If you ever want to know how bad public schools can be, look no further than the New York City public schools. And no publication does a better job of exposing the madness than the Village Voice. This article from the Voice delves into the city’s Teaching Fellows program. The program offers career changers a seven week teacher training practicum and a subsidized master’s degree in exchange for teaching in a city school.
Half of those who go through the program leave the profession within the first five years of teaching. It is not hard to figure out why. From the article:
The frustrations?with grad school, bureaucracy, and classroom chaos?take their toll. Diana is interviewing this summer for jobs outside the classroom. If she lands one, she’s considering abandoning her in-progress master’s and writing off her Teaching Fellows experience as a regrettable mistake.
Wand is now finishing a 16-month licensing program in massage therapy?a course of study, she notes, that requires more than 1,000 hours of training, far more than she received before becoming a schoolteacher.
