Title: Teaching in the Terrordome
Description: Heather Kirn Lanier joined Teach For America (TFA), a program that thrusts eager but inexperienced college graduates into America's most impoverished areas to teach, asking them to do whatever is necessary to catch their disadvantaged kids up to the rest of the nation.  With little more than a five-week teacher boot camp and the knowledge that David Simon referred to her future school as "The Terrordome," the altruistic and naive Lanier devoted herself to attaining the program's goals but met obstacles on all fronts.
Subjects: Educational change, Urban schools, African Americans, Teach for America (Project), Secondary Education, Case studies, Teachers, High schools, Social conditions, Urban Education, Education (Secondary), Biography, EDUCATION, Secondary, Dropouts, School management and organization, law and legislation