Jason Kamras is making the future look brighter for many Washington, DC students. Last April he was awarded with the title National Teacher of the Year, which was DC’s first. Kamras is profiled in today’s Washington Post [1] ,and the article discusses his travels as the titular winner, his love of teaching math, and his positive remarks about No Child Left Behind (yes, *positive*, not a typo).
It’s worth mentioning that Kamras is a Princeton alum (Go, Tigers!), and began his teaching career with the Teach for America program in 1996. At Sousa Middle School in Southeast DC, the high school where he has taught for almost a decade, Kamras successfully pushed for more time spent on math, and as a result test scores dramatically rose.
I don’t need to say that we need more people—no, more teachers like Kamras. Schools are struggling to hire teachers, let alone good, certified, and passionate teachers. Teach for America tries to fill the void by recruiting and training graduating seniors from top-notch colleges for two-year teaching stints in disadvantaged urban and rural public schools. An article [2] last month profiling the surge in TFA’s popularity mentioned that critics said that fewer than one-third of TFA’s teachers stay in the classroom following their two-year stints. But TFA, in the same article, said about two-thirds of these teachers have remained committed to education through research and policy work, if not through teaching. Kamras, in fact, says in the Post article that he would like to become more involved in policy work. But not before he returns to his classroom in Room 219 this fall to teach algebra.