Is Teach For America A Program For The Poor Or For The Rich?

I'm going to start with full disclosure: I have never liked Teach for America. If that's going to bug you, you might want to move on to the next blog.

Why do I dislike Teach For America? Because it has nothing to do with permanent investment in our schools, or thoughtful reform of education. Because it is one of many organizations that seem to exist more or less to give privileged young people the "life experience" that will qualify them to go on to their next advanced degree. Because it relies for its prestige on the idea that people who are middle or upper class naturally have something special and intangible to offer to the poor. Because it activates our not so thinly-veiled social contempt for people who chose the hard work of teaching public school as a career, often doing it for decades in places where they are forced to buy books and classroom supplies out of their own salaries.

I dislike TFA because public education does not exist to give graduates of elite colleges and universities a couple swing years so that they can later go on to great graduate schools and fabulously well paid careers. I dislike TFA because I am a teacher, and I am quite clear that you don't learn to teach in five weeks, much less teach students who have a range of social, economic and developmental problems; who are often hungry, in pain, angry or frightened; and who come in unruly waves of 40-50 every 45 minutes. So thank you Michael Winerip for interviewing numerous elite college grads who are struggling with the "stigma" of having been rejected by this glitzy non-profit because there aren't so many paralegal and entry-level Wall Street jobs this year; and thank you for using this as an opportunity to take a look at this popular NGO that makes a lot of claims for itself that are thinly documented.

As someone who is a career teacher, I am offended by the notion that anyone can step into a classroom and teach effectively, even though they are inexperienced and virtually untrained, because they are oh-so-smart and have successfully gotten into Harvard or Zenith. And teaching public secondary school is harder than teaching, or being a student in, college. Public school is open to the public, folks, and nobody does a sort for you to separate out the ones who are ready to learn, or who already speak English. Magnet and charter schools can be even harder to teach in, since in their initial years they are often the dumping ground for students who have been expelled from and flunked out of other schools.

But let's be clear: mostly I dislike Teach for America because it is not school reform and it claims to be. It is a neo-liberal romance about the ways in which volunteerism by elites can replace a political and fiscal commitment to lifting Americans out of poverty by supporting, and investing in, the schools that poor people attend. Worse, TFA is a spiritual extension of those internship programs that these eager young things with BA's larded their records with to get into elite colleges and universities in the first place. The logic is: if it looks good for me, then it must be good for "them." As Winerip comments, "Teach for America has become an elite brand that will help build a résumé, whether or not the person stays in teaching. And in a bad economy, it’s a two-year job guarantee with a good paycheck; members earn a beginning teacher’s salary in the districts where they’re placed."

And they don't stay in teaching. Perhaps the worst aspect of TFA is that it views teaching as a kind of boot camp for entering the leadership class. TFA's website claims that "corps members and alumni are creating fundamental change," but what that change comprises, and what counts as change, is not clear. The website cites research "that Teach For America corps members' impact on their students' achievement is equal to or greater than that of other new teachers. Moreover, the most rigorous studies have shown that corps members' impact exceeds that of experienced and certified teachers in the same schools." But in fact, if you click on the link that supposedly leads you to that research, you find that "Studies of TFA teacher vary widely in both their findings and the strength of their methodologies." Hmmm. And actually, although you can get citations for these studies, the documents themselves have not been uploaded to the website.

What the website doesn't tell you is how many of those teachers quit in the first six months. As Winerip notes, according to one study, “by the fourth year, 85 percent of T.F.A. teachers had left” New York City schools." That's change for you. My guess is the rate of attrition is higher and faster in the Mississippi Delta, currently identified by TFA as a location in great need of amateur teachers. According to one of my former students who entered the program over five years ago and is still teaching in the troubled urban system he was assigned to, his cohort lost half its membership in the first year, and he is the only original member of his team still in teaching.

TFA has not helped to build a permanent corps of excellent teachers who will train other career teachers or use their classroom training to become effective principals. Hence, it has nothing to do with a program of fundamental, structural reform for our nation's public schools. It has nothing to do with how schools, and school systems, might use their centrality to communities to address issues that are currently crippling education, such as unfunded testing mandates, the effects of poverty and unemployment, teaching critical thinking rather than rote memorization, or state budget cuts that eliminate books and raise class sizes. TFA does, however, seem to be a training ground for education bureaucrats, such as Chancellor Michelle Rhee of the District of Columbia, who continues to blame most of her system's problems on undocumented teacher incompetence.

Rhee recently laid off over 250 teachers: how many of them will be replaced by TFA fly-by-nighters, whose salary is paid by a combination of private and federal dollars? I don't know about other states, but because of drastically reduced property tax revenues, Connecticut is currently laying off young teachers who have actually committed to teaching as a career, not as a temporary stopgap before law school. Other states are waiting anxiously to hear whether Congress will pass a bill that would fund the Obama Administration's new education initiative, and whether they will actually receive the millions of dollars they were promised for system-wide education initiatives. Will these funds be replaced by well-intentioned and untrained young people from elite schools who are here today and gone tomorrow?

Extra! Extra! It's Not Only Healthy To Be Born To A Lesbian Couple, It's Better than Healthy

In case you have been living under a rock, the big news this week in Gaylesboland is that a federal judge in Massachusetts (otherwise known as the San Francisco of the East) has ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act violates the right of the states to regulate marriage. The second biggest news is that the children of lesbian couples are not only as successful as the children of straight people -- they are more successful! Whatever that means. According to Time magazine, a longitudinal study out of UC-San Francisco, published in the journal Pediatrics,

found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.

According to one of the lead researchers, Nanette Gartrelle, although 41% of children reported the teasing at school that is supposed to persuade gay and lesbian people not to parent (for the sake of the children), the home environments in lesbian households make up for it with higher levels of nurturing and by making their children "a priority." The outcomes do not change for children whose two mothers separate (lesbians split up at about the same rate as straight people, which is 43% within 15 years, although this is harder to track since in most states same-sex couples have no right to marry or divorce.)

Are the children of lesbians better adjusted because the parents are all women? Probably not, because all of our mothers were women at some point. Is it because there are no men in the children's lives? Also probably not: all the lesbian moms I know (particularly those with sons, which is about 90% of 'em) are super-fanatical about bringing daddy-types into the picture lest Junior spend his whole life without ever meeting another penis or learning to urinate mannishly. More likely lesbians treat their children better because if you are a lesbian, you really have to want children a lot, and you really plan, and you have to put up with a lot of crap from the law to actually get and keep them. You also need a lot of money, and although children raised with money are not automatically successful, it sure greases the wheels: money + making child rearing a priority is one sure-fire recipe for success. This means, of course, that gay men are probably raising children who are just fanatically successful, since they have to have even more money to get children in the first place by adoption or surrogacy, and have to be highly educated besides to navigate the homophobic legal hoops they must jump through.

It also means that the whole idea that we should have gay marriage because it's better for the children in lesbian relationships is a lot of hooey. The children in this study were raised by committed and unmarried lesbians, married as they surely might have been in their hearts.

In case you want a little fictionalized peek at lesbian life with children, the summer's hot movie for the gay and gay-friendly moving goer will be Lisa Cholodenko's The Kid's Are All Right: read the review by A.O. Scott here. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as lesbians? I'm lovin' it, and it's rumored that all the babies in that relationship are named Oscar.

Anger (Is Not A Good) Management (Style): A Meditation On The American Way Of Rage

Well, If LeBron James wasn't sure it was a good idea to leave Ohio, he knows it now, doesn't he? Historians, what does this picture remind you of?

I started thinking about why Americans feel entitled to their anger early this morning. At around 5:20 I turned right onto a road I normally take to go to my rowing club. As I approached a bridge leading to a major intersection, I saw that my lane was blocked with orange cones, and a sign that said "Road Work" was on the left hand sidewalk. I couldn't see over the bridge because it was arched, and there was no one there to tell me what to do. Proceeding slowly and with caution, I drove to the peak of the bridge in the oncoming lane (often what one is asked to do, at the direction of a worker designated to help) and saw that the intersection was completely blocked by people resurfacing the road I needed to cross.

At that moment, a DOT worker ran toward me, screaming angrily. When he reached my car, I rolled down my window to ask for instructions as to where I could cross and he yelled: "What's wrong with you?! Are you stupid? Get the hell out of here! You don't belong here!"

Frightened, but mainly interested in getting out of there, I raised my voice to interrupt him and said: "How can I get to the other side? Which bridge should I take?" Then followed a torrent of abuse, and no instructions. I asked again, more forcefully, and he replied:

"I don't care what you do, you c**t," he yelled. (If I am confusing you with my ampersands, think female body part used as an epithet.) As I began to back slowly down the bridge, hoping that no one would turn the corner and slam into my car, I will admit that almost involuntarily my middle finger separated itself from its betters in the universal gesture of contempt, at which point he screamed "C**T!" repeatedly until I was out of sight.

I mention this story because anger has been in the news a lot lately. It's something we are all encouraged to have nowadays, as if rage, like Adderall, increases our capacity for civilized problem-solving. Tea Party activists, for example, are united as a national movement by absolutely nothing but their anger, which journalists talk about as if it were a national resource. Some report on it in the midst of their own fits of mindless rage, while the more serious ones discuss Tea Party anger in hushed, admiring tones as if anger were a radical philosophical position rather than -- to point to more personal contexts for understanding rage -- symptoms of depression and paranoia. As Bob Bennett, the Utah Senator defeated by a Tea Party activist, said on the News Hour Wednesday night, honoring anger alone is like worshipping nihilism. "The concern I have about the anger that we're seeing that's being fed by talk show hosts and others," Bennett said about the anger vote, is that "it will be like a wave that comes in and smashes on the beach and destroys everything there, and then recedes back into the ocean, and leaves nothing behind it but empty sand....Anger is not a sound strategy for governing [and] once you are in office, you have to have some solutions."

Bennett has a good point here, and it reminds me why I admire some conservatives who I disagree with profoundly. It reminds me that the problem with anger -- displayed in the political arena -- is that it is often a way of diverting attention from the fact that you don't know how to solve a problem, and are offering a show of hyper-masculine belligerence in its place.

Take, for example, the DOT worker's abusive behavior. A better example, to return to the burning jersey picture, is the outrage being expressed over LeBron James as he leaves the Cleveland Cavaliers for Miami. Why on God's green earth should James have stayed in Cleveland longer than seven years? Why should he have had to earn his way out with a championship for a city that hasn't won a championship of any kind since 1964? I mean no disrespect to the city of Cleveland (I'm from Philadelphia, after all), but the man isn't actually an industry; and basketball is a mere sideshow to the actual political story of why Cleveland has been on its economic uppers since the 1970s. Although the city estimates that James generates $150 million a year in tourist dollars, I would really love to see where those numbers come from, and know why Cleveland doesn't have a better plan than basketball for bringing that money in. If LeBron James' career had been ended by an injury tomorrow, the money would have been gone too: wouldn't it have been better to invest in a high-tech sector than in a sports star? How much would Cleveland love a LeBron whose career was over? Would Cleveland think that it "owned" a white basketball star in this way, and that he should be so grateful to them that he would put their desires before his own?

And I hate to ask this, but don't a lot of people leave Ohio (nice as it is) to seek their fortunes elsewhere?

But it's the anger that seems to be the story here, since apparently LeBron James was responsible for Cleveland and can be justifiably treated as if he had left a wife and six children stranded at an SRO in Toledo. Why? Because the fans have a right to be angry! The Indiana, Pennsylvania Gazette agreed this morning that Cleveland "got played" by James; Cavs fans are publicly defacing LeBron posters and burning their souvenir jerseys in the street. One Cleveland sportscaster announced that James would "enter the hall of shame" along with Art Modell, the football owner who took his team to Baltimore without even announcing it (now it becomes clear why that was not such a bad choice.) The Cav's majority owner, Dan Gilbert, published an idiotic open letter to fans where, among other things, he calls James' departure "shameful" and a "cowardly betrayal." See Paul Harvey's analysis of the letter at Religion In American History.

You might ask, What about the circus that always overwhelms actual competition in professional sports -- isn't it a silly and unnecessary waste of time and money? The answer is yes. It isn't bricks and mortar, or high-wage jobs, that are being supported by superstar athletes. It isn't schools or hospitals. What is supported is a fantasy that the spiritual and economic well-being of working people (as opposed to say, the well-being of Nike, the team owner or the NBA) is related to the success of an athletic franchise. The idea that LeBron James has wronged the entire city of Cleveland belongs in the same category as the misimpression that Tiger Woods betrayed his fans and his sponsors as much as he betrayed his wife and children when he had (what sounds like nasty, impersonal sex) with dozens of women.

Anger is too much with us nowadays: it's become an easy alternative to thought, planning and the hard work that goes into creating tangible successes around things that matter. Worse, in a country where there doesn't seem to be a right to work, to a good education, to health care, to protection from corporate negligence, to family planning services or to food, "our anger" seems to be the only thing to which everyone seems to agree we have a right, and an obligation to perform, as a daily act of citizenship.

Dr. Radical, Your Liberal Media Membership Card Is In The Mail

Yesterday afternoon I was tending my email -- a precondition for fruitful writing -- after having dumped several boxes of old research with a young scholar who plans to make lemonade with it (in a metaphorical sense.) Up pops an email from MSNBC, asking me if I would like to come to New York -- like now --to be on one of those political news/opinion shows. It was the Dylan Ratigan Show, hosted that day by Cenk Uyger. Cenk is normally the host of a show called "The Young Turks," a name you probably couldn't use in today's climate if you were not actually Turkish, which Cenk is.

I wrote back and said perhaps I would be interested. Moments later a young feller was on the line and asked: "Can I send a car and bring you to New York now for a 4:30 air time?" Since I had come home from New York at 1:30 in the morning, and it was 103 degrees in Shoreline, I though that sitting in traffic, even in an air conditioned car was an unattractive idea. I suggested that we use a feed from Oligarch University's studios instead. Thus it was that, at 4:20, I found myself sitting alone in front of a robot camera, an audio feed in my ear and a mike threaded inside my shirt, in a nice, cool basement downtown, ready to answer questions about the shift to the right in American political culture in the past half century.

My self-critique (other than observing that a slightly twitchy face reveals nerves I was not aware of at the time) is that I failed to pick up on it that his interest was less a shift to the right than the proposition that the media had consistently failed to report the shift to the right. Instead, I stuck to explanations of the actual political history. A format like this moves very, very fast, and you literally have microseconds to decide how you are going to respond to what is usually a leading question, how to make the link to something you have prepped, and whether you can kick out a very complex thought without context or background.

An interesting follow-up media story is the report on this very minor media event in NewsBusters. It offers up a brief clip from the show (moi cracking a joke about Nelson Rockefeller.) NewsBusters has also provided a partial transcript (identified only as a transcript) that has edited out, among other things, remarks I made about Nixon establishing OSHA in 1970 only to use this government agency to pressure business into making contributions for his 1972 campaign. Moral of the story: what you leave out can be just as important as what you include, or for that matter, any editorial content.

Let's go to the videotape:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

She Started A Heat Wave By Making Her Seat Wave; Or, Having Fun With American Studies

Given that we are going into our third day of temperatures topping 100 degrees, I can't believe no one has posted this yet.



Since this is an academic blog, and a feminist blog, and since I am locked in my study with a small air conditioner roaring away, here is a brief teaching guide to this segment from There's No Business Like Show Business (1954). An utterly dull period piece about a fictional theater family, this movie is far is better remembered for Ethel Merman's belting version of the title song that valorizes the heartaches and spiritual rewards of "the business." The movie also starred legendary dancers Donald O'Connor, Mitzi Gaynor and Johnnie Ray (that's the group watching from the wings in the crazy pastel "Mexican" outfits) -- a who's who cast in what was even then a dying Hollywood genre, the big budget musical.

This little tidbit of Cold War popular culture, originally penned by Irving Berlin in 1933 for the musical "As Thousands Cheered," is a perfect way to spice up any class on the Cold War, whether you are teaching foreign policy, the crafting of South America and the Caribbean as a source of cheap goods and marketplace for American products, or the post-war sexual home front. I'm going to be using it for my Introduction to American Studies, to teach students how to read the politics of a film which they are just going to think, initially, is weird and racist.

Here, Monroe stalks the line between what remained of the Motion Picture Production Code after Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952), and the openly dirty. She whips her skirt back and forth across her crotch, dips her breasts back and forth and wiggles her fanny, all the while teasing a manic group of "Latino" dancers who sing, dance, and carry around various indeterminate boxes and burdens (one of which, you will note, is an old phonograph.) They pull close to the thing they cannot have, only to be shoved rudely away -- and be beckoned once more. What we will learn, of course, is that they are laboring purely on behalf of us, and that their only function is to excite Monroe enough that she will offer herself to: You.

And You. And Maybe -- You.

This heat wave, we learn from lyrics added to the original Berlin song, was caused by Monroe herself. "She started a heat wave/By making her seat wave," the dancers sing in North American accents, as she is brought in on the shoulders of another group of male dancers stripped to the waist. "Gee, gee/Her anatomy/Makes the mercury/Jump!" they shout enthusiastically, as she alights and picks up the song:

"To ninety-three," the whiter-than-white Monroe sings richly, looking deep into our eyes, and ignoring the leers of these generic men from somewhere south of Texas, who have carried her in only to lose her to "America."

Why 93? I dunno -- because 69 is too cool for a heat wave and 96 doesn't rhyme? Monroe raises the temperature by teasing her "boys" -- who suddenly acquire "foreign" accents when speaking to her -- and pushing them away, because (of course!) they are only surrogates for us. They don't get to have this white woman, only help us possess her. Monroe makes it clear with skilled glances and winks, as the dancers flop to their bellies and knees around her, that it is only we -- each and every one of us -- whose temperature matters, as she struts back and forth across the stage gesturing to breasts and crotch. "What's your name, Honey" she inquires sweetly of the kneeling dancer leaning toward her, as her out-of-control behind starts to sway to the beat and her hands involuntarily pull her skirt apart in front.

"Pablo!" he whines in a hopeful voice. She whips the skirt closed abruptly, and turns away to another, and then another, calling for their names too.

"Pablo! Chico! Miguelito!" she repeats with rapid-fire ecstasy ("so many men! so little time," she is clearly thinking). Her eyes squeeze shut as she contemplates the sheer weight of their (our) lust.*

Perhaps the ultimate Monroe moment is when she snatches a newspaper from one of the dancers, and spreads it out on the ground to read the "weather report" as the ever-hopeful "boys" (who seem happy to share her) cluster around eagerly.

"Pabloooo," she croons, as he draws in; "It say....It say here under" -- and then she sniffs loudly as if they are all so obviously "in heat" you can just smell it through the camera -- "Weather report...."

That loud nasal inhalation --surely Monroe's own genius -- is. So. Deliciously. Vulgar: ditto the subsequent moment when she slams the skirt shut over her crotch at the exact moment that she informs us that "high pressure" will move in over "the Deep South."

Ohhhhhhhhhh.

OK. Reading list? I think this clip like could be best taught as part of a discussion about gender, sexuality and/or hemispheric politics in the 1950s. Depending on your course, and where you want to go with this, I would use it to lift out arguments from Elaine May's Homeward Bound: American Families In The Cold War Era (1990); Alicia Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the US-Mexico Borderlands (particularly chapter 3, which contains an excellent reading of the left-wing labor movie Salt of the Earth also produced in 1954; or, if you want to make connections to the pre-war period, you might want to try Anne Rubinstein's Bad Language, Naked Ladies and Other Threats To The Nation: A Political History Of Comic Books In Mexico.

And if you want a really good book to read on the beach while we wait out the heat wave? Try Joyce Carol Oates' fictionalized biography of Monroe, Blonde: A Novel.

...............................................

*I am reminded of Norman Mailer who, like many odiously sexist men, was capable of startling moments of insight about American sexual culture. He described Monroe at such moments as "fucky" (a word the New York Times did not allow Pauline Kael to print in her review of this 1973 book, but which appears on nearly every page of Mailer's text.) As a feminist, I both deplore this, and also think that there is something profound to attend to here about how fuckability is produced over and through women's bodies in mass culture. And by the way? I dare you to use the word "fucky" in class. Double-dog dare you.

The Move Is Official: Please Join Us At The Chronicle of Higher Education

You can wait to be redirected, or click here to get to our new home, where we are in 3.0.

Staff

• Rolly Cohen, Director of the Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning and of the Center for Jewish Teacher Education
• Nancy Manewith, Director, BJE Preschools
• Linda Sonin, Director of the Marshall Jewish Learning Center
• Marcie Eskin, Librarian, Marshall Jewish Learning Center
• Bonnie Neubauer, Business Manager
• Paula Spitz, Assistant Director of  the Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning and Board of Directors Liaison
• Sean Morrow, Technology Consultant
• Janice Cohn, Director Emeritus, BJE Preschools
• Sara S. Shapiro, Senior Consultant Emeritus

Scroll down for detailed bios:


Rolly Cohen, Director of the Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Leaning and of the Center for Jewish Teacher Education

Email: rolly@bjechicago.org
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1304

Rolly Cohen is currently BJE Director of the Florence Melton School of Adult Jewish Learning and of the Center for Jewish Teacher Education. In 2004, she was instrumental in founding the BJE Makor Or Center that serves children and young adults with special needs. Rolly has taught religious school for over 27 years and has participated in the BJE/Supervisor Teacher Program, mentoring beginning teachers. A graduate of the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School and Melton Israel Seminar, she is also a Teacher Educator’s Institute Fellow with the Mandel Foundation and a recipient of the Faye and Haskell Lurie Award for Excellence in Teaching. Rolly earned her BS in Education and Fine arts from the University of Illinois, Champaign and her Masters of Arts in Jewish Professional Studies from Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies.


Nancy Manewith, Director, BJE Preschools

Email: bjeecc@aol.com
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1309

Nancy Manewith joined the BJE Early Childhood Centers staff in 1983. Since then, she has served as a teacher in every capacity instructing all age levels, has served as on-site coordinator at one of the largest centers, and has served as Assistant Director overseeing all 5 centers. In 2002, Nancy became Director of the 5 facilities that comprise the BJE Early Childhood Centers. Nancy earned her B.S. and Master of Education degrees from the University of Illinois in Champaign, is a graduate of the Florence Melton Adult Mini School and participated in the Israel Seminar. In 1993, she was instrumental in bringing the world renowned “Reggio Emilia Approach” to Jewish preschools in the Chicago Metropolitan area and facilitated its integration into our BJE-ECC Judaic program. To further her professional growth, Nancy regularly attends national and international conferences and currently serves on the Board of the National Jewish Early Childhood Network. She is married to Leonard S. Manewith and has two married children, who attended the BJE Early Childhood Centers as young children.


Linda Sonin, Director of the Marshall Jewish Learning Center

Email: linda@bjechicago.org
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1305

Linda Sonin is the Assistant Director and Creative Curriculum Consultant for the BJE/ MJLC. She earned a Masters Degree in Jewish Education and Jewish Communal Service from Brandeis University. Over the past 30 years she has worked as an educational consultant, principal and art educator in a variety of Jewish settings. She loves to help teachers bring greater creativity and love for Jewish learning into the classroom. Linda is the author of Celebrating Israel through the Arts and Walk the Talk: Jewish Values in Action.

She lives in Buffalo Grove with her husband Jeff, and their children Becky and Ben.


Marcie Eskin, Librarian, Marshall Jewish Learning Center

Email: marcie@bjechicago.org
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1300

Marcie Eskin joined the BJE staff as the Learning Center's librarian in October 2000. Originally from Wilmington, Delaware, Marcie received a BA from Cornell University and a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science from Dominican University. In addition to organizing, cataloging, and classifying the Center’s collection, Marcie provides annotated bibliographies and reference services to MJLC patrons. She is a member of the Association of Jewish Libraries and has served in several leadership roles including President of the Chicago chapter.

Bonnie Neubauer, Business Manager

Email: bonnie@bjechicago.org
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1302










Paula Spitz, Assistant Director of the Florence Melton School for Adult Jewish Learning and Board of Directors Liaison

E-mail: mailto:paula@bjechicago.org
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1321

Paula received her BA in Sociology with a minor in Psychology from the University of Illinois, in Champaign. She is currently completing her MA in Jewish Professional Studies at Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies. She has taught for the past thirteen years at various synagogues in the Chicago suburban community. During that time, Paula completed the BJE Master Teacher program and was awarded the Faye and Haskell Lurie Award for excellence in teaching. In 2005, she completed the Teacher Education Program (TEP) and the Florence Melton Adult Mini School for Educators. The program culminated with the Melton Seminar in Israel.

Sean Morrow, Technology Consultant

Email: sean@bjechicago.org
Phone: 847-291-7788 x1315