The RCEF Blog 博客

Teach For America (TFA) is an NGO that places American college graduates in schools in low-income communities in the US to teach for two years. Their teachers go through an intensive five-week training, in which they learn about lesson planning, classroom management, and effective teaching methods. TFA has been around for 17 years now and has placed 18,000 teachers, many of whom stayed in teaching or education. Student performance has been shown to improve significantly. TFA casts its program in terms of fighting a social injustice, the “achievement gap” between low-income and high-income Americans.

Shum Saitak is a program officer of the Chen-Yet Sen Family Foundation, a director of Fuxin School in Anhui, and a friend of RCEF. He has developed the idea of starting “Teach for China”. Last month, he came to the US to learn more about Teach for America. I went with him to meet TFA founder Wendy Kopp, and he also went to Brownsville, Texas to meet with TFA Program Director and RCEF committee volunteer Jessica Shyu.

These conversations have made me think more about RCEF too. Chinese education has an “achievement gap” between rural and urban areas. So why does RCEF not do something similar to TFA? What is different between the goals of RCEF and TFA, and what can we learn from each other? In the next few weeks we will explore these questions on the blog. You will read a report by Jessica Shyu and a thought-provoking hypothetical dialogue. You can leave questions yourself in the comments, and we will address them.

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