“ Schooling Teachers: Teach for America and the Future of Teacher Education is a practical-minded examination of how to attract, prepare, and retain high-quality teachers in America. Chapters scrutinize the 1990 cohort of Teach for America, in the context of efforts to train and improve teachers from the 1990's to the present. Extensive notes and an index round out this thoughtful, methodical, and highly recommended study.”
—Midwest Book Review
“This book situates TFA within the larger context of decades-long political and economic tensions regarding how best to educate teachers and the purpose and reach of public education.”
—Teachers College Record
“This work reminds us that no one system has a monopoly on teacher preparation, and as times change, so too must the access to and modes of teacher preparation—whether one decides to teach for America, or just teach at all.”
—History of Education Quarterly
“Megan Blumenreich and Bethany Rogers have written Schooling Teachers: Teach For America and the Future of Teacher Education, a powerful account that draws on the experiences of 30 members of the first cohort of TFA. Using oral histories, Blumenreich and Rogers capture the lived experiences and all the complexity of those who, depending on your point of view, were pioneers or guinea pigs—or, in all likelihood, were both.”
—From the Foreword by Michèle Foster, Henry Heuser Jr Endowed Chair for Urban Education Partnerships and professor, University of Louisville
"Blumenreich and Rogers have gifted the field of teacher preparation with a long-overdue account of the pedagogical, sociocultural, and political complexities of Teach For America’s alternative attempts to recruit and prepare high-quality teachers for some of our nation’s least-resourced communities. Their oral histories meticulously animate the tensions inherent in an educational reform based on free market principles and entrepreneurial logic—both at personal and societal levels. The result is an elegant analysis of the enduring challenges to building a socially just, professional teacher workforce in a culture where educator preparation has always occupied an inferior position.”
—Tina M. Trujillo, associate professor, Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley
“Should teachers receive ‘traditional’ preparation in university-based education programs, or should we develop ‘alternative’ pathways into the profession like Teach For America? That’s the wrong question. Looking closely at the lives and careers of the first TFA cohort, Megan Blumenreich and Bethany Rogers show how traditional and alternative approaches have influenced each other. Anyone who wants to understand the recent history of teacher education—and anyone who wants to improve it in the future—will have to read this wise little book.”
—Jonathan Zimmerman, professor of history of education, University of Pennsylvania
“Schooling Teachers brings significantly more light and less heat to the fierce battles that have been roiling teacher education since the 1980s by deeply listening to the sometimes pain-filled voices of one group who experienced the education first hand—the first 1990 TFA cohort. This book lets us hear them speak.”
—James W. Fraser, professor of history and education, New York University
