Exploitative - of Teachers and Students
Pros
I met and worked alongside real teachers- and some of the best human beings I've known - at my school.
Cons
Exploitative Unhelpful Misleading Callous REMEMBER: - TNTP gets +/- $1,000,000 grants from school districts to provide and train new teachers. By end of summer, there were no more than 50 teachers who passed PST. Out of 120+. Some of these left in the first week of school, utterly unprepared. - New teachers move from all over the country to train during summer. Many leave their jobs and commit fully to teaching. Training is role-playing and repeating by rote certain phrases and reactions, especially from "Teach Like a Champion." Lost $ -Teachers then placed in a summer-school classroom. My training was in a high school. The main teacher did not have any lesson/curriculum planned. No guidance. I never saw a full lesson in my content area over the summer training. I never met an experienced teacher in my specialty and grade level over the summer (or for my whole time teaching). I struggled with lesson planning, but was given no models of successful lessons to read and watch. Yes, we saw excerpts. No, we never saw a full lesson with real students. -Teach unpaid for hours each morning, train in afternoon, plan lessons at night. No chance to retrieve lost income over summer. The teaching and planning requires us to impart a semester's worth of learning to our students in 12 days of summer school. At the end of every session, the main teacher passed her students based on who had showed up every day and marginally attempted the worksheets she gave. When we weren't teaching, we all sat in the field room, planning lessons and supervised by 1 or other coach. -Encouraged to take a job at the first school that offers to hire, not to reflect or question fit at school. Some teachers miserable. -No actual training in content area during summer or schoolyear. Instead, we had online learning modules about lesson planning on "Blackboard." In PST, we spent hours sitting in a classroom together staring at screens, reading breakdowns of NexGen standards and watching snippets of classroom videos. Never even saw a video of a full lesson. -The work for the modules is involved but mostly busy work. During schoolyear, it takes 3-8 hrs that can be poorly spared from a busy schedule. When projects are turned in, 4 tepid comments maximum, mostly praise. No advice on how to improve, even though I described in detail the challenges my students and I face. -Most of my students had no concept of foundational standards to our grade level. I was docked points in 1st observation because the lesson was remedial. Kids did not know what atoms, or phases pf matter were, but I was supposed to stick to the standard on kinetic theory rather than have a review lesson. Even though it was remedial was aligned to the grade level standard; the observer did not know or understand my content area. -No support is provided in the school-year, beyond ~20 min bimonthly "coaching" meetings - No advocacy for teachers -For all this, you get to pay $5,500 tuition. I was buying breakfast, pencils, supplies on top of paying off the cost of moving, settling in a new city, rent, student loans. $550 is my groceries for 2+ months. I had a passion for teaching and loved my kids. However, I did not receive support or guidance. I still have never seen a full lesson in my content area (whether to adults or children). I spent hours on lesson plans. By Christmas, the other teacher in my content area had resigned. For 2 months I planned for both classes and differentiated for his EC kids. There was no recognition of this extra work or support when I described my stress and need for advice. I was inadequate. I was a new teacher with 150 kids of my own whom I loved, but who also had immense challenges. The other teachers at the school could commiserate, but not help. My coach gave a couple tepid sentences of advice when I asked her about lesson planning, teaching kids who could not read or speak English. I resigned. I am still on the hook for the rest of the $5,500 and am getting calls. By my calculations, TNTP already got almost $20,000 per new teacher from the school district for this school year. They put new, idealistic teachers with insufficient training into classrooms. My coach had about 10 other trainee teachers in our Blackboard group. Where is all the district's money going? Certainly not serving the students. The first response from the coordinator in my area after I told TNTP I was resigning? "Even if you resign you still have to pay the full $5,500." I never mentioned the tuition.
