ABSTRACT
In 1990, I was asked to evaluate `Teach for America'. The program is an alternative teacher education program. It lies outside university certification programs and is designed to recruit and train people with degrees in fields other than education. The program focus was on for urban and rural schools where there are chronic shortages of teachers. The data collection for the research entailed `traditional' procedures associated with an ethnographyÐduring the first year of the program, I observed and interviewed the staff and the program's recruits (corps members) as they worked full time in the different schools around the country.
