Bethany Rogers

City University of New York - College of Staten Island | CSI CUNY · School of Education, CSI, CUNY

This article draws on oral history testimonies to examine the experiences of participants in the inaugural 1990 cohort of Teach For America (TFA)—a group of young people dubbed the “best and brightest” of their generation and tasked with “saving” urban education. For 25 years, TFA has operated according to the principle of the “best and brightest,”...

Background/Context: Researchers have examined the challenges of staffing urban, underserved classrooms primarily through large-scale data sets; policymakers have responded with strategies intended to recruit more or “better” teachers into the classroom through programs such as the popular Teach for America. Yet there is little qualitative evidence...

“What is our image going to be—conventional educators or innovators, milque-toasts or activists?” In posing this question, federal staff members responsible for developing the National Teacher Corps (NTC), a Great Society teacher reform initiative, articulated both their assumptions about and aspirations for teaching in the 1960s. According to the...

The National Teacher Corps (NTC) was created in 1965 to improve the education of “disadvantaged” students by upgrading the quality of their teachers. Specifically, the initiative sought to deploy bright, young liberal arts graduates as teaching “interns” in public schools attended by low‐income students of color. This essay explores the attempts of...

This article draws on oral history narratives to examine the beliefs and expectations that brought a group of young people to the field of teaching in the 1960s through the National Teacher Corps (NTC). The oral histories address the identities, politics, aims, and backgrounds of a dozen NTC participants. By situating the voices of these young peop...

In a policy climate driven by tests and external mandates, theories of school reform that place teachers, their knowledge, and their relationships at the heart of school improvement have garnered attention as promising alternatives. Yet little exists in print about how such theories actually work or what these approaches look like in practice. This...

Highlights three areas of research on the relationships between college service learning and citizenship. Discusses the need to: understand relationships between different approaches to service learning and conceptions of good citizenship; connect service learning research to scholarly issues and frameworks from related disciplines; and examine rel...

Fundamental reform of American secondary schooling will require more than just revising the structures and relationships within schools; it demands as well a serious rethinking of the curriculum, the heart of teaching and learning. Drawing on several school-based examples, the paper illustrates the differences between 'subject matter learning' and...

Exhibitions are one way to exemplify high standards while serving both individual liberty and civic virtue. Exhibitions begin with determination of what students should know and be able to do and proceed methodically backward to define what and how students must be taught to reach those outcomes. Policy options to ensure accountability through comp...