Book chronicles teachers at Locke High

The book "Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches With Teach for America" tracks the lives of four first-year teachers at Locke High School in Watts.

Donna Foote spent a year with these young teachers, describing the highs and lows of life in the troubled urban school. Foote, a former Newsweek correspondent, said in an interview that she came to believe the most important element in improving schools is recruiting and retaining qualified teachers.

"I don't actually think it's just money," she said recently. "It's more a human resource.... We really have to think about how we are going to attract, select and train quality teachers."

-- Beth Shuster 

Comments

[LA teacher]

Of course, a first year Teach for America teacher is the "best teacher in the school" and no one else knows what they are doing! Yea, right. It takes years to develop into a great teacher.
Stop disrespecting the teaching profession. If teachers are hording supplies, its because they have a hard time getting supplies.
Most of the Teach for America teachers are here today and gone tomorrow while the real teachers stay and work hard on behalf of the kids. That's great to work for Teach for America but don't put down your fellow teachers.

The author was definately fooled tnto viewing the students as victinms of the school instead of victims of bad parenting

[Herb]

I am always leery of people who say the teacher is the biggest factor in the student's achievement. My 23 years of experience in one school, plus 5 years before that, contradicts that view. A student needs to be socialized for the school experience. This socialization can come from parents, culture, clergymen, or the student himself. I teach elementary algebra and have a failure rate of slightly over 50%. Almost all these failures are the result of students who don't have a clue as to how to be students, how to sit in a chair and be quiet and do work. (Another factor is social promotion of students into ninth grade who haven't mastered fourth grade arithmetic) This District also tacitly encourages parents to blame teachers for student failure by never explicitly stating that learning involves hard work on the students' part; they only speak in terms of inspiring teaching.