Applications to Teach for America fell by 16 percent in 2016, marking the third consecutive year in which the organization — which places college graduates in some of the nation’s toughest classrooms — has seen its applicant pool shrink.
Elisa Villanueva Beard, TFA’s chief executive, announced the figures in an online letter to supporters Tuesday morning, describing the steps that the organization is taking to stoke interest and reverse the trend.
“Our sober assessment is that these are the toughest recruitment conditions we’ve faced in more than two decades,” she wrote.
TFA received 37,000 applications in 2016, down from 57,000 in 2013 — a 35 percent dive in three years. It’s a sharp reversal for an organization that grew quickly during much of its 25-year history, becoming a stalwart in education reform circles and a favorite among philanthropists.
New York
Yuri Milner said the eventual goal is sending hundreds or thousands of tiny spacecraft, each weighing far less than an ounce, to the Alpha Centauri star system. That’s more than 2,000 times as far as any spacecraft has gone so far.
Propelled by energy from a powerful array of Earth-based lasers, the spacecraft would fly at about one-fifth the speed of light. They could reach Alpha Centauri in 20 years, where they could make observations and send the results back to Earth.
Mclean, Va.
“One of the hardest things I had to do was look in the mirror every day and shave,” said Singh, whose Sikh religion requires men to grow beards as an article of faith. “Your self-esteem was kind of shattered.”
Now Singh and three Army enlistees have won permission to wear beards and turbans after filing federal lawsuits that seek to force the Pentagon to accommodate those who wear beards for religious reasons.
Singh, now a captain at an engineering battalion at Fort Belvoir, won an administrative exception two weeks ago under an Army policy that allows exemptions to the no-beard policy on a case-by-case basis.
On Friday, the Army granted similar exceptions to three Sikh enlistees who had filed a separate lawsuit. Those enlistees will now be allowed to wear beards and turbans when they report for basic training next month.
Harsimran Kaur, legal director for the Sikh Coalition, which filed the lawsuits, said the coalition will continue to pursue its lawsuits to obtain a permanent policy change that allows all Sikhs to serve and keep their beards. She said Sikhs served in the U.S. military at least as far back until World War I, and then without incident until 1981, when the military implemented its no-beards rule.
Paris
Prosecutors said the men — initially identified only as Ibrahim F., born in 1988, and Samil F., born in 1984 — were linked to the rental of an apartment in Brussels that appeared to serve as a safe house before the March 22 attacks that killed 32 people.
Investigators suspect that Khalid el-Bakraoui, 27, may have left the apartment before he detonated a suicide bomb on a Brussels metro train at the Maelbeek station, near the headquarters of the European Union. Earlier, twin suicide blasts struck Brussels Airport.
In recent weeks, Belgian authorities have made a series of arrests linked to a Brussels-based terrorist cell that planned the attacks in the Belgian capital and a deadly rampage in November in Paris that killed 130 people. Both attacks have been claimed by the Islamic State.
— Wire reports