Teach for America, a nonprofit organization combating educational inequity with a corps of recent college graduates who devote two years to teaching, will triple its staff in Miami-Dade, Florida’s most needy neighborhoods through a $6 million grant it received last week.
Teach for America will be able to dedicate 350 local teachers to the area by 2014, it announced on Friday, because of the grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, an organization that promotes journalism and giving back to the community. Founded by the Knight brothers who co-owned the Knight Ridder media company, which was the second-largest newspaper publisher until it was bought in 2006 by The McClatchy Company, the Knight Foundation helps philanthropy efforts aimed to benefit society in the 26 communities where the Knight Brothers owned newspapers.
The partnership will allow Teach for America educators to help more than 25,000 students in the Miami-Dade area, the nonprofit said.
Teach for America first expanded to the Miami-Dade area in 2003, and the organization says it has produced tangible results, through fast-paced reading advancement and improved test scores.
"The typical Miami-Dade student in a Teach for America teacher’s classroom advances 1.5 reading grade levels over just one academic year," the nonprofit said in a statement.
The organization also points to improved FCAT scores at Central Senior High School, where Teach for America recruit Kimberly Williams "quadrupled" the number of her students passing the FCAT retake.
The Florida Department of Education’s commissioner said that the nonprofit has some of the finest educators working for them and that Teach For America is an excellent way to raise educational success levels for students from low-income backgrounds.
"Miami-Dade is home to some of the best teachers in the nation," said Education Commissioner Dr. Eric J. Smith. "The expansion of Teach For America through this generous grant from [the] Knight Foundation is going to push that progress even further."
Funding fake teachers will not help education. Instead why don’t they donate funds to help payoff real teachers’ student loans? The fake teachers have alternative certifications and do not prepare themselves for teaching while taking only a few abbreviated courses, the REAL teachers took the traditional route, taking the full workload and are the ones paying the bill while being the only ones truly prepared to teach.