Students and representatives from six organizations on Friday discussed education inequality and reform in an open forum held in the Rabb Room of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.
Organizations present included Teach for America (TFA), Tufts Education Society, LIFT, The Roosevelt Institute, Generation Citizen and Peer Health Exchange. Seniors MarysaSheren and Allison Hoffman, Tufts campus campaign coordinators for TFA, moderated the bagel brunch forum.
Conversation topics included standardized testing, the theory and practice of civic education in public schools and what constitutes a "true education."
"There's a disparity in academic performance between children who come from low−income families and from more affluent backgrounds," Sheren said.
Participants also discussed the sometimes−negative connotation associated with teaching and the evolving charter school movement.
Hoffman, who has also worked as both a coordinator and health educator for Peer Health Exchange, said the forum was designed to consider solutions to disparities in the education system.
"What we're trying to address is that TFA is a viable solution, but there are other ways to go about addressing this issue," she said. "I believe [education inequity] is a solvable problem and it's not something we can write off."
Co−Coordinator for Generation Citizen Kira Hessekiel, a junior, saw the forum as an opportunity for organizations and individual students to exchange ideas.
Generation Citizen is a program through which college students serve as mentors and implement civic education programs in schools.
"We're just looking to have an open and real discussion about what it's like to ... be a teacher in a school where there are limited resources, the challenges involved in educational inequity and the myriad [of] ways and ideas that exist in the world of education reform," Hessekiel said.
The forum served a dual purpose of bringing student groups together to generate conversation and garner interest for positions with these organizations in light of their upcoming recruitment periods, according to Sheren.
TFA'sthird−round application deadline for teaching positions is on Oct. 26.
"Tufts has been written up as one of the top contributing communities to TFA," Sheren said. "There's a lot of untapped potential at Tufts and I think a lot of people who don't know about the organization and have some misconceptions."
As the discussion drew to a close, Hoffman alluded to the possibility of more forums in the future, judging from general interest.
"In my past four years at Tufts I haven't seen anything like this before," she said. "People are coming together from different perspectives … it's really cool to get everyone together and talk about something that really matters.
