USA)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
The Hero Teacher Story is an important American myth, known through such movies as "To Sir With Love", "Stand and Deliver", "The Hobarth Shakespearians" and "The Ron Howard Story". Like all good myths, they are used by different people to prop up different ideologies; often it is used to support a claim that poorly performing schools are not caused by a lack of money, just by a lack of expectations. Thus we should not be tempted fix the problems by "throwing money at the school districts which will just waste it like they have wasted all we have given them in the past".
A more reasonable interpretation may be that an excellent teacher with strong motivation can sometimes (often?) achieve what seems like miraculous results in a surprisingly short time with an almost superhuman work effort under even the worst of circumstances. But absent a systemic change, these results will probably only last for as long as the hero keeps up the superhuman effort. After he or she gives up, and leaves the field to "ordinary" successors, the disaster returns to the status quo ante. Thus, American urban schools have often turned into permanent disaster areas.
Thus, the must can promote both hope and hopelessness:
- on one hand, there is hope for a solution *IF* we can attract more of the very best teachers to address the problem
- on the other hand, this seems unlikely. The people that make extraordinary teachers tend to be all-around competent, intelligent, hardworking people with charismatic leadership abilities. Why would these people, who would be an asset to *any* organization, and who are often well recognized and given many well-paying job offers right out of college *EVER* take an underpaid job in what looks like a war-zone and work themselves half to death in a place that gives them no respect, where their supervisors give them no help (often directly sabotaging them) with a high risk of failure and give up their guaranteed career opportunities to go on this death march?
There are pockets of excellence dispersed throughout the often dismal American "system" of public education, but we should not be surprised that they occur far more often in the comfortable suburban neighborhoods than in the inner city or on the Indian reservations.
There the problem sat until Wendy Kopp's senior year at Princeton University, where she wrote a thesis proposing a radical experiment:
Bribe a few hundred of the most promising university graduates to take on this challenge and give them all the support you can. Amazingly, she got funding to try this experiment, now called Teach For America (TFA). It has been operating for 17 years, and the new book "Relentless Pursuit" is the story of 4 of its teachers, assigned to Locke High School in Watts, Los Angeles from 2005 to 2007.
The Atlantic Magazine has written about TFA from time to time, and my daughter Katherine wants to apply when she graduates.
I heard about the book on NPR's Fresh Air, and ordered it the next day. When it arrived from Amazon I could not put it down. One of the young teachers in the book, Taylor Rifkin, is from Santa Barbara (where I live), and as I read about her challenges and triumphs, I kept seeing my own daughter, and I wanted to know how the story ends.
Applying to Teach For America has become very popular among seniors at some of America's elite colleges. In its first year, TFA placed only 500 teachers. In 2007, the organization received applications from "11 percent of the senior classes at Amherst and Spelman; 10 percent of those at University of Chicago and Duke; and more than eight percent of the graduating seniors at Notre Dame, Princeton and Wellesley." Close to 18,000 individuals applied for an incoming corps of 2,900.
So how *does* the story end? Given that these kids are thrown into battle at schools that have a very hard time finding *anyone* to hire, and where most of the teachers they do hire often defect to better schools at the first opportunity, it is testament to an extremely effective selection policy that almost all of them serve out their two year commitment, and about a third of them stay for a third year at the same school. Despite their lack of experience - or maybe *because* they do not know that the job they are doing is basically impossible - they do very well; almost as well as the average teacher. And those TFA'ers that stay with teaching
have gone on to become leaders in education reform in such movements as KIPP and Green Dot.
Next on my reading list is another book about TFA called "Lessons to Learn".
An important book about education April 17, 2008
Martha L. Groves (Los Angeles, CA USA)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
With the opening disclaimer that author Donna Foote is a friend, I want to say I believe this is a well-written and important book about the difficult task educators face. The book has the page-turner momentum of a John Grisham novel and will open the eyes of those who have never ventured inside a stark urban high school. In addition to providing a fascinating history of Teach for America, Donna offers up a compelling recap of education and race relations in Los Angeles, told from within the walls of Locke High School, one of the most challenged schools in America. This is must reading for educators, parents and government officials.
A compelling read that will keep you interested until the end! April 17, 2008
M. Russell (PA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
As a young teacher in an inner city school district, I found this book informative, accurate, and extremely compelling. The book precisely portrays the conditions of inner city schools and the difficulties that the students, as well as the teachers, face. The author, Donna Foote, weaves together an incredible story of four inner city school teachers with factual and informative details about our educational system as a whole. A book I picked up and couldn't put down until the end, I would recommend this book to any reader!
This truly is a relentless pursuit August 15, 2008
Marisa Militello (New York, USA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I decided to read this book because I am currently in the process of applying to Teach for America and wanted to find out the truth about what it's like to teach in a challenging public school in America as a corps member. What I found out were those things and more. I didn't expect such a detailed account of what it takes to make TFA work as an organization nor did I expect to read stories from school administrators and especially not a corps member who quit. He believed that TFA "trumpeted the success of teachers making `significant gains,' and because the corps members are all psycho, and because they have always been told they can do anything they set their minds to, they chase this impossible goal, running themselves ragged to change the world."
I don't know what it's like to teach in a school like Locke, but I think Donna Foote tells it like it is. She reminded me how important the quality of a teacher is to a child's education and how dedicated corps members are to their cause no matter how overwhelming it might be. The four corps members depicted approached their teaching in different ways but each seemed to make a difference in their students' lives by the year's end. Reading this book made my heart sink and then rise again. Wendy Kopp's story alone is inspiring, but I felt like I actually knew the characters in this book while reading. I couldn't put it down.
This is a must read for anyone thinking about applying to Teach for America or anyone who has a negative view of teaching as a profession. For me, it reaffirmed my dedication to the cause of education reform and reassured me that TFA is a place I belong. For others it might do just the opposite.
Highly recommended for all Teach for America Corps Members May 6, 2008
J. Smith (Northampton County, NC)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a second-year Teach for America corps members, this book is the perfect answer to an experience that can not truly be understood by anyone outside the TFA community. After years of trying to explain the experience to family and friends (and failing, time and time again), I was amazed after only one chapter how right on Donna Foote got it. It was like someone was right there with me starting at Institute and then heading into the classroom in the fall. For any corps member who needs validation their feelings of failure and defeat, needs a reminder as to why they signed up for this in the first place, or just needs a sense of who else is going through what they're going through, this book is for you. HIGHLY recommended!
Showing reviews 1-5 of 22
|
|
|
